Leslie W. Dunbar

Asked to write "a retrospect and prospect on civil rights," I demurred. I have had to realize that I am not able, especially as to prospects, to offer anything like a definitive theme. Racism, not civil rights—which is first of all a legal value— [...]

Distinctions there still are between the South and the rest of the country, but not very interesting ones. Praise of the unique Southern cuisine or spiritual, country, and Appalachian folk music can carry regional celebrants only so far. In most qu [...]

Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta, By Ronald H. Bayor. North Carolina. $29.95. The proud and vaunting invite sharp-edged scrutiny, and on that score, as on its demerits, Atlanta is fair game. Ronald Bayor ably measures its realities [...]

Brown v. Board of Education was 40 tumultuous years ago. It had come 40 years after the start of World War I, which seemed then as it does now a darkly ancient time, whereas 1954 feels, at least to me, hardly more than the day before yesterday. Our [...]

It is good to have Anne C. Loveland's Lillian Smith: A Southerner Confronting the South (Louisiana $22.50), because she was a creative, wise, and strong person, and because Professor Loveland respects her enough, takes her seriously enough, to writ [...]

From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration, 1954–1978, by J. Harvie Wilkinson, III. Oxford. $17.95 J. Harvie Wilkinson has given us a deeply thoughtful study of the course since 1954 of the law of school desegregation (or [...]

Knowledge and Decisions. By Thomas Sowell. Basic Books. $18. 50. This is a long, and slow, book. It is written from a compelling sense of urgency, even anxiety, about public affairs. It is obviously intended by its author, a widely heard economist [...]

The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. By David J. Garrow. Norton. $15.95. Why the South Will Survive. By Fifteen Southerners. Georgia. $16.00 cloth, $8.00 paper. David J. Garrow concludes his excellent book by calling for close study of why the FBI [...]

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 poss [...]