~~

A CRITIC AT LARGE

What the civil-rights movement looked like 'ZL!hen it was still happening.

BY NICHOLAS LEMANN

Lott column in the Washington Post,wrote that neoconservatives like him"oppose affirnlative action on grounds ofcolorblindness and in defense of the orig-inal vision of the civil rights mOVement:judging people by the content of theircharacter and not the color of their skin."As Krauthammer surely knows fromfirsthand experience, movements andtheir visions always look a .lot simplerfrom the outside and after the fact. If thecivil-rights movement were suddenly toreappear as it really was, political office-holders would no more be unanimouslyfor it than theyw~re at the time..

The event that Krauthammer wasobliquely referring to by bringing up thecontent of character and the color of skinwas the March on Washington in Au-gust, 1963, where Martin Luther King,Jr.,made his magnificent "I have a dream"speech, from which that line comes. Themarch was originally planned by themovement's radical wing, which wasgoing to end the day by having themarchers move, en masse and unlawfully,into the hallways of the Capitol. A seriesof compromises brought the movement'smoderate wing (the N.A.A.C.P., theUrban League, and theUruted Automo-bile Workers, as well as King himself)on board. Still, the chief organizer wasthe former Commurust and still social-ist Bayard Rustin, who tided the eventthe "March for Jobs and Freedom"--andwhat he meant by "jobs and freedom"was a degree of state interVention in theeconomy that nobody would dare pro-

pose today. The long list of those who ap-peared onstage at the march includedBob Dylan, Walter Reuther, Roy Wil~kills, Josephine Baker, Odetta, MarlonBrando, A Philip Randolph, and Charl~ton Heston. By the time King spoke,much of the crowd had drifted away. Thebig behind-the-scenes drama centeredon JOM Lewis, who was then the headof the Student Nonviolent Coordinat-ing Committee, and is now a veterancongressman from Georgia. Lewis haddrafted a speech that said, 'We will march,through the South, through the heart orDixie, the way Sherman did. ...We shallpursue our own scorched-earth policy."Washington's Catholic archbishop re-fused to give the invOCation unless Lewistoned it down, and finally, under heavypressure from the organizers, he did. Soeven the era's most celebrated momentwas not nearly as consensual as every-body now remembers.

The Library of America's new, two-volume anthology "Reporting CivilRights: American Journalism 1941-1973" ($80) is a useful corrective to theway memory has domesticated the move-ment. As one reads through a hundredand eighty-eight chronologically orderedarticles, the movement's true messiness,radicalism, internal disorganization, highfailure rate, and lack of internal agree-ment become manifest; These are ab-sorbing volumes even if read straightthrough, and they make for a valuablereference work that will reward occa-sional dipping in. There are, inevitably,moments of hokey overwri~ "Oncemore down the old familiar highwaysinto that passionately alive and violentcountry," Karl Fleming begins a piecein Newsweek, and he's soon on to daysof smothering heat and nights of hon-eysuckle-butfewer than you'd expect.It helps that the Library of America'sanonymous compilers have not takenthe terms "reporting" and "journalism"literally: they have supplemented thenewspaper stuff with lotS of essays, mem-oirs, manifestos, and book excerpts, andwithout them the anthology wouldn'tbe nearly as good. King's "Letter from aBirminghamJail," James Baldwin's "TheFire Next Time," the reminiscences ofLillian Smith and Anne Moody, JohnHoward Griffin's "Black Like Me"-

T he recent fall of.a Senate ~a~orityleader for the crIme of praisIng a

centenari~ colleague who had once beena leader of the segregationist movementmade for ~ excelle~t demonstration ofthe marvellous, ~d misleading, clarityof historical retr.<>spection. Everybodynow knows,it seems, that the civil-rightsmovement was a good thing, and thatitsopponents were so patendy wrong that,unless they are elaborately penitent, theyc~ have no place in our public life. (Atthe sametirne,it would have been finefor Trent Lott to send off Strom Thur-mond~hom ev~rybody in Washing-ton had long been treating asa lovablehuggy-bear-,..with an encomium to hiswonderfulness, as long as it didn't spe-cifically mention the main cause withwhich he was associated.) ,

The rules of acceptable political be-havior were not at all so clear atthe time.In the South, when civil rights was still an

open question only a brave few Demo-crats supported it, and one is hard pressedto think of any Republicans who did. In1964, the Republican Presidential nomi-nee, Barry Goldwater, ran as an opponentof mandatory school desegregation andof the landmark Civil Rights Act, whichCongress had just passed. George H. W.Bush, campaigning for the Senate thatyear, came out against the Civil RightsAct. Ronald Reagan, then a popular con-servative speaker preparing to run forgovernor of California, ~trongly opposedit. During the Lott affair, the commenta-tor Charles Krauthammer, in a dump-

Martin Luther King,Jr:, a week before hi assassination, at a demo~stration in Memphis. Photograph by Ernest C. Withers.

86 THE NEW YOI\KEI\, FEBI\UAI\Y 10, 2003

ers,

and there is a lot of material thatdemonstrates what a loss it was when thebig-format mass magazines Life, Look,Colliers, and The Saturday Evening Postwent out of business. Among the specificattractions of the volumes are contribu-tions by Louis E. Lomax, writing as asecret sharer about life inside the black es-tablishment; Michael Thelwell, who per-forms a similar function for the radicalstudent movement, and also writes beau-

work,

at least in these pages, is just asgood or better. Journalists} didn't startreading

until they were in the settledcolumnist-essayist phase of ilieir careers--like Carl T. Rowan and Dan Wakefield-appear here as reporters on the scene. TheNegro press, which was then vital aridimportant, is well represented, wiili first-

rate articles from the Pittsburgh Courier,the Baltimore Afro-American, and theNew YorkAmsterdam News, among oth-

who wotild have wanted a definition of"reporting civil rights" so strict that itexcluded them?

Many (amous bylines-Joan Did-ion, David Halberstam, Tom Wicker,Hunter S. Thompson, John Steinbeck,

oj Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, John~. Hersey, Garry Wills, and Alice Walker,

8 to name a few-appear in "Reporting§ Civil Rights," but it's a particular pleasure

~to read less well-known writers whose

THE NEW YOI\KEI\, FEBI\UAI\Y 10, 2003 87

unseating the N.AA.C.P. from its tradi-

tional position of dominance), a remak-

ing of black consciousness, left-wing eco-

nomic policies, better jobs and better

housing for blacks, and black political

power. Although the movement was

bira,cial, and wouldn't have succeeded if

it hadn't been, its white and black mem-

bers generally had different views of what

its main purpose was-the whites being

much more likely to think of colorblind-

nessand integration as the goals, the

blacks being more likely to think in terms

of racial adVancement. King made a point

of befriending Malcolm X, who re~ly

said that he wasn't interested in civil rights

or integration; and Kings well-publicized

association with Stokely Cartnichae~6f

SNCC, didn't end when, in 1966, Cat-

.mchaelunveilecithe electrifying, polariz-

ing,and implicitly non-nonviolent phrase

"blat:kpower," during a match that fea-

tured them both. When the movement

succeeded , ik wasn't com pletel y clear

whichele.nent was winning, and that

;tmbigUitysurvives toda~t's why both

sides m thea£f1rnlative-actionfight,fot

exatriple,can claim to be pursuing ~e

true g-oals Qfthe civil~.ri g hts movement..-

tively risk~free for the perpetrators. Thecorrosive terror of living with the con-stant possibility of unpunishable vi~~tism comes across vividly in "ReportingCivil Rights." In 1942, Hugh Gloster,a professor of English at Morehous~College, was taken off a bus in Missis~sippi and beaten so badly that he hadto be "taken to the hospitll-not acriine,In 1961, Herbert Lee, a Ne~o Cottonfanner in Mississippi who had tried toregister to vote, was shot in the head atpomt-bl~ range, in a public plilce inbroad daylight, by a white state legis~~tor-not a crime. This sort of low-grade,and sometimes not so low~grade, terror-ism continued through the sixties. InOxford in 1962, se~eg:Jctionlst snipersfired freely on m~mbersoftheNationaIGuard. In Jackson in 1963, MedgarEvers, the field secie:t~ofclieMissis~sippi N.A.AC.P.,was~neddown infront. of his house. Th<,1963 churchbombingin Binninghatri iliatkilledtbur

.c ","'."girls came ~t the end of fifty~~- Ne~obombings, it11 unsolved by the localau+thoricies~lnPhi1~delphi~Mississippi, in

1964,thre:youpg civil-rights workerswere mUtd~r~dby the Klai1, and th~irbodies buried iQ ~dw,with the active

support of~etoWn's topIaw~eriorcementofficl~.,Arid thes~ were cases involviQ,gr~sp~tabl~middle~claSs peop~e, not theVuln~r.ableblack poor, who had it f~rworse.. In "L~tter from~BitniinghamJail,"writt!::n justa few rnonthsb!::torf: the

"J.haveadre~' speech, King convo/sthissens!:: ofindigtlityand~sure with,remarkable power:

tifully; August Meier, who contributed avery smart essay on King, which, as awork of analysis, stands out in a collectionthat is naturally much stronger on dra-matic firsthand descriprion; and WilliamBradford Huie, the hot-blooded inves-

tigative reporter who bribed confessionsout of the murderers of Emmett Till.The outstanding piece of investigarivereporringis an hour-by-hour inside ac-count of the integration of the Universityof Mississippi, in .1962. The authors,

George B. Leonard, T George Harris,and Christopher S. Wren, con~ boththete~violen~eand danger of thatevent (for a while, it looked as if the seg-regationist mob wollidactually defeat thefederal for~es)~d the duplicity of Gov.'emor Ross Barnett, who kept ~akingand breaking deals with the KennedyAdministration while thesituatiot) it)Oxford spun out of cQntrol.

Wh ' ~~1. bl b t "ri rtats most v~ua e a Ou i;\.epo -

ingCivilRight$"is that it provides a his;tory of the civil",rightsmovementwntteIib 1 h , all d "

ky peope ~o:~er~nt owe to pe.e

ahead to the et)ding.A1Ithecompl~tyand cQnringen~of themQvementcomesthrough; it becomes bard to ar~e that

~e m?vement.was ce~trally.a~out ~ekind of color.blind,meqtQcratl~ Ideology;n-.pliedb~y Kin g's "contentof ottrcharac,..~" .' :'

tern rhetorl~:Eventh~name isrilislea~,...". .:'-

because itymplies that Qve~ngtheSouth's]imCrQwfuw$was the on~g-reat,agre~d~upon cause. As "RepotriJ1g CivilRights" m~$clear,there weres~vera1disrinctele~ents within the mQv~m~nt:Old Lefties,iIicluding sQme Commu.nist8; NeW Leftie8; labor unionists; black

natiQna1ists;~4i"chpeopl~;andlibera1 do-gooders. Henceth~ movemet)t'smany~ontendit)g and sometimes conffi~tiIiggQalS, among them changes in th~strtic-tur~ of Negro leadership (in p~<;ti1ar,

T ...he racial problem that makes th~

strongest [mpres$ioninme pages of"Repo~CiVi.lRights".is not le~ seg-rega

ti Oh{ whi cl1 many African-Amen Cil11s

didtit mind thenwd£eel nost~c abO~t

now)b~tSQmethihg roQre ba$ic: fear and

alackofdignio/Jtse~ms almost tooob-.." V10~s tomennon thatd\lPng]trnCrQw

b.lackpeople.inmeSo~m did not havereliabl~ recourse to cl1e)egal system; even

if mQst whites were ~enign, those whowerentcoQId

dQ anything they wanted toa NegrQ and g~tawayWim it. ViolenceWi~

theb.laCkcommunityus~allywent

officially unpunished, so.it, too, was re.la-

Perhqps it is easy for thos~whohaven~ver fe!tt?~,stingihg darts of $~gr~gqtiO?t?say "Walt." But ~h~nyouhav~ s,eenv!-ClOUS mobs lyn~h yourmoth~rs Mdfqth~rs at~ill ql)d drown ypursistersqnd brothers atWhim; when youha.v~ seen hate-fill~d P94~e-men cUrs~, kickqud eV~ri kill your blackbrothers andsist~~$ ~ifu~punity;whe~ yousee the vast majority of your 20 millionNegro brothers smothering in an qir-tightcag~ of poverty in the midst of an afflu~ntsociety.. .w~en rpu are harried by day andhaunted by night by the fact that you are aNegro, never quite knowing what to exp!:ctneXt, and you are plagued with inner fearsand outer resentments; when you are for~verfighting a degenerating s~nse of "nobodi-ness" -then you will understand why we findit difficult to wait.

The problem that King is discussing1

"This is not about Schmidt- its about you.

flere

IS, m some ways, a very old one:black people had never been treated the

same as everybody else in America. Butthe period of waiting really dated backto Reconstruction. President Lincoln is-sued the Emancipation Proclamationin 1863, and Congress and the statespassed the Thirteenth Amendment,which abolished slavery, in 1865. TheFourteenth Amendment (1868) gavethe freed slaves legal rights, and the Fif-teenth (1870) gave them the right tovote. The former Confederacy acceptedthe Thirteenth Am~ndment, but thoughit voted for the others, it nullified themin practice. During Reconstruction, itbecame obvious that, especially in thedeep South, the Fourteenth and Fif-teenth Amendments would be withouteffect unless federal troops came to theSouth and enforced them at gunpoint.Support for this died out quickly in theNorth and never existed in the South,and the last time it happened in post-bellum America was inJanuary, 1875, inNew Orleans and Vicksburg, Missis-sippi. Reconstruction ended formally; in1877, on the explicit understanding thatthe federal government would no longerintervene militarily to enforce the Four-teenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

This bargain that the South madewith the nation as a whole-:- ThirteenthAmendment yes, Fourteenth and Fif-teenth no--was durable to the point ofseeming unchangeable. For much of thetwentieth century, civil rights for Ne-groes weren't even on the liberal agenda.President. Woodrow Wilson honoredD. W. Griffith's pro-Klan "Birth of aNation" with a White House screening.President Franklin Roosevelt, who wasprobably the most powerful liberal poli-tician in American history, and whosewife was a crusader on the subject, didnot attempt to dismande segregation.The South was an essential element inthe Democratic Party's coalition, afterall; and the country as a whole was, atbest, unused to thinking of segregation asa problem. So the civil-rights movementhad to pursue a series of related proj-ects: awakening the long-slumberingracial conscience of non-Southern whiteAmericans; organizing the black Southpolitically by nontraditional means (sincemost black Southerners were prohib-ited from voting); changing the con-sciousness of all of black America tobe less accepting of the situation; and,critically important, persuading the fed-

era! government not just to endorse themovement's goals but to use its powerto enforce them.

with white-resistance villains like BullConnor, Jim Clark, and George Wal-lace-profoundly affected events inWashington. The real fruit of the Birm-ingham campaign was the 1964 CivilRights Act, the real fruit of the Selmacampaign the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The movement's success dependedupon a ricochet effect among the vari-ous power centers of American society,

and the press was only oneof them. Thurgood Marshalland the N.A.A.C.P. LegalDefense Fund began filinglawsuits against- segregatededucational institutions backin the thirties. The SecondWorld War subjected North-ern black soldiers to Southernsegregation (both in the mili-

~ --tary, which maintai:t1ed segre-

gated units throughout the war, and inthe civilian world, when they were onleave) and gave Southern black soldiersa taste of life outside the Jim Crow sys-tem, and this, thanks in part to publicityin the Negro press, inflamed black publicopinion. These wartime sentiments pro-duced federal anti-discrimination execu-tive orders signed by Roosevdt and HarryTruman.They helped spur the very earlyinterstate bus rides by the Fellowshipof Reconciliation. The Brown decisionhelped inspire the Montgomery move-,ment. The Montgomery movement'ssuccess and the attendant publicity con-tributed to President Eisenhower's deci-sion to send federal troops to Lillie Rock.And so on. This kind of multilayered,

cross-jurisdictional activitywas necessarybecause the opposition to the movementwas a lot more powerful and sophisticatedthan the gap-toothed Klansmen and cor-pulent small-town sheriffs who were itspublic foils. The Brown cases, for exam-ple, p~tted Marshall against, among oth-ers, a former Secretary of State,James F.Byrnes, and a former Democratic Presi-dential nominee, John W. Davis; our cur-rent Chief Justice, then a Supreme Courtlaw clerk, wrote a memorandum to hisboss laying out a justification for a dissentfrom the unanimous decision.

q}~

~

T he anthology's first document isA. Philip Randolph's call, in 1941,

for a march on Washington "for jobsand equal participation in national de-fense" (Franklin Roosevelt, through per-suasion and c,?ncession, forestalled themarch), and following it area number of pieces demon- ~strating that attempts to eraseinformal "color lines" in thehousing and job markets, .INegro voter-registration ef-forts in the South, and the re-fusal of blacks to sit in theback of the bus all predatedwhat we now think of as thebeginning of the civil-rights _d.-movement. The struggle was necessarilywaged on m~y fronts, and one of themost important was the press; in fact,as "Reporting Civil Rights"rerninds us,much of the press was effectively partof the movement, and an indispensablepart. One reason that the Montgomerybus boycott was a breakthrough was thatit made Martin Luther King the move-ment's first true media star. King wasshockingly young and oratorically spec-tacular, and the national press-in par-ticular, Time and L.if~onferred a ce-lebrity status on him that it had nevergiven A Philip Randolph,RoyWilkins,Bayard Rustin, Thurgood Marshall, orany of the movement's earlier leaders.King and his 'advisers had a 'genius forgenerating publicity that engaged thesympathies of liberal whites in the North.It wasn't just the strategy of nonviolenceand the rhetoric of hope and redemp-tion that made King successful; it wasthe staging of events in order to play tothe national audience. King's local at-tempts to achieve broad-gauge progressfor blacks failed repeatedly in North-ern cities like Chicago and Cleveland;in Southern towns like Albany, Georgia,and St. Augustine, Florida; and even,arguably, in the movement's sacred sites,like Birmingham, Montgomery, andSelma. But King was great at losing thebattle '?Ihile winning the war-in Au-gust Meier's phrase, at producing "localfailure :and national victory." The ongo-ing real-life morality play he mounted-in which civil-rights heroes contended

"R eporting Civil Rights" has a fewlacunae (where's Gunnar Myrdal?),

but the most important absence is ofmaterial hostile to the civil-rights move-:-ment. Having made the decision not to

THE NEW YORKE!\, FEBRUARY 10, 2003

limit themsdves to journalism per se, theeditors had the opportunity to give ussome flavor of the conversation amongthe movement's adversaries, as they do sowell for the conversation among its allies.But the ideological range of the piecesruns from journalistic-neutral to left;by my count, there are only two contribu-tions from conservatives, Norman Pod-horetz's "My Negro Problem~AndOurs," and Tom Wolfe's "Mau-Mauingthe Flak-Catchers," and neither of thosewriters was so identified at the time thathe published his article. Only one piecein "Reporting Civil Rights," a long, over-wrought excerpt from a 1956 book byRobert Penn Warren called "Segregation:The Inner Conflict in the South," getsacross the feding of the respectable whitesentiment that I~ uparourid in Lou-isiana--opposed to civil rights, but \¥ithapaternalism that was deeply convinced ofits own benevolence and painful honestyabout the race problem, and deeply em-barrassed by the lynchings and snarlingmobs that were what the North knew ofsegregationism. (If only the movementhad been more patient, the patricianwhite South thought, it wouldn't havebrought such creatures crawling out ofthe swamp.) It's true that, as several con-tribuhons say in passing, a goPd deal ofthe written casea,~nst civil rights tookthe form of crude mimeogra,phs a,ndnewsletters, but th~re were also publica,-tions, like the Dan Smoot Report and theJohn Birch Society's AmeriCan Opinion,thatwere hardly less mainstream than, onthe left, the Southern Patriot or Ramparts,which did make the cut for "ReportingCivil Rights" -.-and there was the entirelypresentable work of James J. Kilpatrick,then the editorial-page editor of the Rich-mond News Leader, and soon to be afamiliar Washington columnist and tde-vision personality. Here's a passage fromhis 1962 book "The Southern Case forSchool Segregation":

Manifestly, the resistance to a coercedracial "equaliry" is wide and deep. Why is thisso? The answer, in blunt speech, is that theNegro race, as a race, has not earned equaliry.And as I have attempted to argue earlier, it isa feeble and evasive response to accuse thewhite critic, in making that flat statement, ofemulating the child who shot his parents andthen pleaded for mercy as an orphan. Thefailure of the Negro race, as a race, to achieveequaliry cannot be blamed wholly on whiteoppression. This'is the excuse, the crutch, thepiteous and finally pathetic defense of Ne-

progression of black Southerners froman oppressed caste to an interest group;on August 11 th, in Los Angeles, theWatts riot'-Vividly and terrifyingly de-scribed in several pieces in "ReportingCivil Rights" -broke out. The riot lastedmost of a week and left thirty-four peo-ple dead, in addition to destroying muchof a large black neighborhood and muchof white America's store of racial goodwill. After Watts, the bulk of the ma-terial in "Reporting Civil Rights" is adispiriting succession of riots, murders(including King's), unsuccessful cam-paigns, renunciations of nonviolence,factionalism, and black-white fights. (In1966, John Lewis, the firebrand of theMarch on Washington, was ousted fromSNCC for being too moderate.) But thesummer of 1965 wasn't so obvious aturning point within the movement atthe time as it now appears to have been,and the anthology makes it clear whynot. Nearly everything about the move-ment was improvised and almost ac~cidental. The two shiIilmeringpeaks ofKing's career were the 1963 March onWashington and the 1965 Sehna-to~Montgomery march, which ended ina speech arguably even more dramaticand better than "I have a dream"~theone delivered from the steps of the Al-abama state capitol, with a refrain of"How long? Not long." But King hadoriginally planned to skip the Se1ri1a-to~Montgomery march; only when thesituation escalated did he realize thathe had made a mistake and rush to thescene. Given that none of the importantorganizations in the civil~rights move-ment thought that its purpose was lim-ited to achieving "civil rights," the move-ment couldn't declare victory after theVoting Rights Act and go home; instead,for all its successes, it had to endure thepain of failure, a sense of what had notyet been achieved.

Even now, it would be a mistake tothink that civil rights belongs to therealm of settled opinion, requiring of usonly the kind of easy, post-facto approvalthat Trent Lott managed to bungle. TheSupreme Co~ is about to hear argu-ments in a monumental case onaffirma-tive action in university admissions. Theinstitutional defendant is the Universityof Michigan, but the case is the culmi~nation of a string of conservative anti-affirmative-action activities that began in

T he glory days of the civil-rightsmovement came to an end in the

summer of 1965. On August 6,1965,President Lyndon Johnson signed theVoting Rights Act, which signalled the

90 THE NEW 'rOI\KEI\, FEBI\UAI\Y 10, 2003

grophiles unable or willing to face reality. Inother times and other places, sturdy, creative,and self-reliant minorities have carved outtheir own destiny; they have compelled ac-ceptanceon their own merit; they have dem-onstrated those qualities of leadership and re-sourcefulness and disciplined ambition that inthe end cannot ever be denied. But the Negrorace, as a race, has done none of this.

The white South's argument againstthe civil~rights movement always had atleast three dements: in addition to theracial one that KilpatriCk was making,there was the idea that the movement wasa Trojan horse filled with Communists .and other radicals who wanted to changesociety wholesale, and there was opposi~tion to the use of federal power to over-'turn local cust<;>ms. You almost never seesentiments like Kirkpatrick's in print any-more, and the radical left no longer pre-sents a plausible danger, but hostility to-ward the federal government is a far moreimportant dement in American conser-vatism today than it was during the civil-rights movement. At a time when themovement begins to seem safe, neutral,and inarguable, it's worth recalling thatcoercive federal power really was crucialto its success. The civil-rights revolutionreestablished the principle that the federalgovernment would, after nearly a century'sretreat, again assume responsibility forenforcing the Fourteenth and FifteenthAmendments in the South. In Congress,the bitterest fights about civil-rights leg-islation were always over the question offederal enforcement power, which, for theSouth, was the most objectionable aspect.The .1957 Civil Rights Act is relativelylitde re{!1embered because the enforce-ment provisions were stripped out beforeCongress passed it; the 1964 act and the1965 Vocing Rights Act were landmarks,and finally made the Fourteenth and Fif-teenth Amendments real in the South,precisely because they provided for federalenforcement. Federal troops were presentat one milestone event after another dur-

ing the movement's heyday-indeed,their arrival was the milestone. You haveto wonder how, in a country that has be-come far more suspicious of the federalgovernment, they'd be received today.

The

Inquisitors' Manual, by Ant6nioLobo

Antunes, translated from the Portugueseby

Richard Zenith (Grove; 125). "We for-

get everything, we forget everything for-

ever and ever,': an old soldier declares

about die nearly four decades when Por-

tugallanguished under the regime of An-

tonio de Oliveira Salazar. But no one can,d "Th I ..' M al". . Ian e nqUlsltors anu is a SWlr

of narratives and perspectives revolvingaround the family of a powerful, eccentric

oligarch in Salazar's government. These

orbits are wide: not only ministers but

veterinarians, housekeepers, and social

workers all have their say: Lobo Antunes,

one of the most skillful psychologicalportraitists writing anywhere, renders the

turpitude of an entire society through an

impasto of intensely individual voices.

Unable to filter present from past, dia-

logue from echo, his multiple narrators

bring us with thenias they eddy-throughthe dark backwaters of a losthalf,..century.

ument but also as a multipurpose scien-tific instrument, including "a zenith tele-scope, with lenses at ground and upper-platform levels."

Wrapped

in Rainbows, by Valerie Boyd(Scribner; 130). The novelist, folklorist,and playwright Zora Neale Hurston liveda life easily equal to the drama of her bestnovels. Although her ambitions took herfar from the all-black town of Eatonville,Florida, where she grew up, her intellec~tual and emotional roots remained in itswatery environs, where tellirig taU taleswas a way of life. She told a few taU talesherself: especially in her autobiography,"Dust Tracks on a Road." But what canlying about one's ~e or about how manyhusbands one had matter in the face ofhaving escaped Eatonville to study atBarnard? Hurston's significance as an an-,thropologist should not be .underesti-mated. She made her readers see theuniqueness of black Ainerican speech byprinting it the way it was said. Boyd is toolaudatory in her approach, but this is aconvincing attempt to make sense of a life

that continues to defy categorization.

Ona Grander Scale: The OutstandingLife of Sir Christopher Wren, by LisaJardine (HarperCo/lins; $34.95), Thisen~grossing biography charts Wren'strajec-tory from mathematical prodigy who in-vented transparent beehives and a copyingmachine to England's greatest architect,who rebUilt much of London-most fa-mously St. Paul's Cathedral-:-aftertheGreat Fire of 1666. Wren later claimedto regard all ente~rises involving stoneand mortar as "rubbish," and was prouderof his work as an astronomer and anat-omist. His extraordinary versatility" andindustry give Jardine the opporturiity toexamine the political and~cientific con~stellations of Restoration England. Suchis, her feel for the subject that, when shesees a long-forgotten basement roomdirecdy underneath Wren's Monumentto the Great Fire, she immediately re'"alizes that it is a laboratory~that thebUilding was qesigned not only as a mon-

1995 with something called the Califor-nia Civil Rights Initiative, which usedKing as its patron saint until it becameclear that King had actually been a sup~porter of affirmative action. Although Ididn't notice a single reference to affir-mative action, pro or con, in the nearly.nineteen hundred pages of "ReportingCivil Rights," the Michigan case is reallyan o~c continuation of the events de-scribed in these books. Beginning in theforties, at least part of the civil-rightsmovement devoted itself primarily to de-manding more and better jobs for Ne-groes outside the segregated South. Whenthese efforts were successful, the usual re-sult was proto-affinnative-actionpoliciesby state fair-employment commissions,under which the ordinary job qualifica-tions would be set aside so that Negroescould be hired. The spectre of such pro-grams haunted the debate over the 1964Civil Rights Act, and the act containedanamendrnent prohibiting them. But,once it became law, the act quickly led tothe establishment of federal affinnative-action pro~s, and no civil...rights or-ganization, across a wide ideologicalrange, seems to have objected.

The movement began with as~gglefor political change without the benefitof either votes or public opinion, and itbecame expert at using the courts andre~atory agencies to get results thatlacked popular support. It's doubtfulwhether :a plebiscite would have ap-proved affirmative action in the firstplace. But history rolls onward: today onecan't run for national office as a Demo-craiwithout declaring support fOT affir-mative action, as SenatoT Joseph Lie-berman demonstrated when, on beingnominated for Vice-President, he re-nounced his previous doubt; even Presi-dent Bush has made a point of avoidinga frontal assault on affirmative action-for example, declining to ask the Su~preme Court to use the Michigan casesas the occasion simply to ban the useof race in college admissions.,Big socialissues of this sort are always in con-tention. "Reporting Civil Rights" is reallya chronicle of one long season in Amer-ica's ongoing political battles over race.A major legacy of the civil-rights move-ment is that those battles are far less in-tense and destructive now than theyweteduring the period covered in the anthol-ogy. But they are by no means over. .

Starving to Death on $200 Million, byJames Ledbetter (PubliCAffairs; $26). In theyear 2000, the Industry StandarJ-.-thewould-be bible of the New Econom~ap~aredto be one of the most successfulmagazines in history, with more thanseven thousand ad pages and projectedrevenues 0f two hundred inillion dollars.The next year, it went out of business.This self-lacerating postmortem by themagazine's former European editor showsthat the Standard was doomed by earlysuccess. Unbridled optimism led to wilds~nding, dubious side projects,- and anunwillingness to make hard decisions.The Standard, then, was just like the dot-corns it ~ote about, and so the story ofthe magazine's failure becomes a parableabout the era of the bubble. Ledbetter's

account of the backroom negotiationsthat attended the Standards demise dragsin places, but he is adept at capturing boththe late-nineties atmosphere of irrationalexuberance and the bitter, hung-over feel-

ingthat followed.

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THE NEW YORKER, FEBI\UARY 10, 2003 91