http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/12/16/entertainment/e085658S71.DTL
BY KENDAL WEAVER
December 16, 2009
"The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights
Generation," (Hill and Wang, 339 pages, $27), by Andrew B. Lewis
Even after nearly 50 years, the names bear repeating: Franklin
McCain, David Richmond, Ezell Blair and Joseph McNeil.
They were freshmen at North Carolina A&T on Feb. 1, 1960, when they
took their seats at the whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth's in
downtown Greensboro. Four young blacks tired of segregation laws,
they were refused service and asked to leave. But they remained until
the counter closed, and when they walked back to their dorm
exhilarated, they had set in motion an act of civil disobedience --
the sit-in -- that took the civil rights movement by storm.
The next day, 25 sit-in protesters showed up. Then 63 filled all but
two seats at Woolworth's. The protest spilled over to the nearby
Kress department store, and as word spread across North Carolina and
across the South, so did the sit-in: By mid-April, more than 50,000
protesters -- ordinary Americans, most of them young -- had attacked
Jim Crow at the counter.
Andrew B. Lewis, a historian at Wesleyan University, recounts this
pivotal moment in his book, "The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable
Journey of the Civil Rights Generation," as he chronicles the roles
of a band of young people who gave new direction and courage to the
movement at a crucial time.
The book is a shorthand history of the civil rights era -- from
lynching victim Emmett Till and the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of
Education decision that outlawed school segregation, to the
Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott, the rise of the Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr. and the sit-in phenomenon. It follows the lives of several
key figures who forged the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
some becoming far better-known today than those four college students
from Greensboro.
From mostly different backgrounds but with a common cause, these
activists all were around the age of 20 -- John Lewis, Julian Bond,
Marion Barry, Stokely Carmichael, Diane Nash, Bob Moses and Bob
Zellner among them. They saw the sit-in as a tool to spread the
movement for social justice to the grass-roots South.
The book would be an excellent starting point for anyone,
particularly young people, wanting to learn about key points in the
modern civil rights era and the rise -- and fall -- of SNCC.
Lewis is covering territory that has been well-traveled by others,
such as Taylor Branch with his three-part history of the King years
and David Halberstam with "The Children," and it is light on fresh
analysis. But he distills the vast trove of material on SNCC and the
movement with a sure, skillful hand. The book would be an excellent
starting point for anyone, particularly young people, wanting to
learn about key points in the modern civil rights era and the rise --
and fall -- of SNCC.
His portrait of Bob Moses, the philosopher-activist in a white
T-shirt and bib overalls whose journey took him from Harvard
University to Mississippi to Africa and back, would make anyone
unfamiliar with him want to learn more. This is true of others in
Lewis' account, such as Zellner, a white Alabama student who remained
committed and courageous even when SNCC turned against him.
The second half of the book chronicles SNCC's downward spiral, the
success and prominence of some, and the disillusionment and personal
travails of others in its aging cadre. But Lewis makes clear how much
their fearlessness in youth mattered:
"How this ragtag band with little money, no obvious power, painfully
little help from the federal government, and the entire white South
out to get them, played a starring role in the demise of legal
segregation is one of the great adventure stories of American history."
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