During the civil rights era, masses of people marched in the streets, boycotted stores, and registered to vote.
Others challenged racism in ways more solitary but no less life changing. These twenty-three stories give a voice
to the nameless, ordinary citizens without whom the movement would have failed. From bloody melees at public lunch
counters to anxious musings at the family dinner table, the diverse experiences depicted in this anthology make
the civil rights movement as real and immediate as the best histories and memoirs. Each story focuses on a particular,
sometimes private, moment in the historic struggle for social justice in America. Events have a permanent effect
on characters, like the white girl in "Spring Is Now" who must sort through her feelings about the only
black boy in her school, or the black preacher in "The Convert" who tells a friend, "This thing
of being a man . . . The Supreme Court can't make you a man. The NAACP can't do it. God Almighty can do a lot,
but even He can't do it. Ain't nobody can do it but you." If a character survives-and some do not-the event
can become a turning point, a vision for a better world.
The sections into which the stories are grouped parallel the news headlines of the day: School Desegregation (1954
on), Sit-ins (1960 on), Marches and Demonstrations (1963 on), and Acts of Violence. In the last section, Retrospective,
characters look back on their personal involvement with the movement. Twenty writers-eleven black and nine white-are
represented in the collection. Ten stories were written during the 1960s. That the others were written long after
the movement's heyday suggests the potency of that time as a continuing source of creative inspiration.