Civil Rights and Wrongs: A Memoir of Race and Politics, 1944-1994

Ashmore ( Hearts and Minds: The Anatomy of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan ) has been commenting on race for years, notably as executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette during the Little Rock desegregation crisis. He and the paper led the opposition to segregationist governor Orval Faubus and won Pulitzer Prizes for their coverage. At times his memoir/history bogs down, often neither close enough to the action nor offering new insight into race relations. Some passages remain interesting: how this white son of South Carolina grew skeptical of monolithic views of his region, especially W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South (1941); how the NAACP's Walter White bested him in a 1948 segregation debate; how he helped presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson forge policy on race. Ashmore has encountered many important historical figures, from presidents to Malcolm X, and offers interesting context for the notorious Moynihan Report on the ``pathological condition'' of the black family. But his survey of racial issues in the past decade is armchair commentary--he unaptly describes Spike Lee's movies as ``sensational, antiwhite.'' Ashmore's heart may be in the right place, as he criticizes the conventional wisdom that racial prejudice no longer disfavors blacks, but he has tried to stretch a modest memoir into a major narrative. (May)