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“Jon Meacham . . . has done about the best job of anthologizing the movement that I’ve ever seen.”—Tom Wicker, Mother Jones
Editor and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jon Meacham has chosen pieces by journalists, novelists, historians, and artists, bringing together a wide range of perspectives and experiences. The result is a literary anthology of important and artful interpretations of the movement’s spirit and struggle.
Maya Angelou takes us on a poignant journey back to her childhood in the Arkansas of the 1930s. On the front page of The New York Times, James Reston marks the movement’s apex as he describes what it was like to watch Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his heralded “I Have a Dream” speech in real time. Alice Walker takes up the movement’s progress a decade later in her article “Choosing to Stay at Home: Ten Years After the March on Washington.” And John Lewis chronicles the unimaginable courage of the ordinary African Americans who challenged the prevailing order, paid for it in blood and tears, and justly triumphed.
Voices in Our Blood is a compelling look at the movement as it actually happened, from the days leading up to World War II to the anxieties and ambiguities of this new century. The story of race in America is a never-ending one, and Voices in Our Blood tells us how we got this far—and how far we still have to go to reach the Promised Land.
This powerful anthology contains works from:
Maya Angelou • Russell Baker • James Baldwin • Taylor Branch • Hodding Carter • Ellis Cose • Stanley Crouch • Ralph Ellison • William Faulkner • Marshall Frady • Henry Louis Gates, Jr. • Peter Goldman • David Halberstam • Alex Haley • Elizabeth Hardwick • Charlayne Hunter-Gault • Murray Kempton • John Lewis • Louis E. Lomax • Benjamin E. Mays • Willie Morris • Flannery O’Connor • Walker Percy • Howell Raines • James Reston • Carl T. Rowan • John Steinbeck • William Styron • Calvin Trillin • Alice Walker • Robert Penn Warren • Pat Watters • Bernard Weinraub • Eudora Welty • Rebecca West • E. B. White • Gary Wills • Tom Wolfe • Richard Wright
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
February 15, 2001 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780375506826
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780375506826
- File size: 2301 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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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.
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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.) -
Starred review from January 1, 2001
This admirable work is a solid collection of acclaimed "voices" narrating the environment, origin, and progress of the Civil Rights movement, as told by reporters, artists, novelists, historians, and authors such as Maya Angelou, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Willie Morris, Robert Penn Warren, Alice Walker, Murray Kempton, E.B. White, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Rebecca West. The book begins with the segregated United States of the 1930s and 1940s. James Baldwin recounts the Jim Crow world of New Jersey and the Harlem riot of 1943. Willie Morris, in a 1967 memoir excerpt, recalls knocking over a little black boy just for sport because "the broader reality was that the negroes in this town were ours, to do with as we wished." As a continuous whole, the narratives are well organized into four sequential historical sections--"Before the Storm," "Into the Streets," "The Mountaintop," and "Twilight"--that flow together nicely. Edited by Newsweek managing editor Meacham, this anthology will supplement other Civil Rights movement works, such as John Egerton's Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Knopf, 1994). Thoughtful, sensitive, rewarding, and groundbreaking, it belongs on the shelf of every Civil Rights movement scholar and in classrooms and libraries as well. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/00.]--Edward G. McCormack, Cox Lib. & Media Ctr., Univ. of Southern Mississippi Gulf CoastCopyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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