The Children Bob Moses Led [Paperback]

Heath (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 9, 1996

A half-fictional, half-factual chronicle of the events of Mississippi's Freedom Summer 1964 is told by a white college student who joins a revolutionary group and the leader of a civil rights project for youth. Reprint. Tour. IP.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A powerful book, The Children Bob Moses Led proves wonderfully reminiscent of that long-gone time when it really seemed as if blacks and whites would walk hand-in-hand and change America. Bob Moses, one of the heroes of the civil rights movement, lead a drive in the summer of 1964 in rural Mississippi to register blacks to vote. He appears as a major character in William Heath's novel, the story of the Mississippi Summer Project and of the growing awareness of Tom Morton, a white college student who volunteers to go south to help register voters. The novel opens with Morton working as a counselor at a summer tennis camp, where he learns that his girlfriend is leaving him to join the Peace Corps. At the end of the summer, Morton decides not to go to graduate school, but to join the movement. At that point the novel switches points of view to Moses, who, working in Atlanta for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, understands he must go to Mississippi to lead the drive.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions; 1st Edition edition (December 9, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571310126
• ISBN-13: 978-1571310125
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,639,232 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fact & fiction blend to tell the story of Freedom Summer., October 9, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Children Bob Moses Led (Paperback)

While some novels based on historical events use history as cheap background scenery or read like textbooks with dialogue, William Heath's novel rises above such pitfalls and vividly recreates Freedom Summer 1964--one of America's most crucial domestic episodes.

After attending an orientation session in Oxford, Ohio, idealistic college students from across the country headed south to Mississippi to help Bob Moses register black voters. The Children Bob Moses Led reminds us how far the country has come in the civil rights struggle, and how much work remains.

Reminiscent of All the King's Men in its ambition and political scope, the novel is narrated by Bob Moses, the charismatic leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Conference, and Tom Morton, a white college student who desires to become "his own contemporary'' by contributing to social change. Thoughtful and restrained, Moses is a brilliant political organizer with gentle courage and great moral integrity.

Bob Moses is real, and the novel reconstructs his powerful presence and passionate leadership that inspired people such as Morton to put their lives on the line. Heath is adept at making a real-life (and still living) Moses a credible first-person narrator.

Morton and other volunteers travel to the Delta, where they find a frightening and unfamiliar Southern landscape where whites maintain superiority with guns and scare tactics. Morton and his friends go to the homes of blacks to persuade them to register to vote. The mission of the Mississippi Summer Project was to help blacks see that gaining the power of the vote would empower them to change discriminatory laws. The volunteers soon learn how challenging it will be to find people brave enough to stand up against the threat of violence.

Chilling death threats and mob violence instill terror in both black and white volunteers. Despite the dangers, Tom Morton moves in with a black family and begins to teach black children in a Freedom School. Morton's students are so used to being put down by whites that they are amazed at his egalitarian ideals.

Rural Mississippi is a lonely, frightening place for Morton, and the temptation to take the next bus out of town grows stronger each day as he faces intimidation and beatings. Morton begins to question his role in the project as he measures himself againt the legendary Bob Moses. Amid the chaotic scene of a country divided by race, he wrestles with puzzling questions as he comes to grips with his fear.

Heath's novel is populated by both real (Moses) and fictitious (Morton) characters, but the events are historically accurate. Like Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel views the past with a critical eye, blending real events and public figures with representative characters who live through the most difficult of times.

The Children Bob Moses Led is not only the first major novel to deal with the complex politics of Freedom Summer and the dissolution of the civil rights coalition, it is also one of the few novels on any subject that actually shows how people voted and what they stood for.

Engaging and suspenseful, this is contemporary fiction at its best, and is sure to find its way into college courses on the '60s and the civil rights movement. Readers too young to remember Bob Moses and his work will find Bob Moses an enigmatic, admirable hero. Those who do remember his work will miss him.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An important and entertaining read!, July 28, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Children Bob Moses Led (Paperback)

This is a sad, serious, important book. The action of the novel revolves around the soft-spoken Bob Moses, whose quiet courage inspires everyone who follows him. These followers are mostly young, white college kids with idealistic dreams of changing an unjust South. Every character learns a lesson by the end of this book, and I did too. I recommend this for people who liked A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines.

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book, May 9, 2011

By 

P.Andrews - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Children Bob Moses Led (Paperback)

The Children Bob Moses Led is an excellent, extremely well told account of the Mississippi Freedom Summer project held in 1964. Author William Heath inventively uses two narrators to tell this important chapter in the Civil Rights story, Bob Moses himself, the real-life African American leader of the movement, and Tom Morton, a white middle-class volunteer with all the anxieties, short comings, and mixed motives one might expect from a recent college graduate from a fairly privileged background. While both accounts are fictionalized, Heath has clearly researched every aspect of Freedom Summer. Moses emerges as a deeply thoughtful, philosophically informed, yet practically oriented leader, who energizes his followers from the grass roots up, but who heavily assumes the moral complexities and emotional burdens of putting both local African Americans and summer volunteers in extreme danger. Morton, who at the beginning of the book admits he is a "stranger to himself" who is "auditioning identities," idolizes Moses and grows in his conviction, but must confront the unfamiliarity of rural African American life and religion, various levels of white racism and violence, as well as interracial relationships and racial tensions between volunteers. He experiences the tedium, petty animosities, and small triumphs of the field worker but also encounters inspirational figures and witnesses major events in the Civil Rights struggle. Heath may be at his best when he describes the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, where the summer volunteers hoped to crack the mainstream party and force it to confront its own hypocrisy. White politicos sought to sweep the Civil Rights issue under the rug by fashioning a weak compromise. The Civil Rights workers reject this offer in disillusionment and bitterness, and Heath suggests that this event marks a turning point in the 1960s, when idealistic unity gave place to divisiveness and frustration. The Children Bob Moses Led charts this territory extremely well, but also manages to explain the historic significance and lasting achievement of the struggle. This book explains complex and important events in the Civil Rights movement in a very engaging narrative, and for that reason it should be essential reading for all who wish to learn about the movement from the point of view of its participants.