My dad was a lifelong liberal and loyal Democratic Party voter. The 1960s Civil Rights movement was one of his top areas of interest. When I reached high school, he regularly bought books for me. Here are the five most memorable of those books.
Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), written by Claude Brown: Tom Wolfe wrote this in The New York Herald Tribune when the book came out: ''Claude Brown makes James Baldwin and all that old Rock of Ages rhetoric sound like some kind of Moral Rearmament tourist from Toronto come to visit the poor.'' Wolfe was willing to go out on a limb by denigrating James Baldwin because he felt that Brown wrote with frank, brutal, and beautiful power in his novel/memoir detailing his early life on the mean streets of pre-gentrification Harlem.
Having grown up in a sleepy upstate New York town, Brown's coming-of-age story documenting his youth while surrounded by crime, gangs, and poverty during the 1940s and 1950s blew my mind. I'd never been exposed to anything as gritty as this. It made my comfortable young life look like a fairytale.
The narrator, Sonny, is the “manchild” who needs to learn how to survive in the urban jungle populated by pimps, numbers runners, and black-market fences. He immerses himself in street crime, beginning at the age of six. Eventually, he reaches the level of mid-level drug dealer selling marijuana and cocaine.
In the end, Brown found a way to escape his fate. He began attending night classes downtown, and later graduated from Howard University, later attending Stanford University Law School. Manchild In The Promised Land has sold more than four million copies and has been translated into 14 languages.
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968), by Carlos Castaneda: Castaneda was a UCLA anthropology graduate student who'd traveled to the American Southwest to research medicinal plants. He met Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian "brujo" (sorcerer or medicine man) from Sonora, Mexico. Don Juan taught Castaneda how to enter "nonordinary reality" and become "a man of knowledge”—someone who’s learned to see the world clearly and lives by that knowledge (i.e. “walks the walk”), rather than just talking about it for show. In order to attain this status, one must conquer four natural enemies in order: fear, clarity, power, and old age.
Overcoming fear to reach clarity involves facing it head-on. Don Juan derives his main teaching tool from psychoactive plants, which he calls “allies.” The main three main allies are peyote, datura (jimson weed), and psilocybin mushrooms—”little smoke.” Each of these substances has a special usefulness on the path to enlightenment.
Don Juan treats datura (also called “devil’s weed") as the most dangerous of his psychoactives, because he says it's tied to sorcery. In one passage, he smears Casteneda’s body with a paste made from the plant's root, after which the author collapses and lies unconscious for hours. Waking up, he tells Don Juan that he felt the vivid sense of soaring through the air. Rather than asking if the experience was real, the teacher asks the pupil what he learned from it.
Like Manchild In The Promised Land, this book transported me to a different, fascinating world. In my small town, peyote and “magic mushrooms” weren't around for experiments in getting to that “separate reality” I'd been hearing about. I was interested in looking outside my culture for a wise man to show me how to live life on my terms.
When I’d later find out that the critical consensus was that The Teachings Of Don Juan was mostly fiction presented as anthropology, it came as no surprise. The book’s packed with impossible-to-believe events, such as the time when the author took datura and Don Juan tells him to sew the eyes and mouths of lizards shut before speaking to them. And I didn't believe Castaneda's claim that he flew through the air for two hours. I wonder who did.
At the time, I didn't care much if these wild events were a product of Castaneda's imagination. What I was reading was captivating. I took it as a work of philosophical fiction that was a document of its time—the psychedelic 1960s. Stylistically, it resembled what Herman Hesse did with Siddhartha in 1922, in which he taught that true wisdom and a "separate reality" cannot be passively taught through doctrine, but must be individually discovered and lived.
Soul On Ice (1968), written by Eldridge Cleaver: Cleaver, a former leading figure of the Black Panthers, wrote most of this this while imprisoned in Folsom State Prison in California. It consists of a series of essays dealing with such subjects as his political wakening, personal relationships, and the appeal of revolutionary violence The author, who saw the inside of two other prisons in his lifetime, holds little back, openly discussing his history as a rapist, which included a lame attempt to justify sexual violence against white women as a revolutionary act. Later on in the book, he disavows this stance.
This book, a document of rage, shocked me. I'd never read a book in which the author admitted raping women. The author claimed that he started with raping black women and then switched to white women to punish the white man for his oppression. Soul On Ice didn't become an important book because Cleaver was an admirable person who worked diligently towards the achievement of civil rights and black pride. The book's power comes from its forceful expression of black rage and an affirmation of the use of violence to reform society.
One of the reasons that, by 1970, there were two million copies of this book in circulation was the fact that it had literary merit, just as Dostoyevsky’s Notes From The Underground, even though it also had a cruel and spiteful narrator. Cleaver wrote powerful prose even when his arguments were objectionable. At the age of 16, Soul On Ice offered me insights into the development of black radicalism told in a raw, uncompromising voice.
Seize the Time (1970), written by Bobby Seale: Seale, co-founder of the Black Panthers, wrote the majority of this memoir while San Francisco County Jail after being was arrested and charged with ordering the torture and murder of Alex Rackley, a 19-year-old Black Panther member suspected of being a police informant. Subsequently, a judge would dismiss the case, supporting the belief of many at the time that the government held Seale as a political prisoner.
The first-person narrative, while not well-written, provides an on-the-ground perspective of the origins of the Black Panther Party. The image of an upraised, black-gloved fist on the cover—the symbol of the Black Panthers—suggests the aggressive tone of the narrative. The Black Panthers were synonymous with the “Black Power” movement whose militants weren't shy about waving their guns around in public to show they meant business.
The Panthers were known for their firearms and violence, but this book also delves into their grassroots work in black communities. Unlike Eldridge Cleaver, Seale wasn’t a talented writer. His prose is weak, and his narrative unorganized. Aesthetics aside, Seale makes valid points on how to boost black pride and power. As he describes it, blacks were coerced into obeying the whims of the “pigs” because the “pigs” had guns. Thus, blacks must also carry guns to achieve their own distinct power structure. It was an argument that scared a lot of white people. When the cops saw black guys walking around in the streets carrying shotguns and M-1 rifles in their hands, all within the bounds of the law, they freaked out.
Seize the Time gave me an unfiltered, first-hand blueprint of the Black Power movement. The text demystifies the organization by pushing aside the sensationalized media coverage to document such grassroots topics as the logistics behind their community survival programs—e.g. free healthcare and breakfast initiatives. It remains an important instructional artifact of the protest-era.
Black Like Me (1961), written by John Howard Griffin: Griffin, a 44-year-old white Texan journalist and novelist, figured that no white man could understand what it was like to be black, because black people would never tell the truth to outsiders. "The only way I could see to bridge the gap between us was to become a Negro," Griffin writes in his book. This was undergoing medical treatment to darken his complexion to pass as black while traveling through the Jim Crow Deep South. Black strangers showed him warmth and kindness, while white strangers stared at him, denied him basic public accommodations (restrooms, restaurants, and hotels), and wouldn't hire him for menial jobs.
In Dante's Inferno, the damned are subjected to the gazes of mythological monsters and demons whose looks can turn a person to stone. Griffin describes the white racists' stare in similar terms. To him, they weren’t just an expression of dislike; they were an aggressive force designed to strip him of his humanity.
I already had a negative view of white Southerners before picking up this book. I'd read about lynchings and other KKK atrocities. Griffin expected hostility from overt racists, thugs, and rogue police officers, but the power of his book lies in its revelation that some of the worst offenders were well-dressed white women and middle-class citizens.
Reading Black Like Me reinforced my bias towards the South. I've traveled all over the country, but not Georgia, Alabama, or Mississippi. My resentment towards these people went up a couple notches after hearing about the KKK goons who, because his book scared and embarrassed them, beat Griffin violently with chains on the side of the road in his Texas hometown before leaving him for dead. It took the author five months to recover, but his book sold millions of copies on the road to becoming an important document on the moral vacuum so many “pillars of society” once occupied in one region of this nation.