VOICES IN OUR BLOOD: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement.

• Author: Williams, Juan
• Position: Review

VOICES IN OUR BLOOD: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement Edited by Jon Meacham Random House. $29.95

Personal History

AT ITS BEST, HISTORY IS FULL of passion, grit, stupidity, and violence. But historians typically tell heroic stories of people with titles--the presidents and the generals--who face their fates with determination and even wisdom. And the history is true, no doubt, if the historian is a good researcher. But even at its best, that official history is no match for history as lived by people without tides.

So while every movie goer loves a simple tale of hemes triumphing against the odds, there is a deeper level to real history, where sex, hate, and even insanity among the anonymous public gives the truest feeling of what happened. At the dawn of the 21st century, such honest history of the civil rights movement is in short supply. The movement has been reduced to a morality play with an ample supply of pure heroes and pure villains. Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, is now a hero who seems to have been born with his name on a major street that cuts through the black section of every town. And Birmingham Police Chief "Bull" Connor is now so reviled for his attacks on civil rights demonstrators that he has become the perfect representation of evil. Connor is now so bad that even his first name, Theophilus, is lost. (Did you really think that his mother named him "Bull?")

There is hard truth to be found in the defining moments of history that produced the essence of King's heroism and Connor's villainy. But both have now been inflated beyond recognition into one-dimensional characters. Any curious mind knows a far more complex story is being hidden. And if you truly care about the most bloody and bizarre puzzle in American history--race relations--then a bothersome thought may tease at your soul. What if American society is telling itself these infantile stories about and the civil fights movement to stop discussion of the more difficult, complex truth about pace in this nation?

The perfect antidote to any childish version of civil rights history is now available in a compelling new book edited by Jon Meacham. He has collected essays and book excerpts about the personal experience of pace in America during the middle and end of the 20th century. Meacham's selections include works done by writers such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, and Walker Percy.

And since Meacham is a journalist (Newsweek's...