In the preface of his upcoming book on the history of race relations in Macon, author Andrew M. Manis jokes that the book will probably never make its way into the Chamber of Commerce's "newcomer packets." Yet it is a sobering line seven chapters in that penetrates the city's racial fog, a fog that has drifted toward amicability for generations but has refused to lift.
In "Macon Black and White," Manis quotes revered Atlanta columnist Ralph McGill, who in 1966 saw farce in the tumult over a Macon church's vote to ban black worshipers from its pews, and how the church went so far as posting sentries to keep out blacks.
"If this were not so ineffably sad," McGill wrote, "it would be hysterically funny."
Save, of course, for the impoverishment, the lynchings, the insults and the racial injustices seen here over parts of the past 150 years, McGill's line could very well describe a city at times mired in its own foolishness.
But Manis' work, drawn mostly from interviews and newspaper articles, is hardly so shallow as to sum up a century and a half so simply or conclude that Macon has spent its existence spinning its wheels on matters of race.
Rather, as Manis writes in his introduction, "This book ... offers rebuttal to the impassioned argument of racial pessimists that little has changed in Macon or in America." Much of his research came from newspaper articles and interviews.
There are, he argues, lessons to be learned. And Manis, in the book's subtitle, "An Unutterable Separation in the American Century," sets his sights on Macon's "unspoken separateness." [...]
| Continue Joe Kovac Jr.'s Associated Press (via Macon Telegraph) article "New book explores history of Macon's race relations" and take in Kovac's "Q&A with author Andrew Manis"
posted in articles on August 29, 2004 4:59 AM | t (0)
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