Now with a new foreword, this timely reissue features a remarkable
collection of oral histories that trace three decades of turbulent
race relations and social change in the United States for a new
generation of activists.
One evening in 1955, Howard Spence, a Mississippi field
representative for the NAACP investigating the Emmett Till murder,
was confronted by Klansmen who burned an eight-foot cross on his
front lawn. "I felt my life wasn't worth a penny with a hole in
it." Twenty-four years later, Spence had become a respected
pillar of that same Mississippi town, serving as its first Black
alderman.
The story of Howard Spence is just one of the remarkable personal
dramas recounted in Black Lives, White Lives. Beginning in
1968, Bob Blauner and a team of interviewers recorded the words of
those caught up in the crucible of rapid racial, social, and
political change. Unlike most retrospective oral histories, these
interviews capture the intense racial tension of 1968 in real time,
as people talk with unusual candor about their deepest fears and
prejudices. The diverse experiences and changing beliefs of Blauner's
interview subjects—sixteen of them Black, twelve of them white—are
expanded through subsequent interviews in 1979 and 1986, revealing as
much about ordinary, daily lives as the extraordinary cultural shifts
that shaped them. This book remains a landmark historical and
sociological document, and an exceptional primary-source commentary
on the development of race relations since the 1960s. Republished
with a foreword by Professor Gerald Early, Black Lives, White
Lives offers new generations of scholars and activists a
galvanizing meditation on how divided America was then and still is
today.