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

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Alice Walker, Richard Wright, and John Lewis Editor Jon Meacham has chosen pieces by journalists, novelists, historians, and artists, bringing together a wide range of perspectives and experiences. The result is an unprecedented and powerful portrait of the movements 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 movements apex as he describes what it was like to watch Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his heralded I Have a Dreamspeech in real time. Alice Walker takes up the movements 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 farand how far we still have to go to reach the Promised Land.Praise for Voices in Our BloodJon Meacham . . . has done about the best job of anthologizing the movement that Ive ever seen.Tom Wicker,Mother Jones Compelling . . . Acting as a maestro for an orchestra of gifted writers, Meacham succeeds at transporting the reader to the confused heart of American race relations, down to the core of the misunderstandings, the invitations to hate, and the violence.Juan Williams, The Washington Monthly A collection of first-rate writings by gifted authors on Americas struggle for racial justice.James Ralph, Chicago Tribune The writing in this collection sparkles.Robert Joiner, St. Louis Post-Dispatch