Synopsis
The highest black elected official in America, the congressman looks back on his life from his childhood on a Alabama cotton farm to his fight for civil rights, to his enduring commitment to the ideals of Martin Luther King, Jr. 35,000 first printing.
Reviews
YA-Lewis was active in the American civil rights movement almost from the beginning. He was there during the lunch-counter sit-ins in Nashville in 1960, took part in the Freedom Rides of 1961, and, as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, spoke at the March on Washington in 1963. The list goes on. Like all memoirs, this one has its biases and limitations. However, for the insider's insights it provides, it is an indispensable resource.
Pamela B. Rearden, Centreville Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Lewis, an Alabama sharecropper's son, went to Nashville to attend a Baptist college where, at the end of the 1950s, his life and the new civil rights movement became inexorably entwined. First came the lunch counter sit-ins; then the Freedom Rides; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Lewis's election to its chairmanship; the voter registration drives; the 1963 march on Washington; the Birmingham church bombings; the murders during the Freedom Summer; the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; Bloody Sunday in Selma in 1964; and the march on Montgomery. Lewis was an active, leading member during all of it. Much of his account, written with freelancer D'Orso, covers the same territory as David Halberstam's The Children?Halberstam himself appears here briefly as a young reporter?but Lewis imbues it with his own observations as a participant. He is at times so self-effacing in this memoir that he underplays his role in the events he helped create. But he has a sharp eye, and his account of Selma and the march that followed is vivid and personal?he describes the rivalries within the movement as well as the enemies outside. After being forced out of SNCC because of internal politics, Lewis served in President Carter's domestic peace corps, dabbled in local Georgia politics, then in 1986 defeated his old friend Julian Bond in a race for Congress, where he still serves. Lewis notes that people often take his quietness for meekness. His book, a uniquely well-told testimony by an eyewitness, makes clear that such an impression is entirely inaccurate.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Georgia congressman Lewis (with journalist D'Orso's help) crafts a passionate, principled, and absorbing first-person account of the civil-rights movementdramatic, well-paced history fired by moral purpose and backed by the authority of hard time in the trenches. Lewis's childhood was the quintessence of post-Reconstruction southern black life. This son of Alabama sharecroppers grew up in a rural shotgun shack, picked cotton, matriculated in a tumbledown one-room schoolhouse, and faced Jim Crow segregation on every trip to town. His adulthood is the quintessence of the struggle to break that oppression. Lewis's itinerary during the civil- rights movement reads like a highlight of its most significant moments. You name it, he was there: launching the nonviolent student protest movement at the Nashville sit-ins, Freedom Riding through the Deep South, delivering the March on Washington's most controversial speech, serving time in Mississippi's infamously brutal Parchman prison, organizing the voter registration drive that brought Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney to Mississippi, marching in Birmingham in 1963 and Selma in 1965. Lewis served as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and his analysis of rivalries between SNCC and the more mainstream, bourgeois Southern Christian Leadership Conference (headed by Martin Luther King) and his candid assessment of notable players (King, Stokely Carmichael, Julian Bond) serve as reminders of the movement's complexity. Gut-wrenching firsthand descriptions revisit the appalling brutality endured by demonstrators (Lewis suffered a fractured skull leading marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday). He memorializes not only the drama, but the patience and steely courage of ``the days and days of uneventful protest'' that laid the groundwork for big developmentsand that risk being overlooked now. Lewis's faith in Gandhian nonviolent resistance is unshakable, as is his devotion to King and to the thousands of working-class blacks who risked their lives confronting southern tyranny. A classic, invaluable blockbuster history of the civil-rights movement. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
The memoirs of Lewis, an African American congressman from Georgia, emphasize his participation in the stirring days of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, when the author served as national chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and held leadership positions in other Civil Rights organizations. The most valuable portions of his memoirs examine his involvement in the dramatic sit-ins in Nashville in 1960. Many of the local college students who organized these sit-ins became, like Lewis, important leaders in the Civil Rights Movement throughout the remainder of the decade. Lewis and other youthful veterans of the Nashville protests were frequent and very visible participants in demonstrations that made them targets of physical violence (e.g., the Freedom Rides of 1961). Yet Lewis, despite all he's seen, remains a supporter of nonviolence as an effective and moral approach to change. Complementing David Halberstam's The Children (LJ 2/15/98), this book is recommended for the Civil Rights collections of all public and academic libraries.AThomas H. Ferrell, Univ. of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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