Rising sons.

• Author: Stephenson, Wen
• Position: Book Review

SONS OF MISSISSIPPI A Story of Race and its Legacy by Paul Hendrickson Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95

ON SEPT. 27, 1962, IN OXFORD, Miss, among the elms and oaks and catalpa trees on the campus of Ole Miss, a gifted young freelancer snapped a photograph for Life magazine of seven Mississippi sheriffs having too good a time. It's not an icon of the 1960s, but it should be, says Paul Hendrickson. They're standing, "these seven faces of Deep South apartheid," around the hood of a squad car, and the handsome one in the middle--head of the state sheriffs' association, cigarette between his grinning teeth--is taking a practice swing with a billy club to the amusement and grim appreciation of his colleagues. It was three days before James Meredith would become the first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi (accompanied by more than 500 federal marshals and several thousand U.S. troops), and these sheriffs, in their white shirts and dark ties, had come from all over the state to help keep their fellow Mississippian from setting foot on the sacred campus. (A senior at Ole Miss at the time named Trent Lott--head cheerleader, president of Sigma Nu, and future majority leader of the U.S. Senate--stayed away from the ensuing violence that weekend, in which two were killed and hundreds injured, but distinguished himself in the effort to keep his fraternity segregated nationally.)

For Hendrickson, a former Washington Post reporter who was born in California but raised partly in the Deep South, that photograph contains an essential underlying story of the Battle of Oxford and the larger civil rights struggle, a story of race and its legacy that holds the key to much of the past 40 years. In Sons of Mississippi, Hendrickson takes a rare approach to this subject, focusing on the white supremacists themselves, rather than the familiar, and safer, heroic narrative of the people who rose up to defeat them. His driving impulse is to get beneath the surface and beyond the frame of that photograph in order to see these seven Southerners, and their children and grandchildren after them, as complex individuals rather than two-dimensional caricatures. He knows that racism--even in a time and place as benighted as Mississippi in 1962--is never monolithic, and is careful to highlight the nuances of racial feeling along a spectrum that runs from virulent bigotry to complacent (and complicit) passivity. He knows that the only way to understand the...