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.
Acts of Terror Described The author (singular) correctly notes that this book has nothing to do with his gender reassignment from Elizabeth Cobbs to Petric Smith in 1981.
Elizabeth Cobbs became aware at an early age of her family's intense fear of Black people, especially Black men. We not only learn of the intense hatred that Klan members had for African Americans, but the author reveals the acts of terror carried out by these defenders of Anglo-Saxon purity, which intensified when the civil rights movement emerged in Birmingham. By the 1950s, Birmingham Klan members moved from assaulting and killing individuals to attacking Black institutions and organizations, as well as Jewish temples, holding to the same political objective -- the subjugation of African Americans and their "allies."
