 |
 |
||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Publisher's Weekly Review of Voices in Our
Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement
To "give a flavor of what life was like" as the
Civil Rights movement played
itself out, Meacham, the managing editor of Newsweek, has assembled
"a highly personal anthology" of "the country's best writing
on the midcentury crisis." Extending far beyond the decade between
Rosa Parks's bold act of resistance to the proprieties of segregation
in 1955 and the landmark civil rights bills of 1965, Meacham includes
some unexpected works written in the heat of the moment: Tom Wolfe's "wicked
portrait of the liberal elite's fascination with the Black Panthers,"
Alex Haley's Playboyinterview with Malcolm X and Howell Raines's memoir
of his family's complex relationship with their black housekeeper. The
pieces range broadly, from "the fissures between the young and the
old within the black community" in the late 1950s (embodied in the
relationship between Stokely Carmichael and John Kaspar), to the "cornucopia
of discontent" afflicting "blacks in the 1980s and 1990s"
as rendered by Ellis Cose. Mixing the work of artists and journalists,
including Rebecca West, Taylor Branch, William Styron, Eudora Welty, Stanley
Crouch, Elizabeth Hardwick, Alice Walker, Hodding Carter and Richard Wright,
this compilation is a useful resource for tracking the daily realities
of civil rights struggles. Meacham captures the movement's "complications
behind the public spectacle" with immediacy, driving home the point
that black and white citizens of the U.S. remain "connected by a
common heritage, yet hopelessly divided by skin color."
