Crossing Border Street: A Civil Rights Memoir - Hardcover

Honigsberg, Peter Jan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520221478 ISBN 13: 9780520221475

Publisher: University of California Press, 2000

Synopsis

In 1966 Peter Jan Honigsberg--a young, idealistic law student--arrived in the South to help provide legal representation for civil rights workers. Although based in New Orleans, most of his work was in the city of Bogalusa and in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. Bogalusa was the heart of the Louisiana movement and the home of one of the most formidable but little-known black organizations in the country--the Deacons for Defense and Justice, the first modern-day African American organization to carry weapons and to respond with force against the Ku Klux Klan. This riveting memoir, one of only a handful of first-person full-length accounts of the civil rights movement, is both a stirring coming-of-age story and a thrilling chronicle of a remarkable era in United States history.

Honigsberg's engaging narrative conveys the emotions and personal dangers activists faced. He describes how the Deacons worked with the Bogalusa Voters League to boycott the white-owned businesses in the downtown area and to integrate the local schools, restaurants, parks, and paper mill.

Unlike many law students, Honigsberg not only worked on legal issues; he participated directly in marches and demonstrations. His narrative includes lively firsthand accounts of his attempt--with a group of black and white demonstrators--to integrate a beach on Lake Pontchartrain, his experience marching through hostile Ku Klux Klan territory under the eye of the National Guard, and his witnessing a prominent civil rights leader lift his car's trunk to display a cache of carbines and grenades to a station attendant who refused to fill the tank with gas. This memoir provides a unique glimpse into the civil rights movement and the people who were forever changed by its struggle for human dignity and its vision of racial justice and equality.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Jan Honigsberg is Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco.

From the Back Cover

"This valuable document of recent history is skillfully written, with a plain eloquence. Honigsberg is especially good at rendering conditions in Louisiana in the mid-Sixties. We have precious few narratives of this sort from the civil rights period, and this one will join a small, distinguished company."―Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties

"Crossing Border Street offers a window onto the civil rights movement in the rural South during the mid-1960s and captures what it was like for a young northern volunteer to work with some of the key figures and organizations in the freedom movement in Louisiana."―Robby Cohen, New York University

“This memoir of the movement in Louisiana is a welcome addition to the literature of the civil rights struggle, serving to leaven as other memoirs have a literature too often dominated by dry, scholarly studies. The book is also welcome for the light it shines on struggles--in Louisiana in general and Bogalusa in particular--that for all their importance have been eclipsed by the attention accorded to the movement in other places.”―Doug McAdam, author of Freedom Summer

From the Inside Flap

"This valuable document of recent history is skillfully written, with a plain eloquence. Honigsberg is especially good at rendering conditions in Louisiana in the mid-Sixties. We have precious few narratives of this sort from the civil rights period, and this one will join a small, distinguished company."—Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties

"Crossing Border Street offers a window onto the civil rights movement in the rural South during the mid-1960s and captures what it was like for a young northern volunteer to work with some of the key figures and organizations in the freedom movement in Louisiana."—Robby Cohen, New York University

“This memoir of the movement in Louisiana is a welcome addition to the literature of the civil rights struggle, serving to leaven as other memoirs have a literature too often dominated by dry, scholarly studies. The book is also welcome for the light it shines on struggles--in Louisiana in general and Bogalusa in particular--that for all their importance have been eclipsed by the attention accorded to the movement in other places.”—Doug McAdam, author of Freedom Summer

Reviews

"We were doing God's work, we were on the side of the angels." In the poetic language of a starry-eyed activist, the mature Honigsberg candidly describes the passion he felt for the civil rights movement and the violent reality he witnessed in rural Louisiana during the late 1960s. Now a law professor at the University of San Francisco, Honigsberg went to New Orleans as a student to provide legal representation for civil rights workers battling Jim Crow laws. At the time, he admits, he was a bit "na?ve and perhaps even self-righteous," but he was forced to deepen his thinking when confronted with the "complex and multilayered" nature of black-white relations. Still, his fervor for social justice was never doused. Using a winning combination of vivid description and youthful musings, the author recalls the funky, sordid New Orleans nightlife, the sleepy mornings at a smalltown cafe, the hair-raising terror of close calls with the Klan and the practical wisdom of activists like Marian Wright Edelman. Sent to Bogalusa, La. (rumored to contain the largest population of Ku Klux Klan members per capita of any Southern town), the young Honigsberg encountered the little-known Deacons for Defense and Justice, who drew the wary respect of the white community as one of the first African-American organizations to forcefully retaliate against the KKK. Honigsberg's friendships with fellow activists, his reverence for the community leadership and his affection for Louisiana saturate these pages. In acknowledging how the civil rights movement changed the world and his life, Honigsberg has given the reader a glimpse of the past and a rare, remarkable book. B&w photos. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Honigsberg, a law professor, traces and reflects upon his formative years as an idealistic civil-rights worker in the South. In 1966, as a law student at New York University, he ventured into Paris, Louisiana, as a civil-rights volunteer and experienced the dangers and exhilarations of challenging the U.S. to meet its ideals. Honigsberg, a Jew, recalls the support and appreciation of his efforts by black civil-rights workers. But for those who opposed the movement, he and the other volunteers were treated as outside agitators. He also recalls a shift in sentiments within the corps of civil-rights volunteers when the movement attracted a more black nationalist element. At that point, the goal of integration took a back seat to an emphasis on black participation in the movement, creating discomfort for white volunteers. Honigsberg later shifted attention to the antiwar and peace movements, continuing his activism even today. But he recalls that it was his experience as a civil-rights worker in the South that laid the foundation for his commitment to struggles for human rights. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

University of San Francisco law professor Honigsberg recalls his 1960s self-discovery when, after his first year at New York University Law School, he went South as a civil rights worker for the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee in New Orleans. He worked in Bogalusa, near the Mississippi border, where he joined hands with the black, gun-toting Deacons for Defense and Justice as they battled the Ku Klux Klan. Looking back, Honigsberg lays bare the facts that led to such landmark laws as the 1968 right-to-jury trial decision in Duncan v. Louisiana. What he contributes mostly is a behind-the-scenes view of the daily grassroots struggle of people the national audience never heard about but who made all the difference in moving the nation along the road to ending de jure segregation. Comparable to Marvin Caplan's Farther Along: A Civil Rights Memoir (Louisiana State Univ., 1999) and a readable complement to David Halberstam's The Children (LJ 2/15/98) or Tom Dent's Southern Journey: My Return to the Civil Rights Movement (LJ 12/1/96), this is recommended for collections on law and lawyers in U.S. society, as well as civil rights, Southern, and U.S. history.DThomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520221478
• ISBN 13: 9780520221475
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192