Witness to Injustice

In this powerful account, Frost, an African American moonshiner who became a civil-rights activist, frankly recounts his life growing up amidst lynchings in the town of Eufaula, Ala. Born in 1917, Frost takes readers from his childhood days of ``living in a one-room house'' on a plantation, where he watched his financially strapped parents ``make moonshine in our back yard in a washpot'' and listened to them ``tell about the lynching of the Peterson boy [which] made me very afraid of white people.'' As an adult, he was in and out of jail for making moonshine, as well as for civil rights activities-he joined the NAACP and participated in the drive to register black voters and even met Martin Luther King Jr. Ultimately, Frost learned to live with the complex, uneasy and twisted and economic and social relations that bound blacks and whites together. This memoir is a valuable addition to the many books written on social injustice in America then and now. (Nov.)