TEE KLANSMAN

Huie is as politically liberal as the morals of his best known heroine, Mamie Stover, and a while back he did a widely discussed newspaper series on the South which was long on indignation, shy on documentation. This novelizes the Civil Rights struggle and it is set in a pine forested county of Alabama. The characters are cardboard and the plot is corrugated with rape and therapeutic sex. Briefly, Sheriff Big Track Bascomb climbed out of white trash status via an undeserved Congressional Medal of Honor. While he was away from the jailhouse, a young Negro virgin was raped by a moronic Negro with a gigantic phallus under the direction of the Sheriff's Klan buddies, who were under the delusion that this would halt local agitation for Civil Rights. Bascomb bustles around to cover up while the town's one white defender of Negroes talks himself into a lyncher's noose. Bascomb's teenage son, potential West Pointer and the apple of his pappy's eye, gets lynched defending the defender, while Bascomb is locked in one of his own cells, by consent. Striking with overheated ironies, Huie tries to shame the Southern syndrome about miscegenation and Negro sexuality, but unfortunately enhances it. Trying for the antithesis of Birth of a Nation, the result is a smalltown miscarriage. Salable.