In a new book, Andrew B. Lewis follows the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee and its leaders from Nashville's north side
into the heart of Dixie
http://www.nashvillescene.com/2009-12-10/arts/in-a-new-book-andrew-b-lewis-follows-the-student-nonviolent-coordinating-committee-and-its-leaders-from-nashville-s-north-side-into-the-heart-of-dixie/
By Lyda Phillips
December 09, 2009
Nashville's north side had it all going on in the late 1950s.
Jefferson Street was jumping with students from Fisk, Meharry Medical
College, Tennessee State and American Baptist Theological College.
The clubs along the strip between Fisk and TSU were packed with kids
out to hear Jimi Hendrix, Little Richard, Tina Turner and Ray
Charles. The postwar economic boom had brought new prosperity to the
entire country, and teenagers, black and white, bopped to the beat,
self-identifying as part of a new, hipper culture.
In that electric atmosphere, a group of earnest and thoughtful
Nashville students became leaders in one of history's most
impressive苔nd successful衫ass movements, as they threw their bodies,
their very lives, on the line to end segregation in the South. The
Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights
Generation by Andrew B. Lewis is a new look at this era, examined
through the lens of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and
its leaders胖iane Nash, John Lewis, Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael,
Marion Barry, Bob Zellner and Julian Bond.
Nash, Lewis and Barry, all students in Nashville, were present when
the SNCC was created in April 1960 to coordinate and broaden the
massive civil disobedience that began in February 1960 with
lunch-counter sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C., and a few weeks later in
Nashville. The Nashville students were nicknamed the "seminarians" by
others in the SNCC, notes the author (who is not related to John
Lewis). Trained by Jim Lawson, a Vanderbilt divinity student, they
viewed the struggle as essentially moral rather than political.
Believing in the power of redemption, they were convinced the
protesters' sacrifice would move the hearts of observers, shame even
arch-segregationists, and thereby heal a broken society.
By contrast, Carmichael, who grew up in an Italian neighborhood of
the Bronx and took the subway to Harlem to get his hair cut in a
proper black barbershop, and Julian Bond, the son of academics and
the only black student in his Pennsylvania prep school, both saw the
struggle in more political rather than redemptive terms. Over the
long years of grueling field work in difficult and dangerous
conditions, that ideological split was the drop of difference that
poisoned the communal water, Lewis concludes.
Lewis meticulously traces the path SNCC activists followed苯rom lunch
counters in 1960, to segregated bus waiting rooms during the 1961
Freedom Rides, to voter registration drives in Macomb, Miss., and
Albany, Ga., in 1961 and 1962, through the Birmingham children's
marches in 1963 and the deadly Freedom Summer of 1964. They refused
bail when they were arrested, read Gandhi and sang freedom songs in
their jail cells, and manned new WATS lines 24/7 to respond to calls
for help from the field. They endured brutal beatings, even murder,
but invariably countered abuse, attack and arrest by throwing even
more bodies into the fray. One of their favorite catchphrases: "Where
is your body?"
Lewis credits the youthful energy of the SNCC leaders with driving
the civil rights movement further and faster than their elders would
ever have dreamed or dared. Quoting one SNCC organizer, Lewis notes
that Martin Luther King Jr., whom he portrays as distant from the
ground war, couldn't "let a SNCC person be more willing to go to jail
than himself." Self-aggrandizing and overly cautious, King wavered
from the open confrontations SNCC activists forced upon him, up to
and including the bloody March 1965 confrontation on the Edmund
Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.
Within the SNCC itself, Lewis maintains that the fatal rift opened in
1966 when an all-night power struggle at an SNCC retreat ended with
John Lewis ousted as president and Stokely Carmichael in charge.
Within weeks Carmichael stepped up on a Civil War monument in
Greenwood, Miss., and espoused Black Power, and the unraveling of the
SNCC as a unified activist organization began. Lewis details the
disillusionment, anguish and severe depression many of the SNCC's
most dedicated members suffered in the aftermath of Carmichael's苔nd
then H. Rap Brown's負erm as head of the group. Bob Moses "once said
that time in the movement was compressed and that one month of
Mississippi time was like a year of real time," Lewis writes.
"Movement time was catching up with SNCC."
He follows the core group through the shadows and then finally out
the other side. Carmichael spent nearly his whole life in Africa.
Nash drifted back to her hometown of Chicago and lived with her two
children after her marriage to fellow Nashville SNCC member James
Bevel collapsed. She was rescued from obscurity when PBS featured her
in its Eyes on the Prize documentary. To avoid the draft, Bob Moses
fled the United States, first to Canada and then to Tanzania, where
he lived until President Carter offered amnesty to Vietnam-era draft dodgers.
Lewis, Barry and Bond, of course, successfully turned to politics.
Author Lewis focuses closely on the bitter 1986 Georgia congressional
race between John Lewis and Bond, with whom the author has a personal
friendship. (Lewis also co-authored Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table: A
Documentary History of the Civil Rights Movement with Bond.) He
repeatedly jabs Lewis' mythic reputation with darts about his
oversensitivity, ambition and jealousy. This animus toward Lewis and
King somewhat mars the credibility of the narrative, especially since
John Lewis' name is missing from the list of former SNCC members that
he interviewed.
The Shadow of Youth lacks the immediacy and narrative sweep of David
Halberstam's The Children, which follows the same players through the
same events, many of which Halberstam witnessed as a reporter for The
Tennessean. And unlike Taylor Branch's trilogy on the civil rights
era, which lionizes King, Lewis focuses instead on the young
activists and the way the early rush of triumph and sacrifice at the
SNCC affected the rest of their lives. Still, Lewis' writing is both
moving and meticulous, although not academic, in detailing the
profound influence this band of brothers and sisters had on the civil
rights movement. On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the
lunch-counter sit-ins, his revisiting of the people and events of
that time is welcome, though it's a shame the publisher failed to
include historical photographs.
The trip the SNCC founders took, from the early "freedom highs" when
"the civil rights movement tapped the energies負he careless
expectations and raw idealism觔f its own youth" to maturation and
middle age, is a classic cycle of youthful hope turning to
disillusionment. Wisely, Lewis takes their stories through the
shadows cast by their youthful experiences into the years of their
renewed influence, wisdom and acceptance. He narrates this journey
with clarity and passion: "How this ragtag band with little money, no
obvious power, painfully little help from the federal government, and
the entire white South out to get them, played a starring role in the
demise of legal segregation is one of the great adventure stories of
American history."
.
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