Freedom Bound: A History of America's Civil Rights Movement

Traces the history of the Civil Rights movement, tells the stories of ordinary people as well as leaders, and looks at new directions for Black political expression

YA-- Where Weisbrodt offers a scan of many years of the civil rights movement, Seeger and Reiser focus on the people involved and the songs that heartened them. From Montgomery in 1955 to Memphis in 1968, they show the southern campaign from the inside. The words of such people as Bob Moses and Rosa Parks, Dorothy Cotton and Bob Zellner give a sense of what it was like to be part of an exciting and dangerous movement. Photos add immediacy to a work that colors the history of an important time. Weisbrodt offers a comprehensive overview of the movement, from the first sit-ins of 1959 through the Reagan years. In chronological fashion, he documents the growth of the movement through the organizations and individuals involved, its struggles in both the South and the North, the reactions to it, its policical victories and failures, and the factionalism and bitterness of its later years. A useful final chapter summarizes both gains and losses as they are visible in the 1980s. --Sally Bates, Houston Public Library
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In an invaluable, fast-paced chronicle that throws three decades of civil rights struggles into sharp perspective, Weisbrot ( Father Divine and the Struggle for Racial Equality ) argues that the coalition forged by blacks and liberal whites in the 1960s fomented only a self-limited revolution. It abolished formal barriers to equality, he notes, but left intact the basic features of a system that confines blacks to a subordinate or marginal role. The author charts a movement beset by racism and indifference, from the early sit-ins and boycotts, through "black power" and the waves of mass protest, to today's federal retrenchment on protection of civil rights. Weisbrot maintains that mainstream groups such as CORE failed to win a broad base of support, while black separatists offered no vehicles for transforming social and economic conditions. He further establishes that blacks have been disproportionately hurt by Reagan's domestic policies. Photos.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.