ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author writes some conviction about the power of books, because three or four have surely changed my life, for better or for worse. One of them is a peculiar volume called I'll Take My Stand, a stirring defense of the South by twelve young men, most of them associated with Vanderbilt University. In those early days of the civil rights movement, Southerners in New England were constantly being called on to explains the South, challenged to defend it or simply denounced for their association with it. Young men and women who stayed in the South for their education apparently seldom felt the need to defend our region. If they read I'll Take My Stand at all, they were likely to be scornful of it. Edwin Yoder, for instance, has written of his youthful response. Another Chapel Hill alumnus tells that his copy is full of his outraged undergraduate marginalia.
