
          Movement Profiles.
          
            
              L.W.D.L. W. D.
            
          
          Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, p. 16
          
          The Long Haul, an
Autobiography by Myles Horton, with Judith Kohl and Herbert
Kohl. (Doubleday, 1990. xvi, 245 pages.). Whitney M. Young,
Jr. and the Struggle for Civil Rights, by Nancy
J. Weiss. (Princeton University Press, 1990. xv, 286 pages.).
          Whitney Young and Myles Horton represented the breadth of and
variety within the civil_rights movement. One was black, one
white. One held the confidence of corporate and political leaders, one
was avowedly radical and worked almost exclusively among the poor and
dissidents. One believed in the efficacy of political processes, the
other cared but little for policies that did not arise from the
understanding of the people. Horton with the help of the Kohls sat
down his own story before his death this year and Princeton historian
Weiss tells Young's. I knew and had some working relationship with
both men, though I was not close to either. People who knew them will
find little in these books to change or deepen their opinions of
them. All will find the books useful additions to their knowledge of
American reforms, in Horton's case from the 1930s to the present, in
Young's tragically shorter and intenser period from the mid-1950s to
his drowning in 1971. The books are, moreover, interestingly
written.
          If you want democratic society, wrote Horton, you have to act
democratically. "If you want love and brotherhood, you've got to
incorporate them as you go along, because you can't just expect them
to occur in the future without experiencing them before you get
there." Whitney Young, as I knew him, would believe and act on
that rule as consistently as Horton, though, as Professor Weiss
writes, he "spent his life making the needs and interests of black
Americans comprehensible and compelling to the whites who had the
power to do something about them."--L.W.D.
        
