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America's Second Civil War
| Article
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19745 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
1,882 Words |
| Author
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Arnold H. Taylor
Arnold H. Taylor, professor of history at Howard University,
is the author of Travail and Triumph; Black Life and Culture
in the South Since the Civil War (Greenwood Press, 1976) and
American Diplomacy and the Narcotics Traffic, 1900-1939 (Duke
University Press, 1969). |
FREE AT LAST?
The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It
Fred Powledge
Boston: Little, Brown, 1991
687 pp., $27.95
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s may be perceived, in several respects, as America's second civil war. Although the political and physical structure of the Union was not at stake, in forcing Americans to confront again the issue of black oppression, the movement challenged them to assess, as in the 1860s, what the Union really meant in their hearts and minds. The need to revisit the issue in the 1950s and 1960s clearly indicated that the first civil war, despite the subsequent passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, ultimately had left the question unresolved.
In Free at Last? Fred Powledge, a white native southern journalist who covered the Civil Rights Movement for the Atlanta Journal and the New York Times adds detail and his own perspectives to what is now a fairly well-known story. Of particular interest are his profiles of the activities of lesser-known activists and excerpts from postmovement interviews with both movement participants and adversaries. While he does not employ the Civil War metaphor as an interpretative framework, the story he tells does reflect, at times, the flavor of a war correspondent's report.
The impending crisis
Slavery, which the first civil war ended, rested upon the maxim that the oppression of black people was essential to the well being and progress of white people. The system of apartheid, which the white South had perfected by 1900 to replace slavery, was based on the same principle. The evil inherent in such a premise and in its social, economic, and political manifestations was profoundly at odds with professed American principles and with basic principles of human rights. Nevertheless, most white southerners were either oblivious to the contradiction or accepted it as desirable or necessary. Black southerners, the victims of the apartheid system, were always conscious of its evil character. It was inevitable that at some point they would launch a concerted challenge to it. Therefore, when the assault on the system came, it was, according to Powledge, "self-generated, self-fueled, self-motivated, and free standing."
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