Voices in Our Blood is a literary anthology of the most important and artful interpretations of the civil rights movement, past and present. It showcases what forty of the nation's best writers—including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright—had to say about the central domestic drama of the American Century.

Editor Jon Meacham has chosen pieces by journalists, novelists, historians, and artists, bringing together a wide range of black and white perspectives and experiences. The result is an unprecedented and powerful portrait of the movement's spirit and struggle, told through voices that resonate with passion and strength.

Maya Angelou takes us on a poignant journey back to her childhood in the Arkansas of the 1930s. On the front page of The New York Times, James Reston marks the movement's apex as he describes what it was like to watch Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver his heralded "I Have a Dream" speech in real time. Alice Walker takes up the movement's progress a decade later in her article "Choosing to Stay at Home: Ten Years After the March on Washington." And John Lewis chronicles the unimaginable courage of the ordinary African Americans who challenged the prevailing order, paid for it in blood and tears, and justly triumphed.

Voices in Our Blood is a compelling look at the movement as it actually happened, from the days leading up to World War II to the anxieties and ambiguities of this new century. The story of race in America is a never-ending one, and Voices in Our Blood tells us how we got this far—and how far we still have to go to reach the Promised Land.



TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction by Jon Meacham


I. BEFORE THE STORM

Inheritors of Slavery – Richard Wright
—Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, 1941

North Toward Home – Willie Morris
—1967

Notes of a Native Son – James Baldwin
—1955

A Pageant of Birds – Eudora Welty
—The New Repblic, October 25, 1943

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
—Harper's Magazine, February 1970

Opera in Greenville – Rebecca West
—The New Yorker, June 14, 1947


II. INTO THE STREETS

America Comes of Middle Age – Murray Kempton
—He Went All the Way, September 22, 1955
—Upon Such a Day, September 10,1957
—Next Day, September 12, 1957
—The Soul's Cry, September 13, 1957

American Segregation and the World Crisis – William Faulkner
—The Segregation Decisions, November 10, 1955

The Moral Aspects of Segregation – Benjamin E. Mays
—The Segregation Decisions, November 10, 1955

The Cradle (of the Confederacy) Rocks – Carl T. Rowan
—Go South to Sorrow, 1957

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years – Taylor Branch
—1988

Prime Time – Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
—Colored People, 1994

Letter from the South – E.B. White
—The New Yorker, April 7, 1956

Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South – Robert Penn Warren
—1956

Travels with Charley – John Steinbeck
—1962

Liar by Legislation – Hodding Carter
—Look, June 28, 1955

Harlem is Nowhere – Ralph Ellison
—Harper's Magazine, August 1964

An Interview with Malcolm X – Alex Haley
—A Candid Conversation wtih the Militant Major-domo of the Black Muslims, Playboy, May 1963

Wallace – Marshall Frady
—1968

Mystery and Manners – Flannery O'Connor
—1963

The Negro Revolt Against "The Negro Leaders" – Louis E. Lomax
—Harper's Magazine, June 1960


III. THE MOUNTAINTOP

"I Have a Dream…" – James Reston
—The New York Times, August 29, 1963

Capital is Occupied by a Gentle Army – Russell Baker
—The New York Times, August 29, 1963

Bloody Sunday – John Lewis
—Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, 1998

Mississippi: The Fallen Paradise – Walker Percy
—Harper's Magazine, April 1965

This Quiet Dust – William Styron
—Harper's Magazine, April 1965

When Watts Burned – Stanley Crouch
—Rolling Stone's The Sixties, 1977

After Watts – Elizabeth Hardwick
—Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning?, The New York Review of Books March 31, 1966

The Brilliancy of Black – Bernard Weinraub
—Esquire, January 1967

Representative – Charlayne Hunter-Gault
—The New Yorker, April 1, 1967

The Second Coming of Martin Luther King – David Halberstam
—Harper's Magazine, August 1967

Martin Luther King is Still on the Case – Garry Wills
—Esquire, August 1968


IV. TWILIGHT

"Keep On A-Walking, Children" – Pat Watters
—New American Review, January 1969

"We in a War—Or Haven't Anybody Told You That?" – Peter Goldman
—Report from Black America, 1969

Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's – Tom Wolfe
—New York, June 8, 1970

Choosing to Stay At Home: Ten Years After the March on Washington – Alice Walker
—The New York Times Magazine, August 26, 1973

A Hostile and Welcoming Workplace – Ellis Cose
—The Rage of a Privileged Class, 1993

State Secrets – Calvin Trillin
—The New Yorker, May 29, 1995

Grady's Gift – Howell Raines
—The New York Times Magazine, December 1, 1991

 
Jon Meacham is managing editor of Newsweek. Born in Chattanooga in 1969, he is a graduate of The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Meacham has been a reporter for The Chattanooga Times and an editor of The Washington Monthly. He and his wife, Keith, live in New York City.