One of the best books I have read about the civil rights era is Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story by Timothy Tyson.
Tyson grew up in Oxford, North Carolina, the son of a Methodist minister. The book is built around the murder of a young black man in Oxford when Tyson was a child, but it tells the story of the civil rights movement along the way.
Of all the accounts I've read of this era, this one comes closest to the way I remember it. I'm sure that's mostly because it is told from the perspective of someone who, like me, was a white Southerner, and, like me, saw much of it through the eyes of a child.
I think maybe it's also because, like me, Tyson was not actually involved in the movement himself. That is another shared perspective, but it also eliminates what I think is a common bias in first-person accounts of historical events and eras told by those who were involved in them. In telling the tale, they are laying down their personal legacies. Tyson's book undoubtedly has its own biases, but this is, first and foremost, a story of his childhood.
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