'The Shadows of Youth' by Andrew B. Lewis
November 8, 2009
By STEVE WEINBERG
Steve Weinberg is the author of eight nonfiction books, most recently
Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller.
As debates about racial equality continue across the United States,
despite (or perhaps because of) the ethnicity of President Barack
Obama, a history professor leavens the conversation with a remarkable book.
The professor is Andrew B. Lewis, who teaches at Wesleyan University.
He is not the first author to recount the evolution of the civil
rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s. His original contribution
is to relate the sometimes lethal, always important drama primarily
through the actions of seven young activists: five black men (Marion
Barry, Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael, John Lewis, Bob Moses); one
black woman (Diane Nash); and one white man (Bob Zellner).
More famous players are part of the narrative, including the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr., Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B.
Johnson, and J. Edgar Hoover. But because the book is secondarily an
institutional history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (the acronym is pronounced colloquially as "snick"), Lewis
is obliged to feature the SNCC hierarchy.
Lewis opens his narrative on Good Friday, 1960, as black students
from throughout the South converge on Shaw University in Raleigh,
N.C. They arrived to discuss a strategy for lunch-counter sit-ins
that would open the spaces to all, regardless of color. At the time,
the civil rights movement seemed stalled, with the bus boycott in
Montgomery, Ala., a fading memory. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in
Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka also seemed more like a sham
ruling about equal access to quality public schooling.
"The student-led sit-ins revived the movement, harnessing mass
protest as an effective weapon, providing every black American with a
sense of involvement, reaching into the farthest corners of the South
and tugging at the conscience of the nation," Lewis says.
Each reader will need to choose which of the seven primary figures
deserves the most credit for sparking the movement, because Lewis
does not anoint anyone. Each of the seven has either written her or
his own book or been featured in books published before this one.
That means Lewis rarely breaks new factual ground. What he does well,
though, via alternating minibiographies, is demonstrate how the
synergy of the seven created something larger than each of them.
Not everyone played well together during every high-risk campaign,
and Lewis shows this, too. The conflicts among crusaders should be
part of the saga; Lewis does not diminish his credibility by
portraying any of the protagonists as saints.
I became partial to Diane Nash, partly because I knew so little about
her, partly because she needed extra gumption to withstand the abuse
heaped on her by racists. Death was a constant threat faced by all,
but the possibility of sexual assault ratcheted up the risk faced by
Nash. Later, during pregnancies and child-rearing, she had to
consider her offspring as she continued the campaign for equal
treatment. She refused to compromise her ideals no matter the dangers
to herself.
In Lewis' telling, Nash epitomizes the civil rights movement. It is a
boon that Lewis has given her and her colleagues new life in print.
--
Steve Weinberg is the author of eight nonfiction books, most recently
Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller.
The Shadows of Youth
The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation
Andrew B. Lewis
(Hill and Wang, $28)
.
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