Product Review

From A. Philip Randolph's defiant call in 1941 for African Americans to march on Washington to Alice Walker in 1973, Reporting Civil Rights presents firsthand accounts of the revolutionary events that overthrew segregation in the United States. This two-volume anthology brings together for the first time nearly 200 newspaper and magazine reports and book excerpts, and features 151 writers, including James Baldwin, Robert Penn Warren, David Halberstam, Lillian Smith, Gordon Parks, Murray Kempton, Ted Poston, Claude Sitton, and Anne Moody. A newly researched chronology of the movement, a 32-page insert of rare journalist photographs, and original biographical profiles are included in each volume Vivid reports by Robert Richardson and Bob Clark capture the nightmarish Watts and Detroit riots, while Paul Good records the growing schism in 1966 between King's nonviolence and Stokely Carmichael's Black Power advocacy. Joan Didion and Gilbert Moore cover the Black Panthers; Garry Wills and Pat Watters chronicle the traumatic aftermath of King's assassination and the failure of the 1968 Poor People's Campaign; Willie Morris and Marshall Frady assess the early 1970s South; Tom Wolfe caustically explores new forms of racial confrontation; and Richard Margolis depicts post-integration consciousness among African American college students. Singly or together, Reporting Civil Rights captures firsthand the impassioned struggle for freedom and equality that transformed America.