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Overview
David Halberstam’s New York Times Notable Book—a riveting account of the brave individuals at the core of the civil rights movementThe young men and women at the heart of David Halberstam’s brilliant and poignant The Children came together through Reverend James Lawson’s workshops on nonviolence. Idealistic and determined, they showed unwavering bravery during the sit-ins at the Nashville lunch counters and on the Freedom Rides across the South—all chronicled here with Halberstam’s characteristic clarity and insight. The Children exhibits the incredible strength of generations of black Americans, who sacrificed greatly to improve the world for their children. Following Diane Nash, John Lewis, Gloria Johnson, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, Curtis Murphy, James Bevel, and Rodney Powell, among others, The Children is rooted in Halberstam’s coverage of the civil rights movement for Nashville’s Tennessean. This ebook features an extended biography of David Halberstam.
David Halberstam (1934–2007) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author. He is best known for both his courageous coverage of the Vietnam War for the New York Times, as well as for his twenty-one nonfiction books—which cover a wide array of topics, from the plight of Detroit and the auto industry to the captivating origins of baseball’s fiercest rivalry. Halberstam wrote for numerous publications throughout his career and, according to journalist George Packer, single-handedly set the standard of “the reporter as fearless truth teller.” Halberstam died in 2007.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble Review"[Halberstam] hits the high points of the civil rights struggle and makes them immediate.... While some of the young people's names are familiar (e.g., Marion Barry, John Lewis), most are not, but the portraits of them and the society they lived in and challenged is richly detailed.... A masterful achievement in reporting, research, and understanding." —Publishers Weekly
Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author David Halberstam has been working on The Children for about 43 years. In it he returns to the first and perhaps most important story he has ever covered as a newspaper writer — the early days of the historical civil rights movement. The Children captures the compelling true stories of a group of students who risked their lives over a five-year span to improve their country.
In 1959 a group of students came together in a workshop to learn the appropriate manner of nonviolent protesting. A few were white, but the majority were black, and most were the first in their families to attend college. Most of the students were from the South and were all too familiar with the reality of racism, but some had come from the North, where discrimination was more subtle. Those who came from the North to "discover their blackness" experienced for the very first time the deep humiliation of racism and segregation.
Halberstam came to Nashville in 1955 and became a newspaper reporter for the Tennessean, for which he covered that group of students, who one day attempted to break the color barrier by sitting at a segregated lunch counter indowntownNashville. Following the sit-in, many in this group would go on to join the Freedom Riders and actively participate in other aspects of the civil rights movement. A few would rise to high levels of influence, advising Martin Luther King, earning leadership positions at the SCLC, NAACP, and SNCC, and even winning government office.
Included in this group, "the Children," are Diane Nash, James Bevel, John Lewis, Marion Barry, C. T. Vivian, Bernard Lafayette Jr., Gloria Johnson, and Rodney Powell, among others. Halberstam presents their actions in a personal context; he shares their dreams, assesses their values, and reveals the economic and class struggles they faced, their fears and the physical risks they took, and, of course, their triumphs.
Entertainment Weekly
...[M]oving, exhaustively researched...Publishers Weekly
This re-creation of the early days of the civil rights movement by Halberstam (The Fifties) is at once intimate and monumental. By focusing on a small group of young African Americans who attended the Reverend James Lawson's workshop for nonviolent demonstrators in Nashville in 1959, then went on to play active roles in the movement, he hits the high points of the civil rights struggle and makes them immediate: the Nashville sit-ins; the founding of SNCC and CORE; the Freedom Rides; Bull Connor's attacks in Birmingham; the Klan in Memphis; the first singing of "We Shall Overcome"; the voter registration campaign; Bloody Sunday in Selma; and the march to Montgomery. As the group moves out of Nashville and encounters others in the movement, the book expands with the complexity, but fortunately not the imposed tidiness, of a Victorian novel. While some of the young people's names are familiar (e.g., Marion Barry, John Lewis), most are not, but the portraits of them and the society they lived in and challenged is richly detailed. Halberstam examines the subtle frictions within the movement (middle-class vs. poor, lighter-skinned vs. darker, male vs. female), as well as the often violent struggle against segregationists. A number of brief, informative essays are sandwiched in: on the sociology of all-white Vanderbilt University; the eccentricities of the Nashville newspapers; a history of city politics in Washington, D.C.; the role of the Kennedy Justice Department. Martin Luther King Jr. plays a minor part in this history because the subject is indeed the "children"the young adults in their late teens or early 20s in 1960, the early idealists who experienced violence in the streets and saw their movement itself turn segregationist (whites were forced out). The last third of the book follows the professional development of the children into adulthood: there was a congressman, a major, several doctors and college professors, a high school teacher and a political gadfly. This book need not have been as long as it is. But it is a masterful achievement in reporting, research and understanding. In a concluding author's note, Halberstam writes of his own experiences as a young reporter covering the civil rights beat. (PW best book of 1998)Library Journal
Award-winning journalist Halberstam (October 1964, LJ 4/1/94) returns to the time and place of his cub reporting for the daily Tennessean to chronicle what it was like for nine bright, idealistic young black men and women who began a crusade for justice without violence with a sit-in assault on segregated lunch counters in Nashville on February 13, 1960. Detailing the speeding cycle of racial protest that divided the 1950s and 1960s and created a new age and a new America, Halberstam renders the private and public struggles of a generation of young impassioned black students. With impressive sweep he reports on both what happened in the movement and what happened to it. An engrossing supplement to classics such as Clayborne Carson's In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (LJ 5/1/81) and Aldon Morris's Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (LJ 10/1/84). Recommended for any collection on blacks, civil rights, the South, or the United States since 1945.Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., TempeSchool Library Journal
YA-The "children" of the title refers to the courageous students who led the sit-ins in Nashville, TN, starting in 1960. Halberstam, who was a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean at the time, introduces Diane Nash, John Lewis, Gloria Johnson, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, Curtis Murphy, James Bevel, Rodney Powell, and their mentor, the Reverend James Lawson. Readers learn of each student's background, family, fears, hopes, and determination. The narrative outlines the moral and political roots of the civil rights movement and the philosophical divisions that occurred as it grew from the first sit-ins to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. The author shows that this period in American history marked the beginning of the use of television to inform a wider audience, to show violence as news, and to bypass certain local newspapers, which gave little or no coverage of the movement. The last chapters trace the lives of these young people and how their experiences affected them as adults. YAs will appreciate the courage and dedication of these young activists. The excellent index will help researchers trace individuals and locations.-Betsy E. Pfeffer, Northern Virginia Community CollegeDavid M. Oshinsky
[A] powerful, densely packed [narrative]. There is much to admire in Halberstam's book.— The New York Times Book Review