VOICES IN OUR BLOOD: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, Jan, 2001 by Juan Williams

VOICES IN OUR BLOOD: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement Edited by Jon Meacham Random House. $29.95

Personal History

AT ITS BEST, HISTORY IS FULL of passion, grit, stupidity, and violence. But historians typically tell heroic stories of people with titles--the presidents and the generals--who face their fates with determination and even wisdom. And the history is true, no doubt, if the historian is a good researcher. But even at its best, that official history is no match for history as lived by people without tides.

So while every movie goer loves a simple tale of hemes triumphing against the odds, there is a deeper level to real history, where sex, hate, and even insanity among the anonymous public gives the truest feeling of what happened. At the dawn of the 21st century, such honest history of the civil rights movement is in short supply. The movement has been reduced to a morality play with an ample supply of pure heroes and pure villains. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, is now a hero who seems to have been born with his name on a major street that cuts through the black section of every town. And Birmingham Police Chief "Bull" Connor is now so reviled for his attacks on civil rights demonstrators that he has become the perfect representation of evil. Connor is now so bad that even his first name, Theophilus, is lost. (Did you really think that his mother named him "Bull?")

There is hard truth to be found in the defining moments of history that produced the essence of King's heroism and Connor's villainy. But both have now been inflated beyond recognition into one-dimensional characters. Any curious mind knows a far more complex story is being hidden. And if you truly care about the most bloody and bizarre puzzle in American history--race relations--then a bothersome thought may tease at your soul. What if American society is telling itself these infantile stories about and the civil fights movement to stop discussion of the more difficult, complex truth about pace in this nation?

The perfect antidote to any childish version of civil rights history is now available in a compelling new book edited by Jon Meacham. He has collected essays and book excerpts about the personal experience of pace in America during the middle and end of the 20th century. Meacham's selections include works done by writers such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, and Walker Percy.

And since Meacham is a journalist (Newsweek's managing editor) he includes the works of his personal heroes--older journalists with a keen eye for the characters, ironies, and the outright deceptions of pace relations in American life. The journalists are mostly white. They include Murray Kempton, David Halberstam, Garry Wills, and Howell Raines. The black journalists in the collection, such as Carl Rowan and Alex Haley, are featured for work they did in white publications. The work of black journalists in black newspapers and magazines--a major source of civil rights coverage before the '60s--is notably absent.

But at every turn in Meacham's book, his personal struggle to embrace his white Southern heritage (of recent vintage, since he was born in 1969) comes through the pages. Here are stories and news reports about real people exposing real fear, real prejudice/as well as real bravery and honesty, as they deal with racial situations.

One of my favorite examples of the passionate honesty in this book comes in a piece by a man who, like Meacham, was a son of the South but spent time in the best Northern salons. In "North Towards Home," a 1967 piece written by Willie Morris, the Mississippi writer who was later the editor of Harper's, Morris describes his young white male experience of black women.

"I knew all about the sexual act," Morris wrote, "but not until I was twelve years old did I know it was performed with white women for pleasure; I had thought only Negro women engaged in the act of love with white men just for fun, because they were the only ones with the animal desire to submit that way. So Negro girls and women were a source of constant excitement and sexual feelings for me and filled my daydreams with delight and wonder."

Now that's one man being intensely honest about the sexual aspect of racial politics--and there are so many layers to it that provide a valuable window into the white view of race relations.

Similarly, Meacham selects a piece by James Baldwin from Notes of a Native Son that reveals the black side of the intimate, twisted perceptions of race. As a child, Baldwin had a white teacher who was thrilled with a small play he scripted when Baldwin was 10 years old. The teacher wanted to take him to a professional theater presentation to encourage his interest in writing. But that trip required breaking his father's prohibition against going to the theater. Baldwin had a plan, however. Even as a child he sensed that the white female teacher had the power to intimidate his father. And he was right. When the teacher came to the house and announced she was taking little James on an educational trip, the senior Baldwin bit his tongue and got out of the way. But later, the father warned the little boy that he would find out that white people are never friends with blacks and will,do anything to keep a Negro down."