For most of humanity's poor and discarded, change— real, useful social change—is as elusive, and as seductive, as the Holy Grail. For a great many in an American generation coming of age in the 1960's, the civil rights movement showed the possibility of change. It did so as well for some in older and later generations. That was its true and great achievement.

It was peculiarly wrought change, perhaps only arguably replicable elsewhere. Its twin and complementary engines were popular protest and courtroom litigation; both were led by the oppressed themselves. The one claimed and measuredly received the protection of a written and enforceable Constitution. The other invoked its declarations and insisted upon their observance.

The uniqueness was deepened by the nature of the combatants, that is, those particular blacks and whites. We American whites were, by and large, as crudely prejudiced and despising as people anywhere have allowed themselves to become. Yet we had once fought a bloody war among ourselves over those black people we so generally contemned;