An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America

Young's inspiring and important autobiographical memoir reminds us that social transformation is possible and that the civil rights movement prevailed through the courage, vigilance and persistence of individual men and women. As a minister and moving force of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr., endured beatings and arrests and participated in historic civil rights campaigns in Birmingham, Selma and Chicago as well as the Poor People's March on Washington, D.C., in 1968. Born in New Orleans in 1932, Young rebelled against his father's insistence that he follow in his footsteps and become a dentist. Reading Gandhi led to his decision to become a preacher pursuing social change. He provides new details on the FBI's monitoring of the SCLC and of King, and gives a moving, on-the-scene account of King's assassination. Although he says little about his years as mayor of Atlanta or ambassador to the U.N., effectively ending his personal story with his 1972 election to Congress, his analysis of the interconnections among racism, poverty and a militarized economy that, he says, thwarts domestic needs makes his narrative timely and forceful. Photos. (Nov.)