The Pain and the Promise: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Tallahassee, Florida

Rating:
Summary: The Pain and the Promise
Review: A superb study of the civil rights movement in one city that has direct meaning for all communities, north and south. The author traces the sources of the strength of the activists, but does not neglect their weaknesses or mistakes. Covering the period from 1945 to the present, the book gives a rich sense of what the struggle for (and against) civil rights meant then and means now.

Rating:
Summary: The Pain and the Promise
Review: A superb study of the civil rights movement in one city that has direct meaning for all communities, north and south. The author traces the sources of the strength of the activists, but does not neglect their weaknesses or mistakes. Covering the period from 1945 to the present, the book gives a rich sense of what the struggle for (and against) civil rights meant then and means now.

Rating:
Summary: the best local study of the civil rights movement.
Review: Rabby has done a wonderful job capturing the essence of the civil rights struggle on the local level. She has the full cast of characters: impatient students, anxious elders, foot-dragging whites,mean-spirited judges, foolish community leaders, and violent racists.

What makes this book so good, so essential is the humanity, the people who led and bled to advance the movement in Tallahassee and the nation, to make America live up to its promise of freedodm and equality.

In the end, Rabby restastes with passion and eloquence an essential truth of the civil rights movement--it was a daily struggle carried forth by ordinary people cast into extrordinay circumstances by their courage and determination.

Read this book if you want to appreciate America at her best.