- News source:
- 9 December 2009
- Nashville Arts Scene
- By Lyda Phillips
In a new book, Andrew B. Lewis follows the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and its leaders from Nashville’s north side into the heart of Dixie
The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation
By Andrew B. Lewis
Hill and Wang, 356 pp., $28
Nashville’s north side had it all going on in the late 1950s. Jefferson Street was jumping with students from Fisk, Meharry Medical College, Tennessee State and American Baptist Theological College. The clubs along the strip between Fisk and TSU were packed with kids out to hear Jimi Hendrix, Little Richard, Tina Turner and Ray Charles. The postwar economic boom had brought new prosperity to the entire country, and teenagers, black and white, bopped to the beat, self-identifying as part of a new, hipper culture.
In that electric atmosphere, a group of earnest and thoughtful Nashville students became leaders in one of history’s most impressive—and successful—mass movements, as they threw their bodies, their very lives, on the line to end segregation in the South. The Shadows of Youth: The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation by Andrew B. Lewis is a new look at this era, examined through the lens of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and its leaders—Diane Nash, John Lewis, Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael, Marion Barry, Bob Zellner and Julian Bond.
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