Customer Reviews

Freedom Bound: A History of America's Civil Rights Movement

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Freedom Bound begins in earnest with the Greensboro sit-ins of 1960 and terminates with the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency. It makes the most of its relative brevity (317 pages of close type), at least touching on most everything relevant, large and small, and discussing in depth the most important developments in the black freedom struggle through the late 1980s. Much of the book deals with the decline in the fortunes of the revolution in the months and years following the passage of the Voting Rights Act, as its focus shifted from the securement of civil rights to the securement of economic justice.

Robert Weisbrot's insights are many, and they are unfailingly brilliant, even thunderstriking. They are conveyed in crystal clear and often quite elegant prose. Weisbrot's tone is even, yet profoundly empathetic.

I would highly recommend Freedom Bound to anyone seeking a masterful single-volume overview of or introduction to the movement for civil rights and beyond.

(One caveat: David Garrow, in an otherwise glowing review of Freedom Bound in the December 17, 1989 New York Times, claims that "in his accounts of the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City and the 1966 Chicago freedom movement negotiations between [Martin Luther] King and Mayor Richard J. Daley . . . , Weisbrot err[s] seriously by relying excessively on single sources." Garrow fails to specify what exactly Weisbrot gets wrong, however. The only mistakes I detected were a slightly mangled but still fundamentally accurate quote, and a misspelled surname.)