The Civil Rights Movement Book

So, I picked this book up because I know almost nothing about the civil rights movement, I was looking for a longish book (I have been plagued with short stories recently) and I liked the “Pulitzer Prize Winning Author” tag across the top. I did not realize until I had started it that it was non-fiction and that Halberstam is a journalist.

As a spoiled little white-girl child of the 1980s, I was less enamored by the thought of a non-fiction 700+ page account of this moment in history; I really would have preferred a historical fiction rendering.

So, I learned a lot that I did not know. I did not know many of the details surrounding the sit-ins and the freedom rides. I did not know many of these names (actually I only knew about four of them: ML King, Marion Barry, Stokley Carmicheal, and Malcom X). And so this book was good for me and it was a well organized way to present the material.

I wasn’t quite sure about the “cast of characters”; the book is title The Children and so Halberstam begins with the college kids in Nashville and the sit-ins. He then follows them to the Freedom Rides and then (after King’s death) kinda spends the last 200ish pages just summing up their lives. I felt kinda meh about this. If this is the only book I’m going to read about the civil rights movement (and it might be), it would be nice to include some of the other stuff. Rather than hear all the details of Hank Thomas’s acquisitions of McDonald’s restaurants or Chris Murphy’s trouble with too much partying it would have been nice to get bit more about Stokely Carmicheal and Malcolm X. This book is about “the children” and a specific moment that starts with the sit-ins and so it neglects the black power movement and the black separatism that followed. This is kind of okay, but I guess I would have rather had the book end around about ML King’s murder than continue to read about these people and not the development of the movement. I was also a little miffed that Halberstam decided to lump some older folks (Jim Lawson, Kelly Smith) in with “the children” (and so we got their later history), but not others (Julian Bond??) who were arguably children (or at least college age like the rest of them) during the initial sit ins.

Overall it was too long for my taste and felt less like a comprehensive historical analysis and more like a spotlight on these 10 lives. They are clearly important lives, but not everything that happened within them were important.

As a concluding aside, I have a Great-Grandmother who was born and raised and lived her whole life in small town Mississippi. When I was a kid (80s to early 90s) we went to her house for Thanksgiving every year. It was the smallest town I had ever seen; there was a one block downtown that consisted of a barber shop, gas station, a jeweler’s store, a furniture store, a pawn shop, and a grocery store. As a small girl (probably about 7 or 8), I had more freedom during this long weekend than I did ever at home (in a suburb of Chicago and West Palm Beach FL). I was allowed to walk all the way from my Grandma’s house (her’s was the first just over the railroad tracks outside of down town) three blocks to the grocery store and pick out a treat ALL BY MYSELF. The town was so small that there was virtually no crime (at least not perpetuated against a small white girl visiting her grandma) and everyone knew who I was. They didn’t know me by name, but they would all say, “you must be Ms. Priscilla’s granddaughter” or something to that effect. The sidewalks were made of wood and were raised about 4 feet from the road. People would park their cars in the angled slots along the sidewalk and then walk to the middle of the block where there was a short staircase to come up to the sidewalk. Once when I was walking down to the store (something I did at least 6 times a day to exercise my freedom) an elderly black man using a cane approached from the other direction. When he got to the mid-block staircase, he walked down it and turned so that his back was facing the sidewalk and he was looking directly out into the street. I thought this was odd and watched him as I approached. Once I had passed him, I turned around to look over my shoulder to see if he was still just standing there looking at the street. He was not. As soon as I had passed, he climbed back up the stairs and continued on his way. When I got home, I asked my mom about this and she explained that it was a sign of respect and that there was a time when he could risk being beaten up (or worse) for walking next to me on the sidewalk. Rather than risk this, he climbed down before he reached me and waited for me to pass. I could not (and still really do not) comprehend the kind of society in which an elderly gentleman had to pay deference to a 7 year old child. Clearly, his life in Mississippi was much different than anything I can imagine, but the image of that man standing and staring out into the street has stayed with me these 30+ years and impacted almost every conversation or thought that I have had about racial relations.