Research Catalog

Title

And all our wounds forgiven / Julius Lester.

Author

Lester, Julius.

Publication

New York : Arcade Pub., [1994], ©1994.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

228 pages; 22 cm

Summary

• When John Calvin Marshall graduated from Harvard in 1956 with a Ph.D. in philosophy, he was prepared for a life of teaching and relative tranquility. But History had another plan for him: in the nascent civil rights movement of the 1960s, he became first a spokesman, then a leader, and finally a shining symbol of the new generation of blacks who were demanding their full rights as citizens.
• And All Our Wounds Forgiven is the story of John Calvin Marshall's brief, turbulent, charismatic life, which ended, perhaps inevitably, in assassination.
• The novel is told in four alternating voices: that of John Calvin Marshall's wife, Andrea; of Lisa Adams, the young white woman who as a student at Fisk University first heard Marshall speak and fell under his spell, later becoming his trusted aide and passionate mistress; of Bobby Card, a black civil rights leader operating in the heart of darkness - the Deep South of the 1960s - as Marshall's chief lieutenant in the field; and finally, of Marshall himself. There are, too, leading figures of the time - Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Malcolm X - whose meetings and conversations with Marshall add insights and historical perspective to the unfolding events.
• Behind these voices the author intones, at various places throughout the text, the litany of those brave souls, both black and white, who not only bore witness to a national evil but gave their lives to help eradicate it.
• From the lunch-counter sit-ins to the Freedom Rides, from voter registration drives to police brutality, from night-riding Klansmen to behind-the-scenes political maneuvering, Lester re-creates, from the viewpoint of the present day, the daily drama of those fearful, exciting, and violent times. Political and provocative, And All Our Wounds Forgiven is most of all a moving and tender love story about one of this century's most charismatic black leaders and the two women he loved.

Subject

• Civil rights workers > United States > Fiction
• African American men > Fiction

Genre/Form

Historical fiction.

ISBN

1559702583 :

LCCN

93050049

OCLC

• 29594945
• ocm29594945

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries