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Washington Monthly Review of Voices in Our
Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement
AT ITS BEST, HISTORY IS FULL of passion, grit, stupidity,
and violence. But
historians typically tell heroic stories of people with titles--the presidents
and the generals--who face their fates with determination and even wisdom.
And the history is true, no doubt, if the historian is a good researcher.
But even at its best, that official history is no match for history as
lived by people without tides.
So while every movie goer loves a simple tale of hemes triumphing against the odds, there is a deeper level to real history, where sex, hate, and even insanity among the anonymous public gives the truest feeling of what happened. At the dawn of the 21st century, such honest history of the civil rights movement is in short supply. The movement has been reduced to a morality play with an ample supply of pure heroes and pure villains. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, is now a hero who seems to have been born with his name on a major street that cuts through the black section of every town. And Birmingham Police Chief "Bull" Connor is now so reviled for his attacks on civil rights demonstrators that he has become the perfect representation of evil. Connor is now so bad that even his first name, Theophilus, is lost. (Did you really think that his mother named him "Bull?")
There is hard truth to be found in the defining moments of history that produced the essence of King's heroism and Connor's villainy. But both have now been inflated beyond recognition into one-dimensional characters. Any curious mind knows a far more complex story is being hidden. And if you truly care about the most bloody and bizarre puzzle in American history--race relations--then a bothersome thought may tease at your soul. What if American society is telling itself these infantile stories about and the civil fights movement to stop discussion of the more difficult, complex truth about pace in this nation?
The perfect antidote to any childish version of civil rights history is now available in a compelling new book edited by Jon Meacham. He has collected essays and book excerpts about the personal experience of pace in America during the middle and end of the 20th century. Meacham's selections include works done by writers such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, and Walker Percy.
And since Meacham is a journalist (Newsweek's managing editor) he includes the works of his personal heroes--older journalists with a keen eye for the characters, ironies, and the outright deceptions of pace relations in American life. The journalists are mostly white. They include Murray Kempton, David Halberstam, Garry Wills, and Howell Raines. The black journalists in the collection, such as Carl Rowan and Alex Haley, are featured for work they did in white publications. The work of black journalists in black newspapers and magazines--a major source of civil rights coverage before the '60s--is notably absent.
But at every turn in Meacham's book, his personal struggle
to embrace his
white Southern heritage (of recent vintage, since he was born in 1969)
comes through the pages. Here are stories and news reports about real
people exposing real fear, real prejudice/as well as real bravery and
honesty, as they deal with racial situations.
One of my favorite examples of the passionate honesty in this book comes in a piece by a man who, like Meacham, was a son of the South but spent time in the best Northern salons. In "North Towards Home," a 1967 piece written by Willie Morris, the Mississippi writer who was later the editor of Harper's, Morris describes his young white male experience of black women.
"I knew all about the sexual act," Morris wrote, "but not until I was twelve years old did I know it was performed with white women for pleasure; I had thought only Negro women engaged in the act of love with white men just for fun, because they were the only ones with the animal desire to submit that way. So Negro girls and women were a source of constant excitement and sexual feelings for me and filled my daydreams with delight and wonder."
Now that's one man being intensely honest about the sexual aspect of racial politics--and there are so many layers to it that provide a valuable window into the white view of race relations.
Similarly, Meacham selects a piece by James Baldwin from
Notes of a Native Son that reveals the black side of the intimate, twisted
perceptions of race. As a child, Baldwin had a white teacher who was thrilled
with a small play he scripted when Baldwin was 10 years old. The teacher
wanted to take him to a professional theater presentation to encourage
his interest in writing. But that trip required breaking his father's
prohibition against going to the theater. Baldwin had a plan, however.
Even as a child he sensed that the white female teacher had the power
to intimidate his father. And he was right. When the teacher came to the
house and announced she was taking little James on an educational trip,
the senior Baldwin bit his tongue and got out of the way. But later, the
father warned the little boy that he would find out that white people
are never friends with blacks and will,do anything to keep a Negro down."
Note that both of these pieces are done by writers with training as essayists who are writing from personal experience. Similarly, the novelists in this collection, from Maya Angelou to Alice Walker, are effective at evoking the reality of American pace relations when they take the reader inside the intimate relations between black and white. Angelou's writings on how poor whites belittled her uncle, even though he owned the local store, and mocked her kind-hearted grandmother, feel as real and hot as a summer day in the Southland.
Acting as a maestro for an orchestra of gifted writers, Meacham succeeds at transporting the reader to the confused heart of American race relations, down to the core of the misunderstandings, the invitations to hate and the violence.
Journalists in Meacham's collection can only stand on the sideline and report. Their problem is that they are forced to write in the third person. And while some of their journalistic insights are rich, they are overmatched by even the weakest personal story.
The title of this book, Voices in Our Blood, suggests that Meacham is after those stories that are so personal that they are not measured by any universal standard of truth but by naked honesty. The book's title comes from a line in Robert Penn Warren's book, Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South. Warren wrote that when he went south in 1956 to look at the nation's racial crisis, he was going to "hear the voices, to hear, in fact, the voices in my blood." No outside observer can capture what boils in your blood. It is personal, often unsaid for fear of embarrassment. This is the essence of race relations, and it is also the true heart of this valuable collection of writings.
JUAN WILLIAMS is the host of National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" and author of Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary.
