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 My Soul Looks Back in Wonder is a moving compilation of brief memoirs drawn from the Voices of Civil Rights project of AARP and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. With the exception of a foreword by David Halberstam, and introduction by Williams and an afterword by Marian Wright Edelman, the book consists entirely of excerpts from interviews conducted through the Voices project. Each of the 33 chapters offers a different perspective on social activism, with the majority of the reflections centering on 1964s Freedom Summer, and the unanticipated violence that soured the idealism of that projects organizers.
The book is organized in three sections. The first (The Weight) consists of recollections of social conditions in the South under Jim Crow segregation; the second (We Shall Not Be Moved) focuses on key events of the civil rights movement from the late 1950s and mid-1960s; and the third (The Wings of the Future) explores the expansion and branching of the civil rights movement to embrace womens liberation, gay rights, migrant worker empowerment, and environmental justice, among other issues. The interviews selected for this last section show how latter-day empowerment movements adapted the activist impulse and borrowed the tactics of the civil rights campaigns of the 50s and 60s. It also frames the enduring challenges to minority empowerment and equality in the United States.
Williams describes the book as a meditation on Martin Luther Kings belief in the power of nonviolent protest to transform both its adherents and the society upon which it acts. It is also a book about activism and changeat once acknowledgment of great progress and an admonition to do better and be better, as a people. The interview excerpts, mostly from conversations with relatively obscure activists, are powerfully personal because they are minimally redacted.
My Soul Looks Back demonstrates the malleability of the activist impulsethe adaptability of civic spirit to a variety of causes: For example, more than one interview reveals the transition of an activist from the civil rights struggle to the womens empowerment movement. Another sub-theme of the book is the indirect route people travel toward the role of activist. Particularly interesting on this point is Diane Wilsons story. A life-long shrimp fisher on the Gulf Coast of Texas, she mobilized first in response to anti-Vietnamese discrimination and later took on the long-term sustainability of the Texas shrimp fishery, focusing her efforts on major industrial polluters.
A common thread running through a number of the personal narratives in My Soul Looks Back is how the brutal murders of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman undermined the inter-racial unity of the civil rights movement. On the one hand, in part by spilling Caucasian blood, the event galvanized broad support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed a month prior to the discovery of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodmans bodies.) On the other, it signaled the beginning of the end of the movements faith in non-violence as the surest path to social change, and helped give rise to the more militant black power movement. Paradoxically, it also provoked the gradual ejection of white activists from the inner circles of the civil rights movement. The future martyrs of the struggle would be blacks, not whites, and the burden of carrying the movement forward would redound to black activists alone, where it largely remains.
If less welcome in the movement for black empowerment, many white volunteers found other causeswomens liberation, gay rights, migrant worker empowerment, and environmental equity among them. There is more than a hint of regret in the reflections of these former disciples of the civil rights struggle that they failed to attract very much of a black constituency. Indeed, the womens, gay/lesbian/transgender, environmental, and handicap advocacy movements remain principally white-led and white-identified to this day.
My Soul Looks Back in Wonder is no primer on the civil rights movementfor comprehensive history and legal and social analysis many other texts are available. For stewards of community, however, the book is a passionate reminder of the footsteps we follow in the ongoing struggle to redress social inequity.
Insights into the power of faith to coalesce and mobilize disparate peoples in common purpose appear frequently in the 33 personal narratives transcribed in My Soul Looks Back. More often, though, it seems the desire for social justice is inborn, irrepressible and fundamentally humanand inevitable, where societal institutions are sufficiently permissive. Nonetheless, as Marian Wright Edelmans concluding essay points out, the road to equality and equity in the United States remains long, and possibly bumpy. For reasons economic, rather than legal, our society is re-segregating in ways that generate new, de facto oppressed classes and demand new styles of activism, advocacy and intervention.
Readers Note: If you would like to prepare a book review for inclusion in a future issue of this newsletter, or suggest a title for review by us, please contact David Lampe at or .
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