Descripciones mejoradas de Syndetics:

"A vast choral pageant that recounts the momentous work of the civil rights struggle."-- The New York Times Book Review

A monumental volume drawing upon nearly one thousand interviews with civil rights activists, politicians, reporters, Justice Department officials, and others, weaving a fascinating narrative of the civil rights movement told by the people who lived it

Join brave and terrified youngsters walking through a jeering mob and up the steps of Central High School in Little Rock. Listen to the vivid voices of the ordinary people who manned the barricades, the laborers, the students, the housewives without whom there would have been no civil rights movements at all.

In this remarkable oral history, Henry Hampton, creator and executive producer of the acclaimed PBS series Eyes on the Prize , and Steve Fayer, series writer, bring to life the country's great struggle for civil rights as no conventional narrative can. You will hear the voices of those who defied the blackjacks, who went to jail, who witnessed and policed the movement; of those who stood for and against it--voices from the heart of America.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Table of Contents Preface: Toward a More Perfect Union
• Acknowledgments Project
• Notes
• Prologue
• 1 Emmett Till, 1955: "I Wanted the Whole World to See"
• 2 The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-6: "Like a Revival Starting"
• 3 The Little Rock Crisis, 1957-58: "I Had Cracked the Wall"
• 4 Student Sit-ins in Nashville, 1960: "A Badge of Honor"
• 5 Freedom Rides, 1961: "Sticks and Bricks"
• 6 Albany, Georgia, 1961-2: "The Mother Lode"
• 7 James Meredity Enters Ole Miss, 1962: "Things Would Never Be the Same"
• 8 Birmingham, 1963: "Something Has Got to Change"
• 9 Organizing in Mississippi, 1961-3: "The Reality of What We Were Doing Hit Me"
• 10 The March on Washington, 1963: "They Voted with Their Feet"
• 11 The Sixteenth Street Church Bombing, 1963: "You Realized How Intense the Opposition Was"
• 12 Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964: "Representation and the Right to Participate"
• 13 Selma, 1965: "Troopers, Advance"
• 14 Malcolm X (1925-1965): "Our Own Black Shining Prince!"
• 15 The Lowndes County Freedom Organization, 1965-6: "Vote for the Panther, Then Go Home"
• 16 The Meredith March, 1966: "Hit Them Now"
• 17 Chicago, 1966: "Chicago Was a Symbol"
• 18 Muhammad Ali, 1964-7 "His Philosophy Made It Impossible Not to Take a Stand"
• 20 Birth of the Black Panthers, 1966-7: "We Wanted Control!"
• 21 Detroit, 1967: "Inside of Most Black People There Was a Time Bomb"
• 22 The Election of Carl Stokes, 1967: "We Had to Be Organized"
• 23 Howard University, 1967-8: "You Saw the Silhouette of Her Afro"
• 24 King's Last Crusade, 1967-8: "We've Got Some Difficult Days Ahead"
• 25 Resurrection City, 1968: "The End of a Major Battle"
• 26 Ocean Hill-Brownsville, 1967-8: "Everything Became More Political"
• 27 The Black Panthers, 1968-9: "How Serious and Deadly the Game"
• 28 Attica and Prisoners' Rights, 1971: "There's Always Time to Die"
• 29 The Gary Convention, 1972: "Unity Without Uniformity"
• 30 Busing in Boston, 1974-6: "As if Some Alien Was Coming into the School"
• 31 Atlanta and Affirmative Action, 1973-80: "The Politics of Inclusion"
• Epilogue: From Miami to America's
• Future For Further Reading "Eyes on the Prize" Project Staff and Funders
• Index

Extracto provisto por Syndetics

1     EMMETT TILL, 1955     "I WANTED THE WHOLE WORLD TO SEE"   On August 20, 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago's South Side, almost missed the train that would carry him to a summer visit with relatives in the Mississippi Delta. Emmett, nicknamed Bo, was supposed to meet his seventeen-year-old cousin, Curtis Jones, at LaSalle Street station. Young Till didn't show up at LaSalle Street, but with only seconds to spare, out of breath and stammering with excitement, he boarded the train at Englewood, more than seven miles away.   In the forty years since World War I began, Chicago's black population had grown from some forty thousand to half a million. Many blacks had moved up from the South, seeking jobs and a better way of life. Of those, 75 percent hailed from Mississippi. Emmett Till was part of the emigrant community and was closing the circle that summer, traveling back to his family's home place.   Money, Mississippi, was a dusty crossroads, population fifty-five, with the Tallahatchie River at its back door. Emmett's mother had warned the boy to mind his manners with whites down there. No one expected a fourteen-year-old to be in mortal danger, but anyone black had to be careful. More than five hundred black people had been lynched in the state since these statistics were first compiled in 1882. Thousands more racially motivated murders were never officially reported. Now, in the summer of 1955, the death toll was beginning to build again, particularly in the Delta, the northwest corner of the state, where Money was located.   In some Delta counties, blacks constituted 80 percent of the population, and the outnumbered whites were bent on intimidating any blacks who wanted access to a better education or to the ballot box. Three months before Emmett's trip, the Reverend George Lee from the Delta town of Belzoni was killed by a shotgun blast to the face. Local authorities ruled his death a traffic accident. Lee had been the first black to register to vote in the county.   On August 13, just a week before Emmett's arrival, Lamar Smith, a black man who had voted in the state's Democratic primary earlier in the month, was shot to death at high noon in front of the courthouse in Brookhaven. Again, there were no arrests.   For almost seventy years, the U.S. Supreme Court had supported southern insistence on second-class citizenship for blacks. With the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the Court signaled that it was changing its position regarding the legality of segregating black and white schoolchildren. Reaction in the South was swift, particularly in Mississippi. Leaders of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan exhorted their followers to resist the "mongrelization" of the white race. White Citizens' Councils were formed to exert political and economic pressure on black activists and their white sympathizers. Segregationists James O. Eastland and John Stennis, Mississippi's two U.S. senators, worked to further consolidate the white monopoly of political power. Governor J. P. Coleman stated flatly that Negroes weren't fit to vote. Ten years after the end of World War II, many whites in the Delta felt that Mississippi was now in another war to protect its way of life.   Emmett arrived in Mississippi with his cousin Curtis Jones on August 21, 1955.   CURTIS JONES   We was going to Money, Mississippi, to have a good time. I'd never picked cotton before and I was looking forward to that. I had told my mother that I could pick two hundred pounds, and she told me I couldn't. Emmett Till was fourteen years old, had just graduated out of the grammar school.   My grandfather in Mississippi was a preacher. He had a church and he had a little raggedy '41 Ford, if I'm not mistaken. And he took all of us to church that day, including my grandmother, my three uncles, myself, my cousin Emmett, and my cousin Willa Parker. While he was in the pulpit preaching, we get the car and drive to Money. Anyway, we went into this store to buy some candy. Before Emmett went in, he had shown the boys round his age some picture of some white kids that he had graduated from school with, female and male. He told the boys who had gathered round this store--there must have been maybe ten to twelve youngsters there--that one of the girls was his girlfriend. So one of the local boys said, "Hey, there's a white girl in that store there. I bet you won't go in there and talk to her." So Emmett went in there. When he was leaving out the store, after buying some candy, he told her, "Bye, baby."   I was sitting out there playing checkers with this older man. Next thing I know, one of the boys came up to me and said, "Say, man, you got a crazy cousin. He just went in there and said 'Bye, baby' to that white woman." This man I was playing checkers with jumped straight up and said, "Boy, you better get out of here. That lady'll come out of that store and blow your brains off."   It was kind of funny to us. We hopped in the car and drove back to the church. My grandfather was just about completing his sermon.   The next day we was telling some youngsters what had happened, but they had heard about it. One girl was telling us that we better get out of there 'cause when that lady's husband come back gonna be big trouble. We didn't tell our grandfather. If we had told our grandfather, I'm sure he would have gotten us out of there. That was Wednesday. So that Thursday passed, nothing happened. Friday passed, nothing happened. Saturday, nothing happened. So we forgot about it.   Saturday night we went to town. The closest town was Greenwood. We must have stayed there till approximately three o'clock that morning. We returned and--my grandfather didn't have but three rooms, the kitchen and two bedrooms--it must have been about three-thirty, I was awakened by a group of men in the house. I didn't wake completely, youngsters, they sleep hard, you know. When they came, my grandfather answered the door and they asked him did he have three boys in there from Chicago? And he stated yes. He said I got my two grandsons and a nephew. So they told him get the one who did the talking. My grandmother was scared to death. She was trying to protect Bo. They told her get back in bed. One of the guys struck her with a shotgun side of the head. When I woke up the next morning, I thought it was a dream.   I went to the porch and my grandfather was sitting on the porch. I asked him, "Poppa, did they bring Bo back?" He said, "No." He said, "I hope they didn't kill that boy." And that's when I got kind of scared.   "I asked him, "Ain't you going to call the police?" He said, "No, I can't call the police. They told me that if I call the sheriff they was going to kill everybody in this house." So I told him, I say, "I'll call."   That happened Sunday.   When Curtis Jones called the sheriff that Sunday, he also placed a call to his mother, Willie Mae Jones, back in Chicago. She in turn got in touch with Emmett's mother, Mamie Till Bradley, a thirty-three-year-old schoolteacher.   MAMIE TILL BRADLEY MOBLEY   Willie Mae was hysterical. I could barely get any sense out of her. But I finally pieced out that Emmett had been taken from her father's house. I said, "Mama, Willie Mae said someone had taken Emmett from Poppa Mose's house." Well, Mother comprehended the situation immediately. And that of course alerted me that there was real danger.   By Wednesday we knew it was beyond the shadow of a doubt--the thing had really come fallin' in place. We knew about the men who had taken Emmett. We knew the alleged crime. We knew that something was highly amiss that Emmett hadn't turned up by then. He had an uncanny sense of direction, and I don't care where you took him, he could get back home. And he hadn't called. We knew the situation was serious, and we just couldn't name it--that he had been killed. You just couldn't put it into words, but deep down in our hearts we were fearing that.   Based on information that Mose Wright and Crosby Smith gave the sheriff, two men were arrested for kidnapping--Roy Bryant, husband of the woman in the store, and his half brother, J. W. Milam. That Wednesday, Emmett Till's body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River. A cotton gin fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire. Milam and Bryant now faced murder charges.   CURTIS JONES   Wednesday I was over at some relatives' house. We was out there picking cotton. One of my uncles drove up there in that 1941 Ford. He said, "Curtis, they found Bo." I say, "Is he alive?" He said, "No, he's dead."   Excerpted from Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through The 1980s by Henry Hampton, Steve Fayer, Harold Frazer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

Library Journal Review

The PBS series Eyes on the Prize, parent to a narrative history of the U.S. civil right movement (of the same name, LJ 1/87), now begets a second book, excerpts from the project's interview bank. The book's 32 episodes, starting with the 1955 Emmett Till lynching, include triumphs like Selma and Birmingham alongside the Detroit riots of 1967, Attica, the Black Panthers, and other legacies tragic or ambiguous. The cross-currents and complexities of history are well attended to--as Andrew Young and Stokely Carmichael, for example, argue the role of whites--in the voices of some who won fame, many who did not, and a few who opposed the movement. The selections are brief, cleanly edited with light annotation, and wider ranging than those of another fine oral history, Howell Raines's My Soul is Rested (LJ 9/1/77). Recommended for general readers. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/89.-- Robert F. Nardini, N. Chichester, N.H. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

As the authors graphically show, participating in civil rights marches, sit-ins and Freedom Rides took moral stamina and raw nerve. The heroines and heroes of the movement receive a stirring tribute in this oral history, a tie-in to the TV series Eyes on the Prize , which Hampton produced and Fayer wrote. The book is organized in 31 chapters around key events, with demonstrators offering complementary perspectives. We hear from ordinary people along with well-known activists Ralph Abernathy, Rosa Parks, Jesse Jackson and Stokely Carmichael; public officials John Conyers and Nicholas Katzenbach; Black Panthers Huey Newton and Bobby Seale; Alex Haley, Coretta Scott King, Ossie Davis, Tom Hayden, Michael Harrington, Harry Belafonte. Collectively the testimonies reveal how far America has progressed in the drive for equality and how far it still has to go. History Book Club and QPB selections; author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

School Library Journal Review

YA-- This collection of remembrances and personal anecdotes is based on 1000 interviews and records 30 years of the struggle to achieve equality and gain civil rights for black people. Ordinary people who fought to attain their civil rights are recorded here, as well as the more well-known leaders on the civil rights front. From Selma, Little Rock, King's crusades, and the Boston school busing, to Miami, Atlanta, Cassius Clay, and Affirmative Action, both blacks and whites tell how they felt during these significant moments in history. This book, a companion to the PBS series Eyes on the Prize, is a ``must purchase'' for black history collections. --Gwen Salama, Hastings High School, Alief, I.S.D., TX (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Although created as a companion to the popular and critically acclaimed Eyes on the Prize television series, this book stands on its own as an excellent review of the civil rights movement as recalled by participants. The work is divided into 30 sections, from Emmett Till's murder and the Montgomery bus boycott in the mid-1950s to busing in Boston in the 1970s and the Miami riots of 1980. About half the sections deal with the movement in the South before 1965, and about half with racial tensions in the North after 1965. Each section includes 10 to 30 oral memoirs, well edited and coherently arranged. Each section has a brief introduction, and the contributors of each selection are identified. None of the interviews are contemporary with the events described; all are from the thousand interviews done by the "Eyes" production staff beginning in the 1970s. Most of the interviewees were advocates of civil rights, but there are a few opposing voices. Many famous names are included, but there are also selections from ordinary people caught up in great events. Index and civil rights bibliography. Highly recommended for libraries at all levels.-T. H. Baker, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Henry Hampton, who died in 1998, was the creator and executive producer of Eyes on the Prize , one of more than 40 film projects he developed with his company Blackside, Inc., the largest African-American-owned film production company of its time. Hampton became one of the world's most respected documentary filmmakers as he chronicled the 20th century's great political and social movements, focusing on the lives of the poor and disenfranchised.

Steve Fayer was the series writer for Eyes on the Prize .