Shabbat Reading: Tom Dent's Southern Journey

#whatireadovershabbat Tom Dent's Southern Journey: A Return to the Civil Rights Movement

In 1991, Tom Dent took a nine-month road trip to see the legacy of the civil rights movement in the South. In this record of his journey from Greensboro to the Mississippi Delta, he revisits the high and low points of the struggle, trying to learn what came of it. A gifted observer, Dent is also a deeply compassionate human being. He finds ways to convey the hopes and heartbreak of everyone he talks to, sympathetic and otherwise. What he discovers along the way isn’t necessarily uplifting. But as Unita Blackwell, mayor of Mound Bayou, says, “That’s history”—and that’s exactly what Dent was after.