John Egerton, Who Lent Spice to Social Justice, Dies at 78

“There is no explaining,” he once said, “how the best writers would come from the region that has the most illiterates.”

Mr. Egerton, who was one of those writers, died on Thursday after apparently having a heart attack at his home in Nashville, his son Brooks said. He was 78.

A son of the South who grew up when the Ku Klux Klan was almost as mainstream there as the Rotary Club, Mr. Egerton (pronounced EDGE-er-ton) used the written word, humility and ultimately the power of the Southern table to champion racial reconciliation and lead a new generation of writers and cooks to look beyond clichés and divisions to understand the region.

“He could be deeply pessimistic about this place and a minute later, with a whiskey in his hand and his arm around your neck, would be regaling you with tales of the people and the places that he loved,” said John T. Edge, who, in 1999, along with Mr. Egerton and a group of others, created the Southern Foodways Alliance, an irreverent but academic institution — it is anchored at the University of Mississippi — dedicated to Southern food and culture.

Mr. Egerton was one of five children born to William Graham Egerton, a traveling salesman, and the former Rebecca White, a shopkeeper. In 1935, when he was an infant, the family moved from Atlanta to Cadiz, a small town in western Kentucky where Mr. Egerton staked his claim as a writer early by covering high school sports for The Cadiz Record while still in grade school.

Mr. Egerton met his future wife, Ann Bleidt, in high school. Besides his son Brooks, he is survived by another son, March; four grandchildren; and a brother and a sister.

He completed his undergraduate education at the University of Kentucky after serving two years in the Army and then went into public relations. But in 1965, with the civil rights movement gaining strength around him, he moved to Nashville and took a job writing about it for the Southern Education Reporting Service, which monitored integration efforts following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

The job led to a prolific career filled with newspaper jobs, magazine assignments and books. He wrote 10 historical and literary books and contributed to several more as a writer and editor.

Some of Mr. Egerton’s books became seminal for a region trying to understand itself. One, “The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America,” published in 1974, pushed back against the homogenization of the South as it rushed to merge with the rest of America.

Twenty years later, he published “Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South,” a 627-page mix of memoir and history that explored how progressive blacks and whites in the 1930s and ’40s laid the groundwork for the dismantling of a segregated South. It won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, given by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

By all accounts, Mr. Egerton was not the type of progressive white Southerner who swooped in to save an oppressed people and boasted about it, said Rachel Lawson, who, with Mr. Egerton, was a creator of the documentary “A Child Shall Lead Them,” about the desegregation of Nashville’s schools.

“Those men fell into two types,” she said. “One who would put his thumbs under his suspenders and big-daddy it all over the place, and then there were men like John Egerton. He just despised self-glorification.”

For many, his masterwork was “Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History,” a breezy but detailed study published in 1987. He used the book to demonstrate that food is a potent way to achieve racial reconciliation, a belief he imparted to the cooks and food writers he mentored.

“In a very powerful way he connected social justice and food as the essential ingredients for understanding the American South,” said William Ferris, an author and professor of Southern culture at the University of North Carolina,  Chapel Hill.

Mr. Egerton believed that food could fix just about anything. After the levees broke and Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, he arrived at a gathering of his beloved Southern Foodways Alliance with a case of bread-and-butter pickles spiked with chiles bearing the name S-O-S Sharpies. He planned to sell them for $10 a jar to help rebuild the city’s restaurants.

Friends, who said Mr. Egerton had a penchant for tilting at windmills, just shook their heads.

“I mean, how much money you going to raise with a damn pickle?” said Lolis Elie, a former columnist for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans who worked on the HBO drama “Treme.” “But for him, the food was always the way through something. It was always about the people who made it, their relationship to it and their relationship to each other.”

In the end, the pickle project raised about $10,000.

Mr. Egerton advised his friends and followers to be cautious both in celebrating the South and in criticizing the region he had loved so fitfully all his life. “I’ve kind of cobbled together a modestly successful career out of predicting the imminent demise of the South,” he said at a 2006 conference, “and all that’s kept me in the game is its refusal to die.”