A Children's Crusade

By LANCE MORROW

On Sunday, May 14, 1961, a Greyhound bus rolled into Anniston, Ala. A crowd of more than 150 local citizens waited at the bus station. They were surprisingly well dressed. Many of the men wore jackets and ties. Many of them carried iron pipes and baseball bats. A witness said it looked like either a lynching or a picnic.

Seven years after the Brown school- desegregation decision, six years after the Montgomery bus boycott, the Congress of Racial Equality had dispatched a few buses loaded with Freedom Riders--young Negro civil rights workers and a few whites--to challenge segregation laws in various public facilities in the Deep South. The bus driver yelled to the Anniston crowd, "Well, boys, here they are. I brought you some niggers and nigger-lovers."

The mob pounded the bus and slashed its tires. As usual, local police had a gentleman's agreement with the Ku Klux Klan and stayed away. The bus limped five miles out of town, escorted by a caravan of pickup trucks, and stopped. Someone threw a fire bomb inside, and the crowd yelled, "Roast them! Burn them alive!" The Freedom Riders staggered off the smoking bus, and as one, Hank Thomas, hit the ground, reeling from fumes, a white man asked solicitously, "Are you O.K.?" And then took a baseball bat and swung at Thomas as hard as he could.

Hell hath no fury like a guilty and vicious old feudalism dying. The conquest of legal segregation and discrimination in the South is an ugly, heroic American story that ended, officially at least, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In The Children (Random House; 783 pages; $29.95), David Halberstam takes up the narrative in early 1960, with the lunch-counter sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C., and Nashville, Tenn., that were the debut of a new civil rights generation, most of whose members were younger by five or 10 years than Martin Luther King Jr. and frustrated by the lack of change in the years after the Brown decision.

Halberstam covered the sit-ins as a 25-year-old reporter for the Nashville Tennessean. As he writes, "I knew in some instinctive way from the first time I watched the young people walk from Kelly Miller Smith's church to the Woolworth's counter that I was watching the beginning of something historic." Halberstam went on to the New York Times and to Vietnam, where his reporting on the early stages of the war won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. But over the years, he kept up with John Lewis, Marion Barry, Jim Lawson, James Bevel, Diane Nash and the other student leaders. In The Children he has produced a multilayered, loose-jointed, sprawling history of their pivotal generation and the role it played. "I can think of no occasion in recent postwar American history," Halberstam writes, "when there has been so shining an example of democracy at work because of the courage and nobility of ordinary people."

Their work was appallingly dangerous; blacks and their white allies were brutally beaten and sometimes murdered. In the early days of the civil rights movement, the law was no protection--rather the reverse. But as young John Lewis, son of poor Alabama farmers, said, "If not us, then who? If not now, then when?" Lewis, who led the marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on March 7, 1965, and went on to become a U.S. Congressman years later, emerges as a kind of saint, the best of the best.

Halberstam focuses upon the lives of eight young black college students he met in Nashville; he traces their roots back a generation or two, then follows their lives forward, after the 1960s, as they seem to dramatize every possibility of broader American life (burning out, striking it rich, getting married, getting divorced, coming out of the closet, attempting suicide--or becoming the dissolute, crack-smoking mayor of Washington, as Marion Barry did).

It is a large, gripping American story. Halberstam catches a sense of being present at the creation. In a march on the courthouse in Nashville, after a local black leader's house was bombed, a young white radical named Guy Carawan, armed with his guitar, began singing an old black church song called I'll Overcome Someday. And of course it became the anthem of the movement.

The historic moment that Halberstam has captured represents in retrospect a kind of Camelot of moral purpose and righteousness in the drama of American race. Later on, the story became unsatisfyingly complicated and intractable. And sometimes, as Halberstam says, race would become, on both sides of the color line, merely the last refuge of scoundrels.