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History. Nonfiction. HTML:From the Pulitzer Prize�winning author of The Fifties: An "intimate and monumental" account of the people at the core of the civil rights movement (Publishers Weekly). The young men and women at the heart of David Halberstam's brilliant and poignant The Children came together through Reverend James Lawson's workshops on nonviolence. Idealistic and determined, they showed unwavering bravery during the sit-ins at the Nashville lunch counters and on the Freedom Rides across the South�all chronicled here with Halberstam's characteristic clarity and insight. The Children exhibits the incredible strength of generations of black Americans, who sacrificed greatly to improve the world for their children. Following Diane Nash, John Lewis, Gloria Johnson, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, Curtis Murphy, James Bevel, and Rodney Powell, among others, The Children is rooted in Halberstam's coverage of the civil rights movement for Nashville's Tennessean. A New York Times Notable Book, this volume garnered extraordinary acclaim for David Halberstam, the #1 New York Times�bestselling author of The Best and the Brightest. Upon its publication, the Philadelphia Inquirer called it "utterly absorbing . . . The civil rights movement already has produced superb works of history, books such as David J. Garrow's Bearing the Cross and Taylor Branch's recently published Pillar of Fire. . . . Halberstam adds another with The Children." This ebook features an extended biography of David Halberstam..… (more)
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This is a masterful overview of The Movement, as the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s came to be known. Halberstam astutely focuses on a group of college students in Nashville who formed the backbone of what became the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and pushed the older, more conservative Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) into challenging segregation with direct action, beginning with lunch-counter sit-ins and ending with the bloody March to Montgomery and voter registration drives across the Deep South.
Many of The Movement's most well-known names got their start in the Nashville group — John Lewis, Marion Barry and James Bevel among them. But Halberstam also shines a light on activists who were lesser-known or completely unknown to me, showing how essential they were to the ultimate success of the struggle. He interweaves chapters exploring the backgrounds of each of these disparate characters and how they came to be in Nashville with direct reporting on the actions they took and the reactions of the white establishment. His writing brought home the very real physical danger that they all faced, and the constant indignities and humiliations that were visited upon them simply for believing themselves to be equal to whites:
It was a bitter evening for both of them. One of the waitresses had come over and said that they did not serve niggers, and when they still did not leave, she returned and poured milk on both of them, and when they still did not leave, she returned one more time and poured hot tea on them. Then, as if to top it off, one of the other employees went in the kitchen and returned with a container of Ajax and poured it on both of them. Then the police came and arrested them both. It was a moment when Gloria Johnson felt an overpowering sense of sadness, not about herself, or about the others who were protesting with her, but instead about the city and the country. Here were the two of them, she thought, graduates of an uncommonly good college, now on their way to becoming doctors, trying to order simple meals in what was not a very fancy restaurant, and being abused and then arrested for it. She wept that day, for her country, not for herself.
One of the most valuable takeaways for me from this book is the reminder that African-American culture is not and never has been a monolith. The activists in the book come from a variety of backgrounds, from financially secure to desperately poor, from the Deep South of Mississippi and Alabama to northern cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. By continuing the book beyond the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — really the signature achievement of The Movement — Halberstam shows how black activism experienced a schism of its own, between those whose ultimate goal was full integration into society and those who advocated for black power and separating themselves from whites. As he follows many of the activists from their 20s into their 50s and beyond, he also shows how their time in The Movement affected them all profoundly even as they moved into the next phases of their lives. Many struggled with depression as they tried to find some other cause or pursuit that would mean as much to them as the civil rights struggle had.
Reading this book in 2017, as voting rights are once again under attack across the country (including right here in Iowa), I find myself filled with fresh determination that the gains those activists fought so hard to achieve must not be conceded without a fight. The stories Halberstam tells in The Children filled me with awe at a group of young people who faced incredible danger and violence — not fearlessly like superheroes, but with fearful conviction in the rightness of their cause, like flawed but focused human beings.
The largest focus is on the students' involvement in the lunch-counter sit-ins that began in early 1960 and in the Freedom Rides that began somewhat later. The students’ movement started in Nashville--which was a relatively liberal city with regard to segregation—and expanded to cities and towns of the “Deep South” in Alabama and Mississippi. There were relatively peaceful mass arrests in Nashville and vicious beatings sanctioned by the local governments in Alabama and Mississippi. Until the later 1960s, these protesters reacted non-violently, and many of them suffered serious injury.
Halberstam comments on the almost complete lack of involvement by the Kennedy administration until confronted with the extreme violence perpetrated on the protestors by law enforcement officials. He discusses the connection between some of the local police and the Ku Klux Klan. He also calls attention to the relatively new phenomenon of television broadcasting these scenes to the average American, and the significant impact on the populace and on the federal government of that visual evidence.
Halberstam was a reporter for the Nashville Tennesseean when the sit-ins started and moved to the New York Times in the early 1960s where his emphasis shifted to the Vietnam War. The writing is that of a very good reporter, but it is not a scholarly investigation and analysis. It is based upon anecdote and interviews with participants in the events and can be taken as a well written factual account. My one criticism is that he spends approximately 200 pages at the end of the book briefly recounting what happened afterward to all of the individuals he saw as key players. Since I was reading it for information about the civil rights movement, I was not so interested in the "after" stories.
I do, however, highly recommend this very readable book, particularly as one that covers the contributions of the less well known young participants in the early civil rights movement.
Halberstam's focus is on the youth of the movement - college students who were around his own age at the time - and the steps they took in the fight for equality. The story is one of hope and inspiration, helping one to realize that if these young people could stand up for what they believed in and make a difference, there's no reason that any of the rest of us can't be bothered to do something similar. It also helps to remind us that while it is easy to look back on the past and think only of the great things that came from it, real people were and are involved in these struggles - and that's something we should never forget.