Jonathan Yardley

In certain precincts occupied by certain members of the American intelligentsia, it has for some time been quite the fashion to ferret out racists in one's familial woodpile and then to write books about them. The ostensible purpose of these books is to provide intimate, confessional evidence of the degree to which racial prejudice has infiltrated every conceivable corner of American life. Their obvious if unstated purpose is to show how the (white) author has triumphed over his or her sordid ancestral inheritance to become a person of impeccable credentials on matters racial. Though all due modesty and claims of imperfection are expressed, the reader is expected to stand and cheer as, at book's end, the author's heroic achievement is revealed in full.

Two of these books were lavishly applauded in all the right places and festooned with important awards. Edward Ball's sublimely self-congratulatory and self-serving Slaves in the Family (1998) was given a National Book Award. Diane McWhorter's somewhat more subdued but equally self-serving Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. In such cases, one is always left to wonder whether the prize judges are applauding the winners or themselves, but there can be no doubt that those two were honored less for their actual literary merits, which are slender, than for the correctness of their authors' views and, by no means least, those authors' eagerness to clad themselves in handsomely tailored hair shirts.

Now comes journalist Cynthia Carr with Our Town . It is set in the Midwest (Indiana) rather than South Carolina (Ball) or Alabama (McWhorter), but otherwise it is mostly of a piece with its two celebrated predecessors. Clearly modeled after both of them, it purports to tell what its subtitle calls "the Hidden History of White America" by exploring how its author's grandparents may or may not have been complicit in, or at least friendly witnesses to, a horrific lynching in August 1930 in the small Indiana city of Marion. The unfortunate truth is that evidence of Carr's forebears' involvement in the atrocity is slender and shadowy at best, the raw material for a magazine article at most. In order to stretch it into what frequently seems the longest book ever written, Carr is forced to look elsewhere, especially to the Ku Klux Klan, the sordid past and present of which she examines endlessly without managing to add an iota to what we already know about it.

Her labors began more than a decade ago and involved frequent return visits to Marion, her hometown, one of which lasted for a year. Here she tells us what she had in mind, employing the first-person singular to excess as she does throughout:

"I had set myself the goal of uncovering the truth about August 7, 1930. Who planned it? Who covered it up? How did it unfold? And how could this deed ever be undone? Might as well be ambitious, I thought. Then I wanted to look at the racial conundrum embodied in my own family -- my grandfather in the Klan, my grandmother's apparent connections to some [Indian] tribe. With Grant County as the American microcosm, I would look for all the hidden histories connected to race. I wanted to see the big picture, the context that had allowed the lynching to happen. Certainly that was the mystery behind the mystery."

The inspiration for all this gas-bagging and breast-beating was a photograph taken the night of the lynchings. It is a famous picture that often is to be found in books and exhibitions about racial violence in the United States. Taken by photographer Lawrence Beitler, it shows a group of white men and women gathered below a tree from which are hanging the bodies of two black men. Most of the spectators are relatively young. Some look happy. Several are smiling. One man points to the bodies with what certainly appears to be pride. A few in the crowd seem less celebratory, but overall the photo suggests, as Carr writes, "mass complicity and the pride white Marion took in this public execution."

The murdered men were Tommy Shipp and Abe Smith, both 19. A third black youth, James Cameron, 16 years old, came close to being lynched but, for reasons that never have been made clear, was spared at the last minute. They had been jailed on suspicion of killing a white man, Claude Deeter, who had been parked in a car with a white woman, Mary Ball. Rumors of rape soon began to fly around the city and surrounding countryside. This "galvanized the town," true to the honored American tradition of instant violence whenever black men were suspected of sexual advances on white women, whether or not those advances actually occurred.

So Shipp and Smith were strung up, after being unspeakably brutalized. Cameron, who is now in his eighties, believes to this day that he was spared by an act of God; the truth, though probably more mundane, apparently never will be known but possibly had something to do with belated second thoughts among some members of the crowd. No one was ever convicted of participating in the lynching -- two men were speedily acquitted -- and there was considerable evidence of complicity, or at least silent support, among law-enforcement officers.

Whether anyone in Carr's family played a role in the lynchings is impossible to say and, in any case, singularly unimportant. Her grandfather, born illegitimate at a time when that marked one an outcast, had "a fury in him he never showed the grandkids" and seems on the whole to have been an unhappy man, but there is absolutely no evidence that he was anything more than a bystander on August 7. Carr claims to see a face in the crowd that resembles his, but it's hard not to suspect that this has more to do with the author's convenience than with actual fact. Her grandfather was indeed a member of the Klan, but so were many others. The Klan was a powerful political and social presence in Indiana during the 1920s, and not everyone joined it because of racial or religious bigotry, though there was plenty of that to go around.

There is by now a great deal of scholarly material about the Klan in the Midwest, the brunt of it being not merely that white racism was every bit as virulent and widespread there as in the South but also that, for some who joined it, the Klan was an unbenevolent fraternal order. Carr's grandfather may well have been racist to the bone, but more likely he was just another man of his time and place: deeply prejudiced, but also searching for companionship and bonhomie. As Carr says of the remnants of the Klan still to be found in Indiana in the early 2000s, "These were failed, damaged people, and joining the Klan was how they made themselves feel better, and it was deeply sad."

"Deeply sad"? Perhaps so, but one does quickly tire of Carr's insistence on inserting her own opinions -- most of them banal and gratuitous -- at every turn. When she blurts out, at one point, "This is the unbearable part -- facing the fact that my grandparents went along with it," it's all the reader (OK: this reader) can do not to throw the book across the room and shout, "Get off it!" Self-righteousness is everywhere, and invariably it's self-serving. As was true previously of Ball and McWhorter, Cynthia Carr has written a book not about the subject ostensibly at hand but about herself.

Everything is me, me, me. Carr fusses over "what it would mean for me to truly witness, to truly own the history of my family and my Marion, and to take in the impact racism had had," and then, after splitting those infinitives, she bleats: "If I encountered something uncomfortable, I would have to stay with the discomfort. No guilt-tripping. No distancing." Like too many other journalists writing books these days, Carr is under the impression that how she got her story and how she feels about it are more interesting (and, implicitly, more important) than the story itself. She could not be more wrong. ·

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.