Posted on January 1, 0001 12:00 AM
From Al Cross, the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues
John Egerton, a chronicler of the civil-rights movement, Southern food and culture, and may other topics, died this morning in Nashville of an apparent heart attack. He was 78.
“Egerton made his name with Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Award,” Michael Cass write for The Tennessean. “He also wrote Southern Food: At Home, On the Road, In History and other books, and he co-edited Nashville: An American Self-Portrait, a turn-of-the-millennium look at the city he moved to in the 1960s.”
The University of Kentucky graduate was also known for The Americanization of Dixie, and he also won awards for Generations: An American Family, a history of the Ledfords of Kentucky.
From Al Smith, former Russellville newspaper publisher:
As a journalist and author John Egerton wrote about social change in the 20th century South with impressive skill and sensitivity.
His early reporting in Atlanta on school integration laid the foundation for his great book, "Speak Now Against the Day" (a quotation from William Faulkner), about the struggle for civil rights before the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board decision in 1954 ordering an end to school segregation. Although widely praised, this was one of those important books that should have won a Pulitzer Prize but didn't.
In an exemplary work of oral history, he crafted "Generations," about the lives of an Applachian couple, Burnam and Addie Ledford, married in 1903, who each lived for over 100 years with memories that John transformed into what the Washington Post reviewer called "a small American epic." From his base in Nashville,
John frequently returned to Kentucky on scavenger hunts in our history that often produced brilliant essays. One memorable example was a New York Times magazine piece on Mohammed Ali's Logan County ancestors, black and white, in the Civil War Era, unforgettable to me because he scooped me on it when I was editor of the county weekly.
He was a special friend of Russellville’s Granville Clark, who introduced us, a connection from Granville's suits against TVA in behalf of landowners in the old Land Between the Rivers where John owned a farm. I was upset that he got the Ali story from Granville, who had never told me. "I guess you never asked me," Gran said.
In my book Wordsmith you will find a story about John's story on Mohamed Ali's Logan County ancestors. My review of John's prize-winning "Generations" is in my book Kentucky Cured. My review of his great study on the Civil Rights struggle before Brown v. Board, Speak Now Against the Day (a quote from Faulkner's Nobel Award speech) ran in the Courier-Journal, and I am hoping to use it in my next book, due to be finished June 1.
John's interest in southern foodways--the customs, celebrations, and cooks--inspired his humanitarian campaign to help New Orleans chefs whose businesses were damaged and lives uprooted by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
He never wrote fiction that I knew about, nor waged crusades in the style of Harry Caudill or Wendell Berry, but for a keen eye, an attentive ear, and eloquent reporting in depth, I don't think he was surpassed by any Kentucky journalist in our time, and few elsewhere in the South.