VICKSBURG — The best reason for reading David W. Beckwith’s book about his year as a public school teacher in his native Mississippi is that he had no reason to write it.
In the spring of 1969, after Beckwith had graduated from Ole Miss with a business degree, he went home to Greenville to find a job. Because offers were scarce and because he was considering graduate school anyway, he applied at the school district office.
In “A New Day in the Delta: Inventing School Desegregation As You Go” (University of Alabama Press), Beckwith relates how happy he was that the superintendent welcomed him and, in the process, nudged him to become one of the first two white teachers assigned to an all-black school in Leland. Mixing faculties was an attempt to pacify federal courts and stall racial mixing of students. It didn’t work.
After his year in the classroom 40 years ago, Beckwith did go back to graduate school and a career in business followed in Florida.
His new book is on my suggested summer reading list for anyone who has any opinion or anything to say about education in Mississippi. His perspective is from the trenches. Beckwith acknowledges a white middle-class youth spent in the largest town in the Delta and with few, if any, serious thoughts about race. He was aware there was a dual society; it just wasn’t relevant. He took the job, he says, because the pay was enough for food, rent and to tide him over. But he also sincerely tried to be an effective educator in one room at one school while all around him courts and activists, who viewed forced segregation as an indefensible, imbalanced way of life, worked to end it.
So much written about education in that era and today is analytical —people trying to prove a point, often by cherry-picking statistics. What’s refreshing about Beckwith is that he talks about what happened day-to-day as he experienced it, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions, if they wish. In his classroom, ideals met realities. The goodness of people, black and white, was on display and the lesser angels of human nature, who also don’t play racial favorites, created havoc.
People who like to pontificate and theorize about “our schools today” really need to read this book. It provides context and shows none of us knows as much as we think we do.
Second on my list is “Vicksburg 1863” (Knopf) by Winston Groom.
Some may recognize Groom as the author of “Forrest Gump” and believe the author of such a quirky novel could not be a serious historian. That would be wrong, especially given that so much actual history is quirkier than a lot of fiction. Besides, Groom has written more history than anything else.
Only Civil War junkies care which brigade flanked what division where across Mississippi and Louisiana 146 summers ago, but that’s no deterrent to the rest of us. Groom writes about the people more than the mechanics of war as he makes the case that events culminating at Vicksburg determined whether the United States of America would have a future.
Books that decompress history and tell us about those caught up in it — heroic, flawed or some of both — are illuminating. Groom can help any reader understand and appreciate that when North met South in combat, the issues weren’t one-dimensional and the outcome wasn’t a foregone conclusion.
Third on my list would be “The Shack” (Windblown Media) by William P. Young.
That the book about a child’s death, God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit has been declared heretical by some and illuminating by others should be enticement enough.
It came out last summer, so millions — especially those who are predisposed to books about faith — have already read it. But it deserves a wider audience, and among religious skeptics, too.
Young attempts to relate his vision about how the Holy Trinity might relate to each other and how they regard their relationship and/or responsibilities to each other and to mortals. In the book, a father is invited to learn why it is that if there is a God, He (or She) allows bad things to happen to good people. Toss in a glimpse of how Young envisions eternal life, and there’s a lot in this small book to ponder.
Crafting a summer reading list is old-fashioned, I know. But I checked, and all three of these are available as Kindle downloads. (And if you don’t know what that means, bless your heart.)
