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Memories of the Civil Rights Movement
A Review Essay of The Children by David Halberstam. Random House, 1998 by Frances Jones-Sneed A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community . . . this participation is a natural one in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. Places, and particularly home, are seen, therefore, as the foundation of our identity. Given the acceptance of place as important, a sense of place is seen as a necessary feature of individual identity. (Weil, p. 72)David Halberstam's recent work, The Children, demonstrates why he is a Pulitzer Prize winning author. In fact, this book is Halberstam's nostalgic journey back to the beginning of his journalistic career in the South. During the Civil Rights Movement he became accustomed to covering the topics that became front-page headlines. Later, he would win the Pulitzer prize for covering the Vietnam war. It was, however, the coverage of the sixties' movement in the South that was at the heart of |
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Halberstam's journey toward the prize-winning
journalist he is today.
This book reads like the reminiscences of a prodigal son who returns home after a long absence. Halberstam tells the story of eight people that he first met in Nashville, Tennessee, in the early sixties--young African-Americans from all over the country who would by their actions change forever the relationship between blacks and whites in the South. They were only a few years younger than Halberstam and from the beginning their dedication and commitment awed him. This book demonstrates that he is still impressed by their commitment. These relationships form the core of the stories told in the book. To explain the magnitude of the changes that took place in the South in the sixties, Halberstam begins by providing background information on each of the eight people. The South serves as a backdrop for social change. It is the central place that cements these people and their story of struggle and commitment. The South is one of those places that evoke memories of a base upon which millions of humans were set down to realize their possibilities. It became a place from which to discover the world, a destination to which they could return. (Relph, p. 27) The South served as a home for Africans when they were first brought to this country as slaves. Even in the face of unequal treatment after slavery, blacks remained in the South through the height of the Civil Rights Movement. The South became a battleground in the |
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nineteenth century and again in the twentieth
century--both periods centered on equal rights for blacks.
African-Americans understood the drawbacks of the South as a place to live, yet still chose to live there. Indeed, even those who discount the theory of African survivals will attest to the fact that Africans were torn from their social, economic, and cultural place and brought to this country as unwilling workers. Their seasoning or acculturation to America came early. This foreign place was not easy for them because they were also separated from their families and all semblance of their culture, yet few documents that detail this loss exist. The few records that remain detail that they did miss their homeland (Africa) as other humans would under similar situations. They also understood that their memories of home had to be preserved in order for them to survive in the new world. They adopted the South as their new home and invested all of their energy into making it a place to live. After slavery, many southern blacks decided to migrate north because many things about the South, such as crop failures, illnesses, unequal treatment, injustices, harassment and the inequities of tenant farming made it difficult for them to stay. Despite these inequities most African-Americans stayed in the South. It is difficult to understand blacks' deep attachment to the South. One explanation is offered by a former Virginia slave who said: "I |
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been here a long time, and I ain't tired of
staying." (Sobel, p. 95) After all, it was their home, the place that they
knew best and the only place most had lived. Many ex-slaves moved around
after the Civil War but most stayed close to what they called their "homeplace"
in the South. "Slaves . . . were outside the system of landownership. They
were on the land, tilled the land, and were generally given private gardens
to cultivate to supplement their food, but the land did not belong to them
legally." (Sobel, p. 95) The same was true after emancipation but southern
blacks had a spiritual attachment to the southern land. They believed that
humans could not really own land because, in a spiritual sense, only God
owned land and humans were only temporary caretakers. These legal and religious
complications did not cloud blacks' sense of spiritual and physical attachment
to the South. Those who migrated to the north or west still remembered
it and visited it and sent their children back to get to know it.
In the sixties the South became a staging ground for hundreds of young people who had never been in the South. It became a better place to live for those who lived there and it became a place of hope for those who had left it behind. After the Civil Rights Movement, every American could value the South not for the place it was but for what it promised to be. The young blacks that Halberstam writes about were excited by these possibilities. The South was a good place to claim as home because if the South could be changed then so could the nation. The South became a place where people exhibited great courage and a place where the |
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American experiment of freedom was once again
tested after a hundred years.
Diane Nash is one of the eight people that David Halberstam writes about in his book. He introduces us to just eight out of the hundreds of young people who asked, "what can I do?" They were important in redeeming the South for anyone who claimed it as a home. It is a book that confirms that ordinary people were at the heart of the Movement. He writes, "I can think of no occasion in recent postwar American history when there has been so shining an example of democracy at work because of the courage and nobility of ordinary people." (Halberstam, p. 7) This was a time when African-Americans and their allies changed the
face of the South. When one thinks of the South in contemporary society,
one name emerges: Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet the story of the sixties
and what became known as the "Movement" was much more than Martin Luther
King's story. As Diane Nash states, "If people think that it was
Martin Luther King's movement, then today the young people are more likely
to say, "Gosh, I wish we had a Martin Luther King here today to lead us."
If people knew how that movement started, then the question they would
ask themselves is, "what can I do?" (Garrow, p. 3)
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their own brand of activism. Although it was
a time of change, courage and vision it has also become an often romanticized
and exploited time. Halberstam's sweeping saga does not just dabble in
sixties folklore--it is the real stuff. He was there as a young journalist
to witness the beginning of something historic. Although he was there as
an eyewitness to these events, his emphasis is on the story of the activists
because he convinces the reader that they were the important ingredients
that changed the South and the country. So The Children is as much Halberstam's
memoir as it is about the eight activists he covers.
At first glance it is reminiscent of Howard Zinn's SNCC: The New Abolitionists, the first history of the group of young college students who would change the face of the South. Zinn's book was more about the organization of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and how it developed from its beginnings as a student arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1960 through its maturing years in 1964. Halberstam's book is about one contingent of that organization, the Nashville group--how they evolved as leaders of the movement, how they merged with other groups and how they have fared since their days of glory. Halberstam has entitled his book The Children because of the relatively young ages of the participants--all of them were under thirty. Yet the young people who joined the Movement after this first heady period thought of these people as heroes and some |
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even thought of King as the grand old man. The
people that Halberstam writes about set the stage for others to discuss
the cultural and political issues of the time. After the sit-ins, the freedom
rides, the voter registration drives and the protest of the Vietnam War,
what was left for future activists?
By the summer of 1966 the Movement as Halberstam describes it was almost over: the philosophy of non-violent protest was being questioned within the organizations that cooperated for the major changes of the sixties, and many hard-won alliances were irretrievably broken. The summer of 1966 was the beginning of the end of the first phase of the Movement. It was the year that John Lewis stepped down from the chairmanship of SNCC and was replaced by the more radical Stokely Carmichael. It was the year that "black and white together," one of the lines from the old spiritual "We Shall Overcome," was ridiculed. It was the beginning of the movement called "Black Power" and black cultural nationalism was in vogue. Indeed, Halberstam has captured a precious time of hope and commitment that may never be repeated. He has explained what the heart of the Movement was all about: Young, bright, often-naive young people who had the faith and courage that by their sheer will they could change a world. Halberstam writes about that time: "The journey they were beginning had started with a limited enough objective: an assault on the segregated lunch counters in Nashville. As that assault grew it created among these |
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young people its own new equation: Each victory
they gained demanded a further step; the totality of segregation as it
existed in the American South." (Halberstam, p. 8)
A reader interested in this time period will find this book worth reading because of the various themes that are explored. One of the major themes of Halberstam's book is about unrewarded sacrifice. Nowhere is that theme more evident than in the story of Diane Nash. Her story is especially compelling because she and other early leaders of the Movement became role models for younger blacks in the South and the North. Nash's leadership of the Nashville group in the sit-ins became well-known lore of the Movement. Diane Nash led the Nashville Group to victory. The group desegregated the Nashville lunch counters when Diane debated the local mayor on the court house steps. John Lewis remembered that day vividly: "Diane's performance had been nothing less than brilliant. She had managed to get the mayor to move past his politics to the very core of his humanity." (Halberstam, p. 237) When a number of student groups across the south came together to form SNCC it was naturally believed that Nash would be selected as the chairperson, but she was not; Marion Barry was. The reasons for this are varied, ranging from Nash's reluctance to attract attention to herself as well as problems about her gender. "Diane was a woman, and there was some sensitivity to that. The |
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Movement always had a powerful undercurrent
of male chauvinism, and it was believed by some of her friends that this
worked against her." (Halberstam, p. 219)
In a later interview Nash did not seem to regret not being chosen chairperson. She continued her work with the group because the Movement, in Nash's estimation, was always more important than any one person's ego. Rather, it was the betrayal of the personal relationship that she forged with fellow activist and later husband James Bevel that seemed more important to her. She recalled: "I was the sole support of our family because my former husband, the children's father, decided that he did not want to hold a job." (Halberstam, p. 533) She admired him for his commitment to the Movement; he was a brilliant man, but he failed to see that he also had a commitment to support his children. This failure of the extension of freedom into their own personal relationship and Bevel's relationship with his children haunted Diane Nash. After all, were not their children inheritors of this hard-won freedom? Should they not have the benefit of a loving supportive father? Were not the same moral standards that they implored white America to adhere to also the same principles that Bevel should follow? Halberstam's book reads like a bold saga of people's triumphs and failures, and because Halberstam is a skilled storyteller the reader is caught up in the story. Diane Nash's story captures our imagination because hers is a story of success, failure and |
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resignation that anyone would find hard not
to comprehend. Nash--a northerner, beauty queen finalist, smart, savvy,
committed to the Movement--ends up struggling to rear two children alone
without the benefit of an education. After one completes this saga it is
not pity one feels for Diane Nash but tremendous respect. She was perhaps
less successful, financially, than her other better-known colleagues. John
Lewis is now a Member of Congress; Marion Barry, the former Mayor of Washington,
D.C.; Bernard Lafayette, holder of a Harvard doctorate, heads up
his former seminary; Rodney Powell and Gloria Johnson, married and
divorced, became medical doctors; and Curtis Murphy became a high school
principal. (Halberstam, p. 719) Yet it is Nash who on the thirty-fifth
anniversary of that event was the essence of the group when she stood up
to the Mayor of Nashville and further it was Nash who summarized what those
years had been about for the group. At the anniversary "she had spoken
not so much for herself on that day when she confronted Ben West, she said,
but for all of her colleagues in the Movement, and perhaps even more, for
all of those black people who had gone before and who had never been given
a chance to speak or who had never been listened to." (Halberstam, p. 719)
Halberstam asked Diane Nash whether the times made people act in extraordinary ways or whether it was extraordinary people that made extraordinary times? Her answer was that extraordinary times make extraordinary people. They were just people who were in the right place at the right time. The children of |
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Halberstam's book are ordinary people who have
paid a high price for the freedom of a generation of black and white Americans.
Halberstam's book gives me a chance to ponder my identity, my place in
America, a chance to reminisce about from whence I came. It gives me a
chance to call myself a southerner, a Mississippian, an African-American,
a woman who has benefited from their sacrifices to be free enough to claim
any place I wish as home. The story of these people gives us all the chance
to know that we can be extraordinary people if we make similar commitments
in our own lives and dare to ask the question that Diane Nash posed: "What
can I do?"
WORKS CITED Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow, 1986. Relph, Edward. "Geographical Experiences and Being-in-the-world: The Phenomenological Origins of Geography," in David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer, eds. Dwelling, Places and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Sobel, Mechal. The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987. |
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Weil, Simone. The Need for
Roots, Boston: Beacon Press, 1955, p. 53 quoted in John Eyles, Senses
of Place, Cheshire, England: Silverbrook Press, 1985.
Zinn, Howard. SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. |