This book is a small part of what might be called the hid-

den story of the civil rights movement. Anyone who lived through

those sometimes glorious and often dangerous days, who read about the

movement in newspapers and saw it dramatically unfolding on nightly

TV newscasts, might reasonably wonder how much could still be hid-

den. This is particularly true now that journalists and scholars and film-

makers have spent ahnost twenty-five years exhaustively reexamining

the subject and occasionally throwing new light into previously obscure

corners.

Even the "hidden" life of Martin l,uther King, Jr., is no longer much

of a secret. So it would be wrong to suggest that the movement years still

contain many surprises of the sort that make big headlines. Yet head-

lines tell only a small part of this great story. Hardly less dramatic are

the experiences of the thousands of anonymous/blk who fought their

fight far from the glare of the camera and whose travail never got them

a single paragraph in a newspaper or so much as a thirty-second sound

bite on the "Huntley-Brinkley Report" or the "CBS Evening News."

We remember the riots and the marches and the big speeches and

all the political posturing. We constantly heard about the chaos in the

streets, but how much did we hear about the chaos in every community

and home where blacks and whites suddenly had to cope with a changed

social order thrust on them from above and were never certain exactly

what was expected of them?