The Children - Hardcover

Halberstam, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679415610 ISBN 13: 9780679415619

Publisher: Random House, 1998

Synopsis

The Children is David Halberstam's brilliant and moving evocation of the early days of the civil rights movement, as seen through the story of the young people--the Children--who met in the 1960s and went on to lead the revolution.  Magisterial in scope, with a strong you-are-there quality, The Children is a story one of America's preeminent journalists has waited years to write, a powerful book about one of the most dramatic movements in American history.

They came together as part of Reverend James Lawson's workshops on nonviolence, eight idealistic black students whose families had sacrificed much so that they could go to college.  And they risked it all, and their lives besides, when they joined the growing civil rights movement.  David Halberstam shows how Martin Luther King, Jr. recruited Lawson to come to Nashville to train students in Gandhian techniques of nonviolence.  We see the strength of the families the Children came from, moving portraits of several generations of the black experience in America.  We feel Diane Nash's fear before the first  sit-in to protest segregation of Nashville lunch counters, and then we see how Diane Nash and others--John Lewis, Gloria Johnson, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, Curtis Murphy, James Bevel, Rodney Powell--persevered until they ultimately accomplished that goal.  After the sit-ins, when the Freedom Rides to desegregate interstate buses were in danger of being stopped because of violence, it was these same young people who led the bitter battle into the Deep South.  Halberstam takes us into those buses, lets us witness the violence the students encountered in Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma.  And he shows what has happened to the Children since the 1960s, as they have gone on with their lives.

The Children bears the trademark qualities that have made David Halberstam one of the leading nonfiction writers of our era.  The Children is his most personal book since The Best and the Brightest, a magnificent re-creation of a unique period in America, and of the lives of the ordinary people whose courage and vision changed history.two

About this title

Review:

Like the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, the civil rights movement has achieved mythical status in America--an epic tale of heroes and martyrs; of sacrifice, honor, and courage in the face of overwhelming odds; of ideals worth dying for in a time and place where death was an all-too-real possibility. In The Children, prize-winning journalist and author David Halberstam goes back in time to the beginnings of the civil rights movement in Nashville, Tennessee, tracing both the lives of the individuals who initiated it and the growth of the movement itself into its present-day status.

Every epic must have its hero, and The Children has James Lawson, a young, African American divinity student whose tactics in civil disobedience were learned at the knees of Mahatma Gandhi's followers during a three-year stint as a missionary to India. When he returned to the States and was accepted into the all-white Vanderbilt Divinity School, Lawson began teaching workshops to Nashville's African American youth designed to equip them for the equal-rights struggle, a battle Lawson believed could be won only with nonviolent tactics. Halberstam chronicles the fight against racism with the insight that comes from witnessing it first-hand. As a young journalist for the Tennessean in Nashville, he covered the rise of the civil rights movement, and in The Children he draws on many of his writings from the era. From accounts of lunch-counter sit-ins to the freedom rides, Halberstam's book covers the map of the crusade for racial equality, serving as a poignant reminder that heroes come in all ages, colors, and characters.

From the Back Cover:

"POWERFUL . . . TOLD WITH SUCH PASSIONATE CONVICTION THAT THE READER IS TRANSFIXED."
--The New York Times

"David Halberstam is America's Alexis de Tocqueville. . . . In The Children, he returns to his roots as a young reporter for the Nashville Tennessean, where he covered the start of the civil rights movement, the sit-ins that galvanized a generation. In following a dozen student idealists through the arc of their lives in the early 1960s to the present ambiguous moment at the end of the century, he shows how people make history and how the making of that history affects their lives. The Children is an important book, especially for today's youth, who will read in its moving and revealing pages the remarkable stories of flesh-and-blood people who were the fiber of a social movement."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"UNFORGETTABLE DRAMA . . . In Mr. Halberstam's hands, the early days of the civil-rights movement come to life as never before in print. . . . The Children has a rare power."
--The Wall Street Journal

"THE CHILDREN IS UTTERLY ABSORBING and contains some of the most moving passages Halberstam has ever written. . . . 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. . . . David Halberstam adds another with The Children."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"STIRRING . . . Within this book live stories of timeless heroism. . . . Stories so fraught with hatred and hope, violence and suffering, fear and courage, that one reads the book gripping it with both hands, almost afraid to turn the page."
--The Washington Post Book World

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679415610
• ISBN 13: 9780679415619
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 783