The Reins of Power: Racial Change and Challenge in a Southern County

Wilcox County, Alabama, is a fascinating repository of Southern history. with its conflicting images of romanticism and repression. After recounting the county's early history to set the stage for what was to come, Clinton McCarty, a journalist whose own roots are in Wilcox, moves into the 1960s and beyond, detailing the county's extended school desegregation battle and its painful transition from white to black political control. He then takes a closer look at how blacks have done in their stewardship and consider's Wilcox's prospects in the new millennium.