Carol Polsgrove

Divided Minds

A startling portrait of a generation of intellectuals who responded to the civil rights movement with peculiar ambivalence.

No other movement in the twentieth century posed a starker challenge to American democracy than that of civil rights. Its premise was simple; its purpose clear. And yet, as Carol Polsgrove shows in this revelatory history of the movement for racial equality during its climactic years, some of America's best-known intellectuals proved curiously reluctant to face up to its demands. Based upon unpublished archival material and new interviews, Divided Minds unveils startling new portraits of leading writers and scholars who responded to the Supreme Court's call for equality in Brown v. Board of Education with peculiar ambivalence.

With the nation still recovering from the aftershocks of McCarthyism, early intellectual response to the movement was mounted on Cold War axioms. William Faulkner, speaking out for desegregation, regarded the struggle as a Manichean clash between Us and Them—democracy versus communism. Ralph Ellison abandoned his young radicalism for a removed, sagelike distance from the struggle, while Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois, marginalized by their unpopular political positions, had difficulty being heard. Editors sought out the more moderate voices of C. Vann Woodward and Robert Penn Warren.

Other, less patient voices emerged. Lillian Smith, Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, Howard Zinn, and James Silver put themselves at personal and political risk, mounting tireless charges against southern bigotry and the failure of the nation to respond to the racial crisis. Kenneth B. Clark and Lorraine Hansberry also struck courageous blows for equality. But James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time threw down a gauntlet to other intellectuals and plunged Baldwin himself into the nation's obliterating spotlight. He emerged, for a time, as the most politically significant American novelist since Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Divided Minds takes us from Little Rock's jeering mobs to the swirling heyday of New York's intellectual magazines; from the terrors of Mississippi to the Manhattan penthouse of Robert Kennedy. Here is a fascinating, untold history of our nation's most important moment, one rife with unaccountable bravery and inexplicable timidity—often the product of the same divided minds. Carol Polsgrove has written a powerful and provocative account of the struggle whose triumphs and failures still flicker within the American consciousness.

"Divided Minds is a fascinating account of how American intellectuals, black and white, responded to the issue of racial segregation and the movement to abolish it. I know of no other study like it, and I think it will take its place as an important addition to the literature of the civil rights movement." —Howard Zinn, author of The People's History of the United States

"Like the Civil War, the civil rights movement will still be a worthy topic for writers generations after the fact. Carol Polsgrove's Divided Minds makes this point beautifully. Three decades after the marches climaxed in the South, she sifts through the scattered evidence and finds a fresh theme—the all-too-human perspectives of the era's intellectuals—and shapes it into a narrative as compelling as any the sages wrote in the heat of battle." —John Egerton, Speak Now against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South