The Children

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • The “compelling and intimate” (Chicago Tribune) true story of the early days of the civil rights movement and the young people who led the revolution, including John Lewis, Diane Nash, and Bernard Lafayette

“A remarkable and rewarding testament to the bravery and idealism of people who forever changed relations between blacks and whites in America.”—People

Magisterial in scope, The Children is a powerful book about one of the most dramatic movements in American history as seen through the story of the young people—the Children—who met in the 1960s and went on to lead the civil rights movement.

They came together as part of Reverend James Lawson’s workshops on nonviolence, eight idealistic black students whose families had sacrificed much so that they could go to college. And they risked it all, and their lives besides, when they joined the growing civil rights movement. David Halberstam shows how Martin Luther King, Jr. recruited Lawson to come to Nashville to train students in Gandhian techniques of nonviolence. We see the strength of the families the Children came from, moving portraits of several generations of the black experience in America. We feel Diane Nash's fear before the first sit-in to protest segregation of Nashville lunch counters, and then we see how Nash and others—John Lewis, Gloria Johnson, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, Curtis Murphy, James Bevel, Rodney Powell—persevered until they ultimately accomplished that goal.

After the sit-ins, when the Freedom Rides to desegregate interstate buses were in danger of being stopped because of violence, it was these same young people who led the bitter battle into the Deep South. Halberstam takes us into those buses and lets us witness the violence the students encountered in Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma. And he shows what has happened to the Children since the 1960s as they have gone on with their lives.

Brilliant, moving, and personal, The Children is a magnificent portrait of a unique period in America, and of the lives of the ordinary people whose courage and vision changed history.