Volume 45, Number 11 · June 25, 1998
Those Were the Days
By Garry Wills
The Children
by David Halberstam
Random House, 783 pp., $29.95
Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement
by John Lewis, with Michael D'Orso
Simon and Schuster, 496 pp., $26.00
It was lucky for David Halberstam, for the civil rights movement, and for all of us that Halberstam became a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean in 1956. Just a year out of Harvard, he was given a front-row seat for one of the most significant of the early struggles against America's apartheid. The Nashville sit-ins of 1960 were not the first ones (the honor for that goes to four college students in Greensboro, North Carolina), but they were the most thoroughly prepared and skillfully conducted. Those who defied the local power structure knew very well what they were risking. For a year they had undergone spiritual exercises under the guidance of a thirty-one-year-old Gandhian, James Lawson, who had served prison time as a conscientious objector during the Korean War and studied nonviolence for three years in India.
Review, 2451 words
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