Frye Gaillard, a former Charlotte Observer writer, and I communicated almost daily while we were co-editing The Literary Legacy of Jimmy Carter: Essays on the President’s Books (2025). Over the course of our communications, we discovered that we are interested in many of the same topics, such as the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the history of the 1960s, and the culture of the American South. However, it was not until this past month that we realized that both of us are admirers of Thomas Paine and his famous pamphlets in support of the American Revolution. We made this discovery after Frye sent me a signed copy of his new book titled A Republic If You Can Keep It: Reflections on an America in Crisis, which he co-wrote with Cynthia Tucker. As I was reading this book, it reminded me of Paine’s The American Crisis (1776). Both works are eloquent calls to action, and both are rooted in a love of America. I commented on this point when I sent Frye a thank-you email message, and he responded by saying, “I LOVE the Thomas Paine comparison. That’s actually who I was privately channeling, which sounds presumptuous, of course, but interesting that you picked that up.”
I invited Frye to send me the backstory of how he and Cynthia came to write A Republic If You Can Keep It. Here is what he sent to me:
Back in 2022, my colleague Cynthia Tucker and I published a book called The Southernization of America: A Story of Democracy in the Balance. Partly because of Cynthia’s standing as a Pulitzer Prize winner, the book got a good bit of national attention including a nice interview on NPR’s Weekend Edition and inclusion on the network’s list of notable books in 2022. It was our message of hope and warning about the state of things in the country, and having written it, we both moved on to other things.
But when Trump won reelection in 2024, and as we watched his wrecking-ball policies unfold in 2025, we decided we needed to write another book, much more urgent than the first. Around December of 2025, we began outlining A Republic If You Can Keep It, working with Black Belt Press in Montgomery, a small publisher with a concern for history and social justice that we knew could produce the book on an expedited timetable.
We wanted to write about the Trump regime in the context of the nation’s 250th birthday, evoking the shining ideals of equality and justice put forward in the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the U. S. Constitution. Yes, America’s founders were great flawed men, many of them enslavers of other human beings, and so of course our country has wrestled with the contradictions of its founding. But for most of our lives, as two journalists, one Black, one white, coming of age in the civil rights years, Cynthia and I thought the country was making progress, following the North Star of possibility bequeathed by Jefferson, Franklin, George Washington and the rest.
Now we are not so sure.
So, we wrote our book in five months—a still frame of a story in motion—so that it could be published as close as possible to July 4. I say half seriously that I was channeling my inner Thomas Paine: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Because indeed they are.
But in the book, despite the urgency of the warning, we find hope in the deep, spontaneous, nonviolent resistance that has emerged in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago, but also Charlotte, which we mention quite specifically.
Our conclusion is that the ending is still in doubt. We believe the damage to America can be repaired, though the restoration of what we have lost could be a generational project. Black Americans know this well. They lived through the terrible betrayal that came with the end of Reconstruction but kept on pushing. Perhaps we will manage to do the same. But darker possibilities exist as well.
I am happy for the chance to talk about all of this in Charlotte—a place where I lived for 30 years, and where, on the staff of The Charlotte Observer, I learned what it meant to be a journalist.
I left the city in 2005 to take a job as Writer in Residence at the University of South Alabama in my hometown of Mobile. My wife Nancy Gaillard, a former principal in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, found a welcoming home on the faculty of the College of Education at South Alabama. So, it was a happy homecoming. But I continue to miss my friends in Charlotte. On September 20, I’ll be talking about the book at Myers Park Covenant Church, formerly Myers Park Baptist. I look forward to it.
Again, Mark, I’m grateful for your interest.
For readers who want to know more about Frye and his books, please click on the following link: https://fryegaillardauthor.com/ I congratulate Frye and Cynthia on the publication of A Republic If You Can Keep It. It is a timely book, and its message resonates here in Storied Charlotte, which has long been known as a “hornet’s nest of rebellion” against the forces of tyranny.
