SIT-INS AND FREEDOM

...Here are three books about the South that deal with symbols, memories, and facts...

...During the Knoxville lunch counter sit-in demonstrations, I had the privilege of sitting at the counters daily with my Negro friends and serving as a member of the council that devised the strategy for the protest...

...Indeed, the ostrich-like pose of these sophisticated and urbane businessmen made way for the stupid and .brutal physical attack they would find so deplorable if they read of it in the news...

...How to meet the internal tensions of the Negro community and the chasm between economics and morality in the white community...

...Of his personal involvements, Peck tells of experiences as a student at Harvard, a pacifist who spent three years in prison during World War II, and one who endured numerous beatings during the summer of 1954 in a successful effort to end discrimination at Palisades Amusement Park's swimming pool in New Jersey...

...Freedom Ride, by James Peck...

...A large portion of his book is an account of the activities of CORE since its first group was organized in Chicago in 1942...

...Six months later, a bi-racial team testing new Interstate Commerce Commission regulations was served without incident in the very bus terminal where Peck and others had been beaten...

...Simon and Schuster...

...I am white by race and an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church...

...Confronted again and again with these and other searching questions, thoughtful Americans of many persuasions will do well to read or reread Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream...

...As Dr?': Frank P. Graham says in his For*, word, it is "a very human story of nobility and frailty, courage and timidity, honest fears and humane hopes, wisdom and folly, faith and hazards...

...Even then Killers of the Dream will live as a testament to the warm humanity and cool intelligence that helped us win through to our own best selves...

...It has to true itself with facts but also with feelings and symbols, and memories that are never quite facts but some times closer to the 'truth' than is any fact...

...Where are the "heroes" and the "villains" of these human dramas...

...How to cope with the fact that "declared non-resistance brings out the bully in those who are inclined to be bullies...

...Proudfoot's effort to see and understand the varieties of background, personality, and commitment among the people he came to know in this experience is impressive...

...Proudfoot was manhandled by white hoodlums, and he includes that encounter with raw hate as part of his story...

...How to make certain that trouble-making youths of both races would not vitiate the possibility of non-violent persuasiveness...

...Where protest in this country is permitted, change is probable and progress is possible...

...How to answer the challenge of the stubborn businessman who insisted, "When the churches are integrated, then we can expect the stores to follow...

...The school is a coeducational liberal arts college operated by the United Presbyterian Church and attended primarily by Negro students...

...It is necessary to note that both are written by white men who have participated to the point of physical violence (received, not inflicted) in overt efforts to secure specific freedoms for Negroes...

...Both men accept non-violence as a philosophy of life and examine, in varying degrees of depth, its larger implications...

...He also emphasizes that Mayor John Duncan of Knoxville exerted genuine leadership in the situation and even took two Knoxville College students and two Chamber of Commerce officials to New York to confer with executives of four dime store chains in regard to desegregating their counters before the demonstrations began—but the New York executives would not even see the students...

...What are the fears that freeze many of their supporters in immobility...

...From what depths boils such anger and cruelty as that encountered by a Proudfoot or a Peck...

...This was a turning-point in the developing chronology of the sit-in...

...Legal compliance is far from complete, however, and Peck also suggests that non-violent demonstrations are far from over...

...Until quite recently, the lofty grandeur of the Supreme Court chambers in Washington, the hushed courtrooms of many a state capital, and the fly-specked offices of local lawyers in dozens of little towns and burgeoning cities throughout the South seemed to be the places where the most current and effective offense was being waged against racial segregation...

...Then came those movements called the sit-ins and the freedom rides...

...Some of our most lively literature has come from this tradition of protest and progress...

...The Diary is a careful, thoughtful, thorough record of a month and a half beginning in June, 1960...

...the wholeness of man standing on the earth reaching toward the stars...

...With comments on the recent sit-ins and freedom rides, she "up-dates" a book that will not be outdated until our thorniest domestic problem has disappeared and the chasm between peoples has been bridged by a more perfect communication...

...Sparked at first by the impulses and actions of college students, they marked the beginning of a new phase in "race relations...

...They neither discarded nor superseded other, earlier phases—not school desegregation nor fair employment op portunities, and most certainly not the cumulative legal structure which has been and must continue to be built stone by stone as the minority's bulwark against all oppression...

...How to communicate to the whole community that this protest was not conducted by outsiders seeking ulterior gains but was a local action springing from a firm conviction in every customer's right to be treated with equal respect in every department of a store seeking his patronage...

...James Peck's Freedom Ride is diffused over a wider stretch of time than Proudfoot's Sit-In, is no less intense in feeling, and has somewhat fewer probings into the whys and wherefores of either his friends' support or his enemies' ferocity...

...160 pp...

...But they did extend the realm of action and enlarge the opportunity of personal commitment in a struggle to show white citizens just how oppressive segregation really is, and to show Negro citizens just how close desegregation may really be...

...Between the time of his first freedom ride in 1947 through the upper South, and the famous ride in May, 1961, through the deep South, Peck was engaged in many non-violent activities of the Congress of Racial Equality...

...It is not surprising, therefore, to find these two books by new frontiersmen of desegregation, Diary of A Sit-In and Freedom Ride...

...How to arouse the full support of Negro ministers and leaders who, with a few notable exceptions, often had to be pushed into the vanguard by their own followers...

...What recesses of the human heart are probed, what resources of the human spirit are drained, or renewed, in this continuing struggle over race...

...This book tells the story of that demonstration from the first sit-in to the day of desegregation...

...And, always, how to judge one's own motives—and the final success of the sit-in...

...3.50 Reviewed by Wilma Dykeman "Ty/iUTiNG," says Lillian Smith in " her Foreword to this new edition of her classic Killers of the Dream, "is both horizontal and vertical exploration...

...The problems of the sit-in, as related by Professor Proudfoot, were varied and required a wide range of responses...

...This brutality in "Alabama in New Jersey," as he calls it, helped prepare Peck for that vicious attack in Birmingham, when the police were notably absent and the mob was notably present, after which his head required fifty-three stitches...

...Proudfoot describes his Diary thus: "When the events recorded in this diary took place, I had been for three years a professor of religion and philosophy at Knoxville College in Knoxville, Tennessee...

...This revised and enlarged edition of her 1949 landmark reminds us again of her powerful artistry with words, her unflinching courage in searching for truth...

...These are a few of the larger questions posed by Proudfoot's experience...

...Her insights are rare and keen, her memories of a Southern childhood are steeped in compassion and concern but never sentimentality, and her important message to a fragmented South—and a world torn asunder—is to seek wholeness...