| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle. By Allison Graham. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xiv, 224 pp. $32.50, ISBN 0-8018-6615-4.)

Since the mid-1950s, American popular media have constructed an apologia for southern segregation and racism by their representations of the "cracker." The latter is Other, a contaminated character from whom all other whites should distance themselves, a scapegoat for white racism. There is admission of white guilt but denial in that blame is attributed only to lower-class whites. This is the nub of Allison Graham's case. She considers five topics: white decay, focusing on representations of the poor southern white woman and her enlightenment by romance with an outsider; transgression of racial boundaries as highlighting the need for reeducation of the white southern middle-class male; resistance to this process by the southern working-class white male; punishment, reeducation, and redemption of this "rebel of a lost cause"; rebirth of the southern lawman as a respectable figure who defeats "the cracker from hell." 1

The book has major strengths. It provides detailed analysis of interactions among race, gender, and, crucially, class, often neglected in cultural studies. It draws upon an enormous range of evidence. Seemingly unlikely material such as 1950s films on teenage delinquency is convincingly woven into the analysis. Third, the case is supported by detailed treatment of works ranging from Sayonara (1957) and The Intruder (1961), on the one hand, to The Beverly Hillbillies (series on television 1962–1971) and Forrest Gump (1994), on the other. Not least, the book is leavened with humor in a way that makes the argument more compelling. . . .

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