Duties, pleasures, and conflicts

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This is a sometimes embittered look at the civil rights movement by Thelwell, a longtime civil rights activist. In the frightening opening story, a black man who plans to organize a small Southern town is faced with a dilemma when one of his local workers is killed by whites: Should he milk the event for publicity or simply leave the family alone in its grief? A frank account of the famous 1964 March on Washington describes what, in the author's view, really happened: marchers carried ``official'' signs, picked up ``official'' programs and marched in an ``official'' manner; the cause, he claims, was made impotent because the government endorsed and manipulated it. There are general essays about blacks and their political power, black liberation and life in Mississippi as well as six critical essays (one by James Baldwin) on, among others, William Styron and Baldwin himself. The collection ends with a look at the Rev. Jesse Jackson's bid for the presidency. This is an important overview of the civil rights struggle reminding us in vivid terms that it continues today. (March)

Library Journal

Thelwell, former Sixties activist and currently director of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, brings together his short stories and essays written over the past two decades. Some selections, especially those dealing with the early Civil Rights movement, are well crafted, moving, and informative. Unfortunately, the bulk of the book is devoted to tendentious and polemical attacks on liberal whites and moderate blacks and strained defenses of militant black nationalism. These latter essays serve more as dated curiosity pieces than incisive assessments of literature and society. The interested reader can find these pieces published elsewhere. Only for libraries collecting widely in black Americana. Anthony O. Edmonds, History Dept., Ball State Univ., Muncie, Ind.