The Heat and the Chill

...Ashmore was born and raised a white Southerner...

...Throughout his career—and perceptibly in this volume—his journalist's instincts have prevailed: curiosity, skepticism, a sense of humor and of irony, a certain detachment...

...These two recent volumes belong to that tradition...

...with so many other preoccupations, race is on the back burner, an un-cured cancer temporarily in remission...

...For as long as there have been white and black people on this continent, fire and ice have been between them—and for almost as long, there have been books and other writings to describe the heat and the chill...

...Vincent Harding's There Is a River (subtitled The Black Struggle for Freedom in America) is a radical historian's meticulously documented chronicle of the Afro-American experience from the beginning of European colonization to the end of the Civil War...

...Harding and Ashmore probably would find much to criticize in each other's book—and those unexplored and undiscussed and unresolved differences help to explain why race is still an American dilemma...

...Vincent Harding, now a theologian at the University of Denver, and Harry Ashmore, living in active retirement in Santa Barbara, symbolize the two principal left-of-center schools of thought on the race issue...

...As different as they are—and they are vastly different in style, in perspective, in philosophy, in focus—the labors of Vincent Harding and Harry Ashmore give us two informed views of the same complex subject...

...Whatever else may be said about these two books, however, they are not pessimistic...

...John Egerton (John Egerton, a free-lance writer based in Nashville, wrote "The Americanization of Dixie" and "Visions of Utopia...

...But Harding, black chauvinist or revisionist historian or storyteller supreme—or all of these—has got the essential facts firmly in hand, whatever may be said of his interpretations...

...They are stimulating, instructive, exceedingly well written—and ultimately frustrating, reflecting as they do the permanent and continuing reality of racial division in the United States...

...the one is an intense observer who yearns to participate, the other a reluctant participant who prefers to observe...

...Both destinations seem so remote as to be almost unreachable...

...he views the black masses as a struggling, rising, surging river (the metaphorical "River" of his book's title) that one day will sweep over the land...

...not least, he has a well-developed knack for original expression...

...Skip ahead now from 1865 to 1932, where Harry Ashmore's book begins, and there you will find the sins of the grandfathers and fathers visited upon the sons...

...Ashmore's Hearts and Minds (words taken from the Supreme Court's famous Brown opinion) is subtitled The Anatomy of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan...

...His interpretations, inevitably, are open to debate and dissent...

...Harding ascribes to the body of captive Africans and their descendants a collective prescience and militance that seem at times beyond human capability...

...Whites, on the other hand—excepting only the fiery John Brown and perhaps one or two others—take on an unrelieved quality of bigoted sameness...

...The stories are heroic, romantic, spellbinding...

...Even some of the staunchest black heroes, notably Frederick Douglass and Martin De-lany, are portrayed in the end as co-opted puppets of the white power elite...

...But in this time of suspended animation, nobody talks much about separatism or integration...

...Their books deal with different periods from opposite perspectives, and in the end they seem to point in quite different directions, Harding's toward black self-determination, Ashmore's toward thoroughgoing integration...

...Ashmore has a keen memory, a sharp eye, and a politician's instinct for middle ground...

...A second volume is planned to bring the story to the present...

...If Harding comes across as the radical, the idealist, the orator, Ashmore is more nearly the liberal, the pragmatist, the talker...

...A mixture of personal reminiscence and interpretive history, it reviews the last fifty years of black-white conflict in the United States, and though it is decidedly less partisan than Harding's book, it is nonetheless a chronicle of repeated white failures to redeem the inequities and iniquities of the past...

...Now past sixty-five, he has been, among other things, a hometown newspaper reporter, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, an Army combat officer in World War II, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor in Little Rock (for opposing segregationist Governor Orval Faubus), a confidant of Adlai Stevenson, president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and an author of books on such disparate places as Harlem, Vietnam, and Arkansas...

...His narrative is rambling and loquacious, but carefully researched and authoritative—and it is never boring...

...Harding's ambitious objective was not simply to write a narrative synthesis of the long and labored black movement toward justice and equality—a huge task in itself—but to analyze and interpret and explain, from his own perspective, the deepest meanings of that history...

...They are also didactic, homiletic, and poetic, befitting Harding's impressive skills as a teacher, a preacher, and a writer...

...His narrative can be read both as an adversarial account of black American history and as a persuasive judgment on two and a half centuries of white American leadership...

...It is hard to write history without a sense of hope...

...To read them back to back is to understand anew the hope and the despair of race, the most persistent human problem in our history...

...They are essentially Marxist...

...With a storyteller's gifts and a partisan's passion, he celebrates the valor in adversity of his people—the black Americans...