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

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

576 pages
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Published: 1 Jan 2001
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Editions
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Details

This edition

ISBN: 9780375758812

Format: Paperback

Language: English

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Publication date: 7 January 2003

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Description

A literary anthology of important and artful interpretations of the civil rights movement and the fight against white supremacy, past and present—including pieces by Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Richard Wright, and John Lewis 

“Jon Meacham . . . has done about the best job of anthologizing the movement that I’ve ever seen.”—Tom Wicker,  Mother Jones

Editor and Pulitzer Prize–winning author 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 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 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.

This powerful anthology contains works
 
Maya Angelou • Russell Baker • James Baldwin • Taylor Branch • Hodding Carter • Ellis Cose • Stanley Crouch • Ralph Ellison • William Faulkner • Marshall Frady • Henry Louis Gates, Jr. • Peter Goldman • David Halberstam • Alex Haley • Elizabeth Hardwick • Charlayne Hunter-Gault • Murray Kempton • John Lewis • Louis E. Lomax • Benjamin E. Mays • Willie Morris • Flannery O’Connor • Walker Percy • Howell Raines • James Reston • Carl T. Rowan • John Steinbeck • William Styron • Calvin Trillin • Alice Walker • Robert Penn Warren • Pat Watters • Bernard Weinraub • Eudora Welty • Rebecca West • E. B. White • Gary Wills • Tom Wolfe • Richard Wright