Down to Now Reflections on the Southern Civil Rights Movement [Paperback]

Part history and part meditation, Down to Now is a southern journalist’s intensely personal account of the civil rights movement in the South during the 1960s. As a reporter for the Atlanta Journal- Constitution and then as a writer for the Southern Regional Council, Pat Watters followed the movement from the early days of sit-ins, marches, and freedom rides through the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the Poor People’s Campaign in the summer of 1968.

First published in 1971 and written mostly from the author’s own recollections, tapes, and notes, the book blends detailed reportage of the dramatic events with insightful commentary on what the movement meant and why it declined. Eloquent and compassionate, Down to Now is, in Watter’s words, “a book about the movement by a white Southerner who did not participate in the movement—but whose life was essentially changed by it.”

[Watters] pays elegiac tribute to the beautiful spirit which ‘held forth alternatives which the culture was incapable of accepting.’ . . . He illuminates the duplicities of the white establishment, throws into sharp focus the pathologies of American life and attitudes and writes almost heartbreakingly of the opportunity for ‘salvation’ he feels his country has missed.

The best history of the Southern civil rights movement that has appeared to date. Thoughtful, perceptive, highly readable.