Volume 27, Number 9 · May 29, 1980
Black Power Now
By Marshall Frady
Out beyond the South's glassy-towered Everycities of Atlanta and Columbia and Jackson, the piney flatlands cluttered with stale little towns still look much as they did during the storms of the civil rights movement in the Sixties, as if these reaches were suspended in another, static field of time. In early April, some fifteen years after covering the courthouse confrontations and scattered savageries of that theatrical period, and with a presidential battle impending between Ronald Reagan and this region's own Jimmy Carter, I set out on a return passage through those landscapes, ranging from South Carolina to Mississippi, to visit with black community leaders in order to sound out their mood after the great political windfall their people provided Carter four years ago. What unfolded was a curious and unsettling manifestation of the caprices and ambivalences of American politics.
Feature, 5118 words
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