Karl Fleming -SON OF THE ROUGH SOUTH

Wilson, NC–1960’s Chapter

From Booklist

Fleming will forever be remembered as the Newsweek reporter who was photographed after being severely beaten in the Watts riots of 1966. In this memoir, he recounts the long road that led to his reporting on race relations and the incendiary social issues that exploded that day. He was born in 1927 in a poor, bleak North Carolina community and raised in an orphanage when his mother could no longer afford to take care of him. Fleming left college early to begin life as a reporter with a small-town ( WILSON, NC ) newspaper, covering the police beat with a cynical police chief who mistreated blacks. It was Fleming’s first hint that, having grown up in an orphanage, his sympathies were with the underdog. He went on to cover the turbulent racial changes in the South, including James Meredith’s enrollment at the University of Mississippi and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Medgar Evers. In this stunning memoir, Fleming offers the perspective of a poor white boy witnessing the racial turbulence that changed the U.S. Vanessa Bush

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Review   “A harrowing and brutally honest account of Fleming’s experiences on all sides of the civil rights battle.” — Publishers Weekly, April 25, 2005

“A rich and absorbing book, a window into a time and place that defined America.” — Washington Post Book World, June 12, 2005

“Incredibly rich in history, in bravery and brutality, Karl Fleming’s Son of the Rough South is so beautifully written.” — Anne Lamott, author of Traveling Mercies

“It makes for a tense, harrowing, utterly gripping journey.” — Newsweek, May 23, 2005

“Karl Fleming knows how to tell a story.” — Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes and ‘Tis

“Their story will take the reader on a trip not soon forgotten of spirits unwilling to be broken.” — San Antonio Express-News, June 19, 2005.

“a vivid, often painful memoir…” — David Halberstam

“offers vibrant portraits of the most harrowing incidents of [the civil rights]…” — Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2005

…recovers for us a brace period of our recent history, and delivers it with all the sharp…edges perfectly intact. — Barton Chronicle, October 2005

FFFlemingsssssssss craft soars to a level of artful elegance with blunt, unsentimental language full of casual grace notes — The Nation, August 15 and 22, 2005.

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