Responding to Kennedy’s litany of claims for the administration’s record on civil rights, Smith said, “Mr. Attorney General . . . you make me want to puke.’’ The Kennedys had no idea about the extent of the nation’s institutionalized racism, fumed the young man. Even Baldwin was shocked. But within weeks, a chagrined administration was taking much bolder steps toward reform.
Meanwhile, during the centennial year of the Emancipation Proclamation, plans were underway for the first large-scale demonstration of African-American willpower in the nation’s capital. Organizer Bayard Rustin, a tactical genius who took a behind-the-scenes role in the civil rights movement (as a black, openly gay onetime advocate of communism, he had, it was often said, “three strikes’’ against him), hoped to attract as many as 100,000 people to the Mall at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.
In his new book, Euchner, a Yale professor, retells the story of the buildup to that historic gathering through the voices and experiences of various participants, both legendary and humble. Like the late Henry Hampton’s landmark documentary series “Eyes on the Prize,’’ “Nobody Turn Me Around’’ takes its title from the gospel music that fed the movement.
At one point, Euchner reports, an organist played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic’’ after failing to find her sheet music for “We Shall Overcome.’’ Such detail gives the book a transportive effect, even for those who have made close study of the civil rights era. The author informs us that some heat-stricken observers in the crowd had to be passed overhead “like hot dogs at a ball game,’’ and that a photographer in a helicopter tied rolls of film to sponges, dropping them onto the roof of his newspaper’s building for use in the afternoon edition.
