Elizabeth Cobbs/Petric Smith’s “Long Time Coming” is an important work because it vividly reminds us of America’s racial legacy and who the real victims of racial oppression have been.
This book is about the cruelty and savagery perpetuated by white racists on African Americans and condoned by local and federal officials. But it is also about the bravery of a few white southerners who stepped forward to challenge virulent racial oppression.
Smith’s work provides more than an insider’s account of one of the most atrocious events of the civil rights era — the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that caused the death of four children — it is a personal journey inside the world of the most extreme opponents of racial justice. It gives us a better look at the lengths some would go in order to uphold the ideology of white supremacy.
Written in a style that is accessible to general readers, this engrossing narrative exposes a world where the elite club of whiteness was reserved for native-born white Protestants. Although Jews, Catholics and other white ethnics were outsiders, not to be trusted, the special category of “menacing beast” and “danger to the white community” was reserved for people of African origins.
