During the civil rights movement, epic battles for justice were fought in the streets, at lunch counters, and in the classrooms of the American South. Just as many battles were waged, however, in the hearts and minds of ordinary white southerners whose world became unrecognizable to them. Jason Sokol’s vivid and unprecedented account of white southerners’ attitudes and actions, related in their own words, reveals in a new light the contradictory mixture of stubborn resistance and pragmatic acceptance–as well as the startling and unexpected personal transformations–with which they greeted the enforcement of legal equality.

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“Fascinating and remarkably empathetic.” —The Atlantic Monthly“[There Goes My Everything is] on my personal list of the year’s best books.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post “A richly documented, often compellingly dramatic narrative, whose strength is its absence of polemic.” —Dallas Morning News"As eye-opening a look at race relations in the Civil Rights Era as anything this side of Dr. King's own Letter From a Birmingham Jail."—Arkansas Democrat-Gazette“Simply stunning…This is one of the few books about the civil rights movement…that gets it right…Deserves to be read by every American.” —Tucson Citizen

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Jason Sokol grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, and attended Oberlin College and the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in American history. He lives in Ithaca, New York, and teaches at Cornell University.

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