The Shadows of Youth The Remarkable Journey of the Civil Rights Generation

Through the lives of Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Bob Moses, Bob Zellner, Julian Bond, Marion Barry, John Lewis, and their contemporaries,The Shadows of Youthprovides a carefully woven group biography of the activists whounder the banner of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committeechallenged the way Americans think about civil rights, politics, and moral obligation in an unjust democracy. A wealth of original sources and oral interviews allows the historian Andrew B. Lewis to recover the sweeping narrative of the civil rights movement, from its origins in the youth culture of the 1950s to the near present. The teenagers who spontaneously launched sit-ins across the South in the summer of 1961 became the SNCC activists and veterans without whom the civil rights movement could not have succeeded.The Shadows of Youthreplaces a story centered on the achievements of Martin Luther King Jr. with one that unearths the cultural currents that turned a disparate group of young adults into, in Nash's term, skilled freedom fighters. Their dedication to radical democratic possibility was transformative. In the trajectory of their lives, from teenager to adult, is visible the entire arc of the most decisive era of the American civil rights movement, andThe Shadows of Youthfor the first time establishes the centrality of their achievement in the movement's accomplishments.

Andrew B. Lewis teaches history at Wesleyan University. His books include Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table: A Documentary History of the Civil Rights Movement, with Julian Bond.