Synopsis:
Drawing on interviews with blacks, whites, segregationists, civil rights workers, and others, a look back at the civil rights movement and its implications examines its impact on American life and society, as well as its personal role in the author's own life. Tour.
Review:
In January 1991, Tom Dent began a journey that would take him through the South United States, visiting cities and towns that had been significant during the Civil Rights Movement. He began in Greensboro, North Carolina, where sit-ins at a Woolworth's lunch counter in the 1960 helped spark black protest against segregation, and ended in November in Mayersville, Mississippi, a town of just 475. Dent's fascinating journey takes place mostly on the back roads and state highways and, for the most part, he talks to ordinary folks who played vital roles in the Civil Rights Movement, but whose names will probably be lost to history. One of those was Unita Blackwell, who in the 1960s tried to register to vote in Mississippi and was told she would never work again. When Dent visited her, she was mayor of Mayersville, and she assessed the changes she'd seen this way: "I suppose what we really gained is the knowledge that we struggled to make this a decent society, because it wasn't. And maybe it still isn't now, but at least we tried."
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