In this history, James R. Gaines reconsiders the 1950s, framing it not as an era of staid conformity but as a period of activism and nascent social and political change.
... [a] short, very potent primer on four groups of people usually left out of the general hallelujahs for the Greatest Generation ... Unfortunately, it’s hard to do full justice to them all in only 206 pages of text; the book could have been twice its length. With Murray, for example, we only see hints of her willingness to challenge just about every norm she encountered, from where she sat on a bus to her own sexuality. The length also keeps Gaines from fully explaining the fractious, changing nature of the American Communist Party ... Yet brevity can also be powerful and here, stripped to their essence, the stories of people like Fannie Lou Hamer, the martyred Evers and Rachel Carson...all hit with fresh impact ... an excellent starting point for understanding how we got to where we are, and what we risk returning to if we don’t rediscover the faith these men and women had in America’s enduring potential to remake itself in the image of justice.
Gaines provides engrossing character studies of people both well-known and more obscure ... All of these lives are well documented in biographies, memoirs and scholarly publications, from which Gaines skillfully draws his evidence ... More fascinating to me, however, are the many lesser-known individuals who populate Gaines’s book as agents of change ... it is clear that despite the somewhat triumphalist trajectory of Gaines’s narrative, pointing as it does to the legislative and regulatory victories to follow, these battles have not been permanently won.
... enlightening, powerful and intimate ... This excellent, well-researched and well-written book shows how far America has come and yet how very far we have to go to become the country we often think we are.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
