Volume 3, Number 4 · October 8, 1964
Race
By Robert Penn Warren
Crisis in Black and White
by Charles E. Silberman
Random House, 358 pp., $5.95
The New Equality
by Nat Hentoff
Viking, 256 pp., $4.95
White and Black: Test of a Nation
by Samuel Lubell
Harper & Row, 178 pp., $3.50
Why We Can't Wait
by Martin Luther King
Harper Row, 178 pp., $3.50
To Be Equal
by Whitney Young
McGraw-Hill, 254 pp., $5.00
Here are five books on the race crisis in the United States. None of these books will make a man turn over and sink his head into the pilow. Crisis in Black and White, by Charles E. Silberman, a trained social scientist and an editor of Fortune Magazine, and The New Equality, by Nat Hentoff, an expert on jazz and a staff writer for The New Yorker, are remarkably good books, deeply thought and deeply felt, informed, wideranging, candid, sometimes witty, written with flair. Both books have the rare virtue of detachment, but neither writer would see detachment as an antithesis, logical or emotional, of commitment. Both would hold that integration is, in Silberman's phrase, 'the greatest moral imperative of our time.' Both books are careful studies of the meaning of the Negro Revolution, and as such may serve as a natural backdrop for the more specialized books which are appearing almost daily.
Review, 4499 words
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