Voices in Our Blood

January 1, 2001
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 Playboy interview 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."

September 1, 2000
Newsweek's managing editor collects the major writings of the Civil Rights Movement.

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2000
Without understanding what a close call the Movement really was, we cannot appreciate the courage of those who tried to change a nation's habits of heart, nor can we grasp the fact that even the most remarkable revolutions are never complete," "News"week managing editor Meacham declares. The section "Before the Storm" contains excerpts from works by Wright, Morris, Baldwin, Welty, Angelou, and West. "Into the Streets" includes reflections by journalists (Kempton, Rowan, Carter, Haley, and Lomax), historians (Branch and Gates), and literary figures (Faulkner, Steinbeck, Ellison, and O'Connor). "The Mountaintop" section draws on a similar range, from Reston, Hardwick, and Halberstam to Styron, Percy, and Crouch. "Twilight" includes work by Tom Wolfe, Ellis Cose, Alice Walker, and others. A vital reminder of the complexity of the civil rights struggle. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)