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Associated Press Review of Voices in Our Blood: America's
Best on the Civil Rights Movement
Voices in Our Blood (Random House, 561 pages, $29.95)
is a compelling,
literary anthology of "America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement."
Editor Jon Meacham has deftly strung together passionate and entertaining
accounts by more than 30 novelists, journalists, artists and historians,
including Maya Angelou, John Lewis and Alice Walker.
Voices presents the struggle for civil rights in
America from a variety of
perspectives. Reading this book is like joyfully discovering a music CD
featuring an era's greatest hits. Spirited accounts of events thrust readers
into the thick of the moment, whether they remember it firsthand or not.
Pieces are grouped into the movement's chronological phases: "Before the Storm," "Into the Streets," "The Mountaintop" and "Twilight." A lynching case is documented, as is the empowering role of black churches, violent reactions to the Brown vs. Board Supreme Court decision, the Rev. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, the power of television in bringing White America into blacks' living rooms, the Watts riots and the Montgomery bus boycott.
Angelou's classic "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," which depicts life in the small town of Stamps, Ark., during a time of official segregation, is one of the highlights of the collection:
"In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most black children didn't really absolutely know what whites looked like. Other than that they were different, to be dreaded, and in that dread was included the hostility of the powerless against the powerful, the poor against the rich, the worker against the worked-for, and the ragged against the well-dressed."
Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek magazine, superbly organizes Voices into a meaningful flow of the events concerning the abolition of Jim Crow, desegregation and the rise of racial consciousness in America. He has assembled a rich and captivating collection.
