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Collective Unconscious
| Article
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21928 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1993 |
3,303 Words |
| Author
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Julius Lester
Julius Lester is professor in the Judaic Studies, English, and
History departments at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst. His most recent book is a collection of essays,
Falling Pieces of Broken Sky. |
A TASTE OF POWER
A Black Woman's Story
Elaine Brown
New York: Pantheon Books, 1992
452 pp., $25.00
THE JUDAS FACTOR
The Plot to Kill Malcolm X
Karl Evanzz
New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992
389 pp., $22.95
For many, the most enduring memories of the sixties come from the first half of the decade. This was the time when the civil-rights movement combated segregation and disenfranchisement in the South.
Perhaps the paradigmatic image of that era is of the quarter of a million Americans, black and white, at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. For an infinitesimal historical instant the ideal of racial harmony was manifest, knitted by the sonorous voice and biblical imagery of Martin Luther King, Jr., evoking a dream to free the nation from its enslaving past. In was a moment unprecedented in American history and a moment not repeated since.
However, there are other images, disturbing ones that even now, three decades removed, cause the heart to grieve: the shattered stained-glass windows and skewed timbers of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where four black children were killed in a bombing less than a month after the March on Washington; the recovery of the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, a black and two Jewish civil-rights workers, from an earthen dam in Mississippi where they had been buried after being murdered; the beating death on the streets of Selma, Alabama, in the spring of 1965 of Rev. James Reeb, a white minister from Cleveland who had come to participate in the Selma-Montgomery march; and the shooting death of Viola Liuzzo, white housewife from Detroit, another march participant killed while driving a young black man back to Selma at the march's end.
Though the civil-rights movement was successful in achieving its goals--the end of segregation in public accommodations and ensuring the right of blacks to the franchise--the victories did not bring a sense of fulfillment or satisfaction. Too many people had to risk their lives, too any had died or been brutalized,
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