Voices in Our Blood is a literary anthology of the most important and artful interpretations of the civil rights movement, past and present. It showcases what forty of the nation's best writers — including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright — had to say about the central domestic drama of the American Century. Editor Jon Meacham has chosen pieces by journalists, novelists, historians, and artists, bringing together a wide range of black and white 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 Home: 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. The civil rights movement not only changed America for the better, it also inspired some of the nation's best writing, as the pieces collected in Voices in Our Blood illustrate. The 40 essays contained in this anthology succeed in "capturing the complications behind the public spectacles and charting the competing impulses of grace and rage--the proper province of reporting, reflection, and writing," writes editor Jon Meacham in the introduction. Many famous novelists, journalists, and poets appear in these pages--Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, William Faulkner, Rebecca West, Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty, E.B. White, Tom Wolfe--as well as many obscure writers who managed to capture moments in time for the benefit of all. All of these pieces deal with the multifaceted dimensions of America's dark history of racism and discrimination, its consequences, and, hopefully, its cure. This first major collection of enduring writing on the civil rights movement is a powerful and moving portrait that deserves to be read by all Americans. --Eugene Holley Jr. This admirable work is a solid collection of acclaimed "voices" narrating the environment, origin, and progress of the Civil Rights movement, as told by reporters, artists, novelists, historians, and authors such as Maya Angelou, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Willie Morris, Robert Penn Warren, Alice Walker, Murray Kempton, E.B. White, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Rebecca West. The book begins with the segregated United States of the 1930s and 1940s. James Baldwin recounts the Jim Crow world of New Jersey and the Harlem riot of 1943. Willie Morris, in a 1967 memoir excerpt, recalls knocking over a little black boy just for sport because "the broader reality was that the negroes in this town were ours, to do with as we wished." As a continuous whole, the narratives are well organized into four sequential historical sectionsD"Before the Storm," "Into the Streets," "The Mountaintop," and "Twilight"Dthat flow together nicely. Edited by Newsweek managing editor Meacham, this anthology will supplement other Civil Rights movement works, such as John Egerton's Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Knopf, 1994). Thoughtful, sensitive, rewarding, and groundbreaking, it belongs on the shelf of every Civil Rights movement scholar and in classrooms and libraries as well. -DEdward G. McCormack, Cox Lib. & Media Ctr., Univ. of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. Without understanding what a close call the Movement really was, we cannot appreciate the courage of those who tried to change a nation's habits of heart, nor can we grasp the fact that even the most remarkable revolutions are never complete," News week managing editor Meacham declares. The section "Before the Storm" contains excerpts from works by Wright, Morris, Baldwin, Welty, Angelou, and West. "Into the Streets" includes reflections by journalists (Kempton, Rowan, Carter, Haley, and Lomax), historians (Branch and Gates), and literary figures (Faulkner, Steinbeck, Ellison, and O'Connor). "The Mountaintop" section draws on a similar range, from Reston, Hardwick, and Halberstam to Sty