Volume 43, Number 14 · September 19, 1996
A Tale of Three Leaders
By Garry Wills
An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America
by Andrew Young
HarperCollins, 560 pp., $27.50
Prophet of Rage: A Life of Louis Farrakhan and His Nation
by Arthur J. Magida
BasicBooks, 264 pp., $25.00
In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam
by Mattias Gardell
Duke University Press, 520 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson
by Marshall Frady
Random House, 552 pp., $28.50
Despite their boyish appearance, Andrew Young and Louis Farrakhan are now in their sixties (sixty-four and sixty-three respectively). Jesse Jackson is younger (fifty-five), but all three are transition figures, brought up before that great divide, the 1960s civil rights movement, and surviving after many of their contemporaries in the black leadership have been killed or gone dissolute or faded from memory. Too young to serve in World War II, all three were exempted by religious ministry from the Korean and Vietnam wars. Their war has been the black struggle for justice.
Review, 10443 words
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