But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative (Fleming Lectures in Southern History)

Hobson applies the term "racial conversion narrative" to several autobiographies or works of highly personal social commentary by Lillian Smith, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, James McBride Dabbs, Sarah Patton Boyle, Will Campbell, Larry L. King, Willie Morris, Pat Watters, and other southerners, books written between the mid-1940s and the late 1970s in which the authors - all products of and willing participants in a harsh, segregated society - confess racial wrongdoings and are "converted," in varying degrees, from racism to something approaching racial enlightenment. Indeed, the language of many of these works is, Hobson points out, the language of religious conversion - "sin," "guilt," "blindness," "seeing the light," "repentance," "redemption," and so forth. Hobson also looks at recent autobiographical volumes by Ellen Douglas, Elizabeth Spencer, and Rick Bragg to show how the medium persists, if in a somewhat different form, even at the very end of the twentieth century.