Author: By Sam Tanenhaus

Date: SUNDAY, March 22, 1998

Page: G1

Section: Books

The odds against them were steep. On the eve of the first sit-in, planned for a downtown lunch counter in February 1960, Diane Nash weighed the dangers ahead. ``She and her friends, who had nothing and were nothing, were going to go up against white businessmen, who were rich and powerful and connected to the white politicians. . . . They owned the police force of the city and they owned the judges who sat in the city's courts. And she . . . could not make a phone call to a single powerful person if her life depended on it, which indeed it might.''

Yet Nash and company prevailed. How they did it takes up the first third of this massive book. The narrative is gripping, in part because Halberstam, a Northerner educated at Harvard, covered the sit-ins for the Nashville Tennessean and never forgot what he saw. ``I was only a few years older than some of the demonstrators,'' he writes. ``I was the principal reporter, and it was to no small degree my story.'' Drawing on his files, memories, and on interviews conducted for this book, he re-creates the drama from multiple angles. His vivid panorama of Nashville shows the varied faces of bigotry, from the genteel exclusions of Vanderbilt University to the noxious bluster of ``Mister Jimmy'' Stahlman, publisher of the reactionary Nashville Banner.

It also gives a fascinating picture of Nashville's African-American community. With its black colleges and universities and its growing class of educated professionals, the city was an oasis of sorts. Was it really worth imperiling hard-won gains, accumulated over many years, for the privilege of being served at a lunch counter? Not everyone was sure -- until the sit-ins began, and the demonstrators were insulted, taunted, and even beaten by whites. They did not retaliate, but also would not budge, and soon the whole of black Nashville rallied behind them, for ``the children'' were giving voice to something their elders had long suppressed at great psychic cost: the crushing pain of racism, the daily indignities, the injustice of a caste system so encompassing in its inhumanity that it forbade a mother from taking her small child to a department store restroom. The sit-ins declared an end to that silence. When, two months into the demonstrations, a bomb destroyed the home of a black lawyer, thousands marched to the courthouse steps and faced down the mayor, who reluctantly conceded that the lunch counters should be desegregated.

Propelled by this improbable victory, Nash, Jim Bevel, John Lewis, and others rose to the forefront of civil rights organizations and planned fresh assaults on the barricades of segregation. The ``children's crusade'' swept into Alabama and Mississippi, strongholds of the Ku Klux Klan and the even more frightening White Citizens Councils. Halberstam replays the familiar scenes. A busload of Freedom Riders pulls into town late at night. A mob lies in ambush, tipped off by informers and local police. Meanwhile, the federal government does nothing. President Kennedy is loath to antagonize powerful Southern legislators. Those same legislators keep civil rights bills bottled up in Congress. Only the Justice Department, under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, shows any concern for the demonstrators' safety, and these Samaritans must contend with the appalling J. Edgar Hoover, an FBI director who sides with the Southern whites.

But in the end, cowardice in high places aided the cause, thanks to television, which in this period was expanding its nightly newscasts from 15 minutes to 30. Producers scurried off in search of long-running stories with strong visual content and found all they could ask for in Selma, Birmingham, and other battlegrounds. The public received daily bulletins, illustrated by horrific images -- a formula, Halberstam notes, that would be repeated during the Vietnam War. The demonstrators, trailed by cameramen and journalists, soon realized every brutal blow they absorbed was being struck, ultimately, against Jim Crow. The thugs discovered this, too, and softened their tactics. But it was too late. The nation, glued to the spectacle, had seen enough. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, easily pushed through sweeping civil rights legislation.

All this is told effectively, but once the narrative leaves Nashville it rehashes material familiar from other books. Halberstam labors to present his intimate history of ``the children'' as a microcosm of a larger story, the rise and fall of the civil rights movement, but the focus keeps slipping. While he is busy exploring the public and private lives of ``the children,'' pivotal moments flit by -- the signing of the Voting Rights Act, the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. -- like figments from a parallel but remote world. It is up to us to make the important connections. And we do, though not as firmly as we might were the narrative more subtly structured and the prose more nuanced. But subtlety and nuance are not Halberstam's specialties. In this work, as in his previous ones, nothing is artfully implied or tactfully omitted, only blared forth or left out.

Then there is Halberstam's emotional alliance with his subjects. His identification with ``the children'' is complete, as if he had decided, by virtue of having been ``the only reporter'' on the scene so many years ago, that he owned the story in a moral, not just reportorial, sense. Sometimes this attitude seems justified. His depictions of his subjects' early lives, and their first encounters with racism, are as compelling as Dos Passos or Steinbeck. But his practice of dispensing with direct quotation in favor of paraphrasing people's thoughts and feelings seems lazy and presumptuous and strikes, at times, a note of ersatz omniscience. Here Robert Churchwell, the lone black reporter on the Nashville Banner, reflects on his plight: ``He never felt a part of the paper. He understood early on that part of the joy of newspapering, why so many bright people did such odd work for so little money, was the collegial aspect of it. These were men playing like boys; they laughed easily together, and they would go out for lunch and dinner together, as if they were part of some informal but special club.'' The experience may be Churchwell's, but the thoughts and feelings, no less than the wooden phrasing, sound suspiciously like Halberstam.

The book reaches its denouement in the mid-1960s, when an angry new ethos of black separatism supplanted the Christian fellowship of the Nashville integrationists. Branded conciliators, many drifted out of the movement. The book ought to have ended there, but Halberstam can't let go; the narrative dissipates into a lengthy postscript. The ``children'' marry and divorce, raise families, enter professions. Some, like Lewis, a Democratic congressman from Atlanta, attain well-earned success. Others, like Marion Barry, the once and future mayor of Washington, D.C., achieve equally well-earned ignominy. We see that for these pioneers no later experience will ever duplicate the remembered glories of the early 1960s -- the excitement, the dangers, the camaraderie, the call to a higher purpose.

This is not a work of history but of journalistic reconstruction, written from yellowed clippings, secondary sources, and warm memories, bolstered by Halberstam's indefatigable interviewing. Those who want a thorough chronicle of the civil rights movement can turn to other books, like Taylor Branch's exhaustive biography of King, which survey more ground and from a grander height. ``The Children'' is read most usefully as a companion piece to ``The Best and the Brightest,'' Halberstam's 1972 analysis of how the nation's governing elite deludedly plunged us into the folly of Vietnam. ``The Children,'' situated at the same historical moment, records a more inspiring chapter of our national epic and honors genuine heroes -- anonymous outsiders, lit with moral radiance, who made America a vastly better place.