Still an Orphan Boy

If anyone was ever in the right place at the right time, it was Karl Fleming. After surviving a bitter childhood during the 1930s in a North Carolina orphanage, he lucked into a job as a reporter at a small-town newspaper in the wide-open years after World War II. He was churning out puff pieces for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sunday Magazinewhen he was hired as a stringer for the Atlanta bureau of Newsweek in May 1961, just about the time the Freedom Riders were getting the crap beaten out of them in their journey across the segregated South.

The civil rights movement had been simmering for years: the Montgomery bus boycott was history, and Martin Luther King was already well known. But, as Fleming points out in Son of the Rough South,there was very little national coverage of the ongoing fight against segregation. Only The New York Times and Newsweek (which was then an upstart challenging the more conservative Time) were routinely reporting on developments in the South. That would change over the next few years as a series of violent episodes—James Meredith's 1962 entry to Ole Miss in the midst of a deadly riot, the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, and the 1964 murders of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner during Mississippi Freedom Summer—focused intense national and international attention on the region. Fleming, already on the ground with useful contacts within the various factions of the civil rights movement, quickly established himself as a primary witness and interpreter of events for a world audience.

Reporting the civil rights movement in the early '60s was as dangerous and uncertain as reporting a war. The fact that the reporters were nearly all, like Fleming, white men—and many of them Southerners as well—was no protection. A number of journalists were killed, and plenty were beaten bloody. (Just ask former Tennesseean editor John Siegenthaler, then working for Robert F. Kennedy's Justice Department.) Fleming himself dodged bullets at the Ole Miss riot and survived other close calls, and he makes no bones about the fact that the adrenaline rush was part of what kept him hooked on the civil rights beat. He turned down safer, better-paying jobs and left his family for long periods in order to pursue stories. He spent his days following the movement, and his nights boozing and filing copy for Newsweek's editors back in New York, a routine that he manages to recount in a way that makes us understand its appeal.

It's no surprise that a veteran journalist like Fleming is masterful at setting a scene, and Son of the Rough Southdoes a wonderful job of evoking the scary, faintly absurd atmosphere of the time. Here he describes his stay at the Ole Miss Motel, where he roomed with his New York Times colleague, Claude Sitton: "It was run by a tall, belligerent segregationist named R.J. (Rusty) Nail. He didn't say so straight out, but based on a few hints, Sitton and I assumed he was a proud member of the Klan. He did say that though he was accepting the business of Yankee reporters, this would not be a healthy place for people like us when the forces ready to act against Meredith and the hated Kennedys began to have their say. When the moment of truth arrived, he said, they would be arriving from all over the South, armed and ready. Meantime, he said, he had whiskey for sale, and I bought a fifth of Old Hickory."

Fleming's journalistic hot streak came to an end in May 1966, during the second Watts riot in Los Angeles. A group of young black men (urged on by Black Panther founder Stokely Carmichael, who Fleming thought was a friend) attacked Fleming and beat him nearly to death. That betrayal, along with a series of professional and personal failures that followed, led Fleming to reflect on his motives as a reporter and as a man, and how they had been shaped by his hardscrabble upbringing. The resulting insights, along with a richly detailed account of his orphanage life, give Son of the Rough Southa literary depth that's missing from most journalists' memoirs. The book gives little attention to Fleming's professional life after the 1960s, when he went to work in television and as a media consultant: he obeys his storyteller's instinct to focus on the meatier narrative.

Fleming's extraordinary eye for the telling detail has clearly been at work for him all his life. His descriptions of his mother, his early life in a tenant shack and his years in the church-run orphanage are vivid and compelling. He uses the minutiae of daily life as a novelist might, to evoke in the reader an echoing memory of childhood emotion. He is sufficiently self-aware to recognize that the Dickensian aspects of the orphanage were, to a great degree, the making of him. The rage against bullying, unwarranted privilege and cruel authority that he developed there made him naturally sympathetic to the civil rights movement, and passionate about reporting it. He understood instinctively that justice and privilege are not abstractions.

The book ends on a self-congratulatory note that is slightly jarring given the complexity of insight that has come before. It speaks of a deeply felt insecurity. Fleming is, as he himself says, still in many ways an orphanage boy, with a lingering sense of having something to prove. Son of the Rough South shows that the outsider status that haunts him personally also made him a first-rate journalist, and an artist with a powerful gift for evoking his time and place.