WEARY FEET, RESTED SOULS:
A Guided History of the Civil Rights Movement
By Townsend Davis
Norton, $27.50
Townsend Davis’ “Weary Feet, Rested Souls” is history for those who prefer the scholarship of the streets to that of libraries and archives. A self-guided tour to sites where the civil-rights struggle was played out, it can also provide a mind-jarring reminder of how far the country has come since the bad old days of flat-out segregation. For instance, on Feb. 1, 1960, four black college students sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., and asked in vain for a cup of coffee. It marked the beginning of the sit-in movement that would help topple segregated facilities in the South.
“Woolworth’s closed its doors here in 1993,” notes Davis, a free-lance writer whose work has appeared in the New Republic. “The final meal at the counter was attended by all four original protesters, and the management reverted to 1960 menu prices as a tribute.”
Visitors can find the spot easily, he adds: “Outside on the sidewalk are bronze footprints of the four original protesters.”
A SHINING THREAD OF HOPE:
The History of Black Women in America
By Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson
Broadway Books, $27.50
Until black Americans stood up and demanded their rightful place in American society, not just they but all minority groups were virtually excluded from historical accounts of the nation’s development. Alternately, they would be segregated into an occasional page highlighting the career of, say, a Jane Addams, the founder of the settlement-house movement, or a Sojourner Truth, the ex-slave who crusaded against slavery and for women’s rights.
Since the 1960s, though, women’s history and ethnic history have slowly but surely taken their place in the academy, as is witnessed by Darlene Clark Hine’s and Kathleen Thompson’s “A Shining Thread of Hope,” a very readable history of black women in America. Hine, a professor at Michigan State University, and Thompson, editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of Black Women, note that while it intersects with the general story of the women’s liberation movement, the history of black women has been unique, even in its most recent chapters, when older barriers have been falling.
“When ambitious, educated black women step into the mainstream, they take along with them sons or nephews who are being shot at in the neighborhoods,” Hine and Thompson observe. “They bring a history so different from any America has ever dealt with in her senators and CEOs that it is impossible to ignore.”
FROM OUT OF THE SHADOWS:
Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America
By Vicki L. Ruiz
Oxford University Press, $30
Vicki L. Ruiz reports in her brief but provocative survey of Mexican-American women in the 20th Century that her interest in scholarship goes back to a disjunction between the two different kinds of history she learned as a child, growing up in an age when academic history was still the story of whites and males.
“My mother and grandmother would regale me with tales of their Colorado girlhoods, stories of village life, coal mines, strikes, discrimination, and family lore,” recalls Ruiz, a professor at Arizona State University. “At school, scattered references were made to Coronado, Ponce De Leon, the Alamo, and Pancho Villa. That was the extent of Latino history. Bridging the memories told at the table with printed historical narratives fueled my decision to become a historian.”
