Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement [Hardcover]

Jon Meacham (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 9, 2001

Voices in Our Blood is a literary anthology of the most important and artful interpretations of the civil rights movement, past and present. It showcases what forty of the nation's best writers — including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright — had to say about the central domestic drama of the American Century.

Editor Jon Meacham has chosen pieces by journalists, novelists, historians, and artists, bringing together a wide range of black and white perspectives and experiences. The result is an unprecedented and powerful portrait of the movement's spirit and struggle, told through voices that resonate with passion and strength.

Maya Angelou takes us on a poignant journey back to her childhood in the Arkansas of the 1930s. On the front page of The New York Times, James Reston marks the movement's apex as he describes what it was like to watch Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his heralded "I Have a Dream" speech in real time. Alice Walker takes up the movement's progress a decade later in her article "Choosing to Stay at Home: Ten Years After the March on Washington." And John Lewis chronicles the unimaginable courage of the ordinary African Americans who challenged the prevailing order, paid for it in blood and tears, and justly triumphed.

Voices in Our Blood is a compelling look at the movement as it actually happened, from the days leading up to World War II to the anxieties and ambiguities of this new century. The story of race in America is a never-ending one, and Voices in Our Blood tells us how we got this far—and how far we still have to go to reach the Promised Land.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The civil rights movement not only changed America for the better, it also inspired some of the nation's best writing, as the pieces collected in Voices in Our Blood illustrate. The 40 essays contained in this anthology succeed in "capturing the complications behind the public spectacles and charting the competing impulses of grace and rage--the proper province of reporting, reflection, and writing," writes editor Jon Meacham in the introduction. Many famous novelists, journalists, and poets appear in these pages--Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, William Faulkner, Rebecca West, Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty, E.B. White, Tom Wolfe--as well as many obscure writers who managed to capture moments in time for the benefit of all. All of these pieces deal with the multifaceted dimensions of America's dark history of racism and discrimination, its consequences, and, hopefully, its cure. This first major collection of enduring writing on the civil rights movement is a powerful and moving portrait that deserves to be read by all Americans. --Eugene Holley Jr.

From Publishers Weekly

To "give a flavor of what life was like" as the Civil Rights movement played itself out, Meacham, the managing editor of Newsweek, has assembled "a highly personal anthology" of "the country's best writing on the midcentury crisis." Extending far beyond the decade between Rosa Parks's bold act of resistance to the proprieties of segregation in 1955 and the landmark civil rights bills of 1965, Meacham includes some unexpected works written in the heat of the moment: Tom Wolfe's "wicked portrait of the liberal elite's fascination with the Black Panthers," Alex Haley's Playboy interview with Malcolm X and Howell Raines's memoir of his family's complex relationship with their black housekeeper. The pieces range broadly, from "the fissures between the young and the old within the black community" in the late 1950s (embodied in the relationship between Stokely Carmichael and John Kaspar), to the "cornucopia of discontent" afflicting "blacks in the 1980s and 1990s" as rendered by Ellis Cose. Mixing the work of artists and journalists, including Rebecca West, Taylor Branch, William Styron, Eudora Welty, Stanley Crouch, Elizabeth Hardwick, Alice Walker, Hodding Carter and Richard Wright, this compilation is a useful resource for tracking the daily realities of civil rights struggles. Meacham captures the movement's "complications behind the public spectacle" with immediacy, driving home the point that black and white citizens of the U.S. remain "connected by a common heritage, yet hopelessly divided by skin color." (Jan.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1 edition (January 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679462961
• ISBN-13: 978-0679462965
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,069,788 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Readable anthology, not always about the movement, January 26, 2001

By 

bleary in NYC (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement (Hardcover)

I was amazed when I first saw the contents of this anthology--had had no idea that so many big names had written about the civil rights movement. But when you actually read the anthology, a lot of these pieces, as fun as they may be to read in general, aren't really about the civil rights movement at all or only very tangentially, or are "think pieces" without much first-hand observation. The editor goes for star power over relevance. There's a Eudora Welty piece with some African-Americans in it (not sure how else it's related), a Maya Angelou memoir fragment (she reflects to a limited extent on race in her upbringing, but it's not really about civil rights), a Ralph Ellison article about Harlem (excellent writing, partly about Harlem as the place where Southern fantasies about freedom meet reality, but it's about Harlem...) Meacham deserves praise for trying to put together a literary and readable anthology--others about the movement tend to be full of "documents," sometimes boring to read, whereas this is usually entertaining. But he missed the chance to include some less well known writers who really wrote about events in the movement--Lillian Smith, Ted Poston, Robert Coles, Mike Thelwell, Gordon Parks, Paul Good, Bayard Rustin, Anne Moody...

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A classic, January 15, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement (Hardcover)

This book should be required reading in high schools and universities across the nation. Mr. Meacham has done a superb job of finding the best and most moving writings on the civil rights movement. This book is a collection of such exquisite writing - to have it all in one place is a treasure. Mr. Meacham's editing is beyond compare. I am familiar with his contributions to Newsweek and I am impressed with his work here. This book is a splendid look into our nation's history and it should not be missed.

3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Symphony, January 26, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement (Hardcover)

Jon Meachams's voices resonate like the music from a Bach chorale and transcend the whining cacophony of race baiters and hate mongers.