BOOK REVIEW : A Stirring Saga of the Civil Rights Movement

Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement From the 1950s through the 1980s by Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer with Sarah Flynn (Bantam: $25.95, 667 pages).

Nostalgia for the 1960s is the hot commodity of the mass media nowadays, but all the Golden Oldies on the radio tend to obscure the fact that America was at war with itself throughout those tumultuous years--a war of conflicting generations and conflicting ideals. We are reminded of what was really at stake in “Voices of Freedom,” a stirring saga of the civil rights movement told in the voices of men and women who were there.

“Voices of Freedom” is a byproduct of the distinguished PBS television documentary series, “Eyes on the Prize,” which was produced by co-author Henry Hampton. The book has its origins in the thousands of hours of interviews conducted by the television production staff over a period of more than a decade: “Only a fraction of the material we gathered over the last decade could be used in the television series,” Hampton explains. So Hampton, Steve Fayer and Sarah Flynn were moved to weave the unused interviews into an oral history of the struggle for civil liberties in America.

The very notion of turning outtakes into a book suggests something improvised and superficial, a cut-and-paste job, but the opposite is true of “Voices of Freedom.” The choice of witnesses and participants, the selection of interview fragments, and the ordering of these elements into a 667-page book reveals that much care, thought and even love were applied to working the raw material. As a result, “Voices of Freedom” is something much greater than the sum of its parts, a taut and vivid narrative on an epic scale.

What makes the material so compelling is the use of documentary-film editing techniques: the voices of various eyewitnesses are intercut into a single, seamless story. Each fragment of recollection is introduced with a short editorial aside that identifies the speaker and sets the scene for his or her testimony; each speaker is quoted in just enough length and detail to move the story along. And so each chapter becomes a kind of choral recitative.

The historical sweep of “Voices of Freedom” encompasses the ‘60s, of course, but goes far beyond it. The first episode is the 1955 abduction and murder of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago who dared to utter the words “Bye, baby” to a white woman while visiting his relatives in a Mississippi backwater. The family insisted on an open-casket funeral despite the gruesome wounds inflicted by a shotgun blast: “There was no way I could describe what was in that box,” recalls the child’s mother. “No way. And I just wanted the world to see.”

The epilogue of “Voices of Freedom” focuses on a black man named Arthur McDuffie--an insurance agent and a father of two--who was shot to death during a traffic stop in Miami in 1979, and the rioting that ensued when four Miami police officers were acquitted of charges of second-degree murder, manslaughter, and evidence-tampering. “The real shame and the real sadness,” says Sonny Wright, a black real estate developer, “is when are we going to learn?”

Between these two landmark events are glimpses of virtually every important moment in four decades of the civil rights movement: the Little Rock crisis, the Freedom Rides of 1961, James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, the March on Washington, the church bombings in Birmingham, the “long, hot summer” of 1967 in Detroit, the busing confrontations in Boston in 1974-76. And the book pauses to take a close look at Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, the Black Panthers, the election of Carl Stokes, the riot at Attica Prison.

The speakers whose voices are heard are also marvelously diverse--the leadership of the civil rights movement in the very broadest sense (James Farmer, Julian Bond, Andrew Young, Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Abernathy, Floyd McKissick, Jesse Jackson, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver); its celebrities (Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis, Alex Haley) as well as its allies and adversaries (Walter Mondale, Tom Hayden, George Wallace); and the heroes of the movement (Rosa Parks: “One of the policemen . . . said: ‘Why don’t you stand up?’ And I asked him: ‘Why do you push us around?’ ”). But the bulk of the testimony, and some of the most vivid and stirring words, are those of the less celebrated men and women whose bodies and souls were on the line in countless incidents of struggle, confrontation and protest.

All too often, we hear from widows, Myrlie Evers, for example, and Coretta Scott King: “When I arrived in Selma and went to the church where the noontime mass meeting was being held, Andy Young said: ‘Malcolm X is here and he just made a speech. . . . You’re going to have to speak . . . and invoke the whole nonviolent spirit, because the people how have turned a different way.’ ”

And the editors have managed to find many of the surviving participants in memorable incidents, to allow them to speak for themselves. The chapter on Little Rock, for example, features Little Rock newspaper editor Harry Ashmore; Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell, and former Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus, as well as the former students, now grown, who participated in the struggle to desegregate the public schools.

“Voices of Freedom” reminds us of how simple it all seemed in those stirring days when we thought that good will and lofty ideals were enough, and it reminds us, too, of how complex the problems of race and equality really are. But the real value of the book--both for those of us who lived through the ‘60s, and for those who regard it as distant history--is to be found in the evocation of the spiritual heart and soul of the civil rights movement.

When we hear James Farmer recalling the songs of the Freedom Riders in the summer of ‘61, we are taught once again what is truly noble and redeeming in the American dream. We are reminded of a faith that we have lost and must struggle to regain:

Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round, turn me round, turn me round

Gonna Keep on a-walkin’

Gonna keep on talkin’

to the Promised Land.