Crossing Border Street: A Civil Rights Memoir

University of California Press, 2000-06-27. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. Signed by Author. University of California Press [Published Date: 2000]. Hardcover, 177 pp. First printing, (with full number line). Inscribed (personalized) and signed (first name only) by author on title page. Very good in very good dust jacket. Yellow paper over boards with black cloth and gold lettering on spine. Light bumping and scuffing to edges of covers. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a few small nicks and light bumping and creasing along edges. Light overall scuffing to jacket as well. NOT price clipped Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. Black and white illustratios [From jacket flaps] In 1966 Peter Jan Honigsberg--a young, idealistic law student--arrived in the South to help provide legal representation for civil rights workers. Although based in New Orleans, most of his work was in the city of Bogalusa and in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. Bogalusa was the heart of the Louisiana movement and the home of one of the most formidable but little-known black organizations in the country--the Deacons for Defense and Justice, the first modern-day African American organization to carry weapons and to respond with force against the Ku Klux Klan. This riveting memoir, one of only a handful of first-person full-length accounts of the civil rights movement, is both a stirring coming-of-age story and a thrilling chronicle of a remarkable era in United States history. Honigsberg's engaging narrative conveys the emotions and personal dangers activists faced. He describes how the Deacons worked with the Bogalusa Voters League to boycott the white-owned businesses in the downtown area and to integrate the local schools, restaurants, parks, and paper mill. Unlike most law students, Honigsberg not only worked on legal issues; he participated directly in marches and demonstrations. His narrative includes lively firsthand accounts of his attempt--with a group of black and white demonstrators--to integrate a beach on Lake Pontchartrain, his experience marching through hostile Ku Klux Klan territory under the eye of the National Guard, and his witnessing a prominent civil rights leader lift his car's trunk to display a cache of carbines and grenades to a station attendant who refused to fill the tank with gas. Honigsberg considers the impact of the change that occurred in the fall of 1967, when Martin Luther King's dream of blacks and whites working together in a cooperative partnership gave way to the new cry of "Black Power." His memoir provides a unique glimpse into the civil rights movement and those who were forever changed by its struggle for human dignity and vision of racial justice and equality.