Crossing Border Street: A Civil Rights Memoir. (Book Reviews).

Crossing Border Street: A Civil Rights Memoir. By Peter Jan Honigsberg. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, c. 2000. Pp. xvi, 177. $24.95, ISBN 0-520-22147-8.)

Peter Jan Honigsberg, a native of New York City, the son of Jewish refugees from Austria, was a first-year law student at NYU when he volunteered to spend a summer in the South working for the New Orleans office of the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee (LCDC), which had been formed in 1964 to provide legal assistance for the civil rights movement. For the next two years, Honigsberg "commuted between law school and the South" (p. 3), finding self-discovery, self-fulfillment, and adventure in his encounter with an alien culture in the throes of painful transformation. This short book is a straightforward account of Honigsberg's "freedom summers," written in simple, unadorned prose and with no attempt to exaggerate the significance of the author's relatively minor contribution to history. Indeed, to anyone with more than a passing knowledge of the 1960s South, Honigsberg's memoir will be of limited interest. The author first went South after the civil rights movement had peaked. As a law student rather than a lawyer, he was on the fringe of the LCDC's activities (although he does furnish some useful information about those activities). The numerous passages evoking the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of New Orleans--new to the author in 1966 but familiar to most of his readers three decades later--are somewhat redundant.

Still, Crossing Border Street yields a number of insights into aspects of the civil rights movement. The most important is the information that it provides on the Bogalusa Voters League and its shadowy reflection, the Deacons for Defense and Justice. One of the most militant black movements of the 1960s, the civil rights struggle in Bogalusa became nationally famous for organizing armed self-defense in the face of violence by the Ku Klux Klan and police indifference to attacks on demonstrators. However, because the Deacons shunned publicity, and because some of the principal black leaders in Bogalusa--notably Robert Hicks--have been reluctant to discuss their roles, Honigsberg's recollections help to throw light on the internal workings of the civil rights movement there. (Those seeking a detailed account of the Deacons for Defense, however, should consult Lance E. Hill's 1997 Tulane University Ph.D. dissertation, "The Deacons for Defense and Justice: Armed Self-Defense and the Civil Rights Movement.")

Second, Honigsberg illuminates the civil rights movement at a time of transition, when it was abandoning the idealistic rhetoric of nonviolence in favor of the aggressive sloganeering of Black Power. Hard-headed black activists like Robert Hicks and Gayle Jenkins refused to embrace the notion that whites had no place in the struggle, and they continued to work with the white lawyers of the LCDC. In a chilling passage, however, Honigsberg describes the palpable fear he felt when he sensed, at a rally in Baton Rouge in 1967, that the black crowd was bristling with hostility to white people. The realization that being a civil rights worker conferred no exemption from that hostility, and the experience of fearing black southerners rather than white southerners, left him "stunned and numbed" (p. 146). Like many of his white coworkers, Honigsberg left the civil rights movement and joined the burgeoning opposition to the war in Vietnam. Crossing Border Street is a salutary reminder of both what the civil rights movement achieved and how much was lost when Black Power repudiated its principles.

ADAM FAIRCLOUGH
University of East Anglia