HEROIC LIVES

...They don't know it's a powerful, radical word, so I say I believe in 'Democratic Socialism,' which means that the government is under the control of the people and exists for their benefit...

...In his own words, related to Hall during a series of tape-recorded interviews, Johnson tells of his four grandparents, all born into slavery, and of his father^ an educator with a passion for freedom and justice...

...But I don't care...

...Wade Hall, professor of English at Bel-larmine College in Louisville, tells in The Rest of the Dream the life story of a Kentucky schoolteacher, Lyman Johnson, who started in the 1930s to speak out against racial injustice—and now, more than fifty years later, still eloquently expresses the same message...

...John Egerton (John Egerton was born in Kentucky and has spent most of his adult life in the South...

...One of the many virtues of The Dream Long Deferred is its persuasive proof that in Charlotte, at least, busing was a success, a significant triumph for the school system, the city, and the cause of simple justice for all...

...230 pp...

...THE REST OF THE DREAM: The Black Odyssey of Lyman Johnson by Wade Hall University Press of Kentucky...

...This is a story of courage, inspiration, humor, and hope, and it ought to be read widely by the "human family" to which Johnson declares we all belong...

...He has written extensively on school desegregation...

...of James B. McMillan, the Federal district judge who ruled in the case...

...there were "mobs of white protesters" at school headquarters, Judge McMillan was hanged in effigy, and the office of attorney Chambers was destroyed by arsonists...

...Frye Gaillard and Wade Hall underscore the point exceedingly well in these two accounts of heroic lives lived in the spirit of Martin Luther King's dream...

...Having fought a lifetime of battles on principles, Lyman Johnson now enjoys reminiscing with friends and former adversaries alike...

...For the most part, they were grass-roots people with no official standing, nothing to give them power or influence except a growing sense of hope— an ability to peer into the future and imagine how the schools might function if the people of Charlotte really embraced integration, rather than continuing the futile fight against it...

...and of a score of others, black and white, who played important roles...

...If I had been as fit of pen as of tongue, maybe I could have cut a broader swath through the world...

...As the history of the civil-rights movement unfolds now in waves of biographies, memoirs, and narrative recountings that focus on the leaders, we need to be reminded that not all of the players in that great drama were famous...

...Charlotte was not pristine in its reaction to the busing case, Gaillard declares...

...One of the best-known but least-understood Federal court cases of the civil rights era—Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the so-called "school-busing case"—arose from this conflict...

...After attending summer school, he dropped out, dismissing the institution as "a dump" and adding, "I wouldn't cheapen my master's degree from Michigan with a doctorate from the University of Kentucky...

...Gaillard, a veteran reporter for The Charlotte Observer, tells in compelling personal terms the story of his city's long struggle to eliminate racial segregation in public schools...

...Thirty years later, he graciously returned to the Kentucky campus to receive an honorary doctor of letters degree...

...Jesus Christ himself in whose name capitalism has been promoted was not a capitalist...

...Gaillard tells the story of Darius and Vera Swann, who brought the suit...

...His two most recent books are "Generations" and "Southern Food...

...Out of that perception, a new consensus formed, and in the years since then, Charlotte has fundamentally changed...

...But gradually, he writes, "the climate began to change, as a new generation of leaders stepped forward...

...I'm not ashamed of my stewardship...

...But I'm not crying...

...By these lights, we all live in the midst of ongoing history and are part of it, regardless of the level of our fame or wealth...

...Beginning with the quiet courage of a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore named Dorothy Counts, he unfolds a story of pride and prejudice that has all the elements of classical drama...

...When he was finally admitted under court order to graduate study at the University of Kentucky in 1949, Johnson was forty-three years old and out of patience with his home state...

...With that heritage, Johnson, now eighty-two and nearly blind, looks back on his own life of activism with mixed feelings of rage and pride and triumph...

...As a teacher in Louisville's all-black Central High School, Johnson was an outspoken critic of segregation and of economic injustice...

...of Julius Chambers, their attorney...

...I know I'm out of step with most Americans," he told Wade Hall, "I plead guilty to being a leftist...

...Lyman Johnson is still fit of tongue, as the autobiography he has told to Wade Hall makes abundantly clear...

...History is mainly the chronicle of famous people's lives, or so we are told...

...I've done what I could," he says, "to advance the cause of human freedom in my own backyard...

...Kings and presidents, celebrities, heroes and villains—these are the movers and shakers, and their words and deeds, duly recorded in the public ledger, become the fodder of historians...

...But there is another, more egalitarian view: that history is memory, and all who remember can claim not only knowledge of it, but possession of it as well...

...I'm in good company...

...I don't like to use the term 'Christian Socialism' because 90 per cent of the people who use the word 'Christian' don't know what it means...

...The conventional wisdom nationwide is that busing to achieve school desegregation was an utter failure...