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Maybe someday
33
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
22/100Critics
44/100Scholars
Author:
James R. Gaines
Publisher:
Simon & Schuster
Date:
January 11, 2022
In this history, James R. Gaines reconsiders the 1950s, framing it not as an era of staid conformity but as a period of activism and nascent social and political change.
What The Reviewers Say
... [a] short, very potent primer on four groups of people usually left out of the general hallelujahs for the Greatest Generation.
Gaines provides engrossing character studies of people both well-known and more obscure.
... enlightening, powerful and intimate.
The book isn't really 'An Underground History' Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rachel Carson, Norbert Wiener and other individuals featured by Gaines were public figures in the '50s—and many 21st-century Americans are familiar with them. Gaines maintains, not always persuasively, that in the 1950s Black women (like Pauli Murray) were 'pioneers of a vigorous postwar feminism.' And that Black World War II veterans (like Evers, Robert Williams and Kennard) believed 'nonviolence without the support of armed resistance to racist violence amounted to surrender'.
