‘A Wind at Their Backs’

Ever since the Montgomery bus boycott, the public image of the American Negro has been slowly but definitively transformed. Through a progressively militant series of street demonstrations, thousands of Negro men, women and children have begun, in the words of Harold R. Isaacs, “to feel the new sensation of having the wind at their backs.”

In his latest book, The New World of Negro Americans, Mr. Isaacs assiduously labors to explain the private reasons for this new upsurge in militancy among the twenty million Negroes in America. He has interviewed, as he states in his introduction, more than one hundred prominent Negro writers, teachers, social scientists and government officials. Using a sort of “See-It-Now” compendium of opinion, Mr. Isaacs literally narrates verbatim the extended interviews he had with 55 persons in this group. Not since the July 29 Newsweek has the country been given such a thoroughly detailed version of what makes “The Negro” run.

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Myrna Bain

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Martin Luther King Jr

Ralph Ellison

Ever since the Montgomery bus boycott, the public image of the American Negro has been slowly but definitively transformed. Through a progressively militant series of street demonstrations, thousands of Negro men, women and children have begun, in the words of Harold R. Isaacs, “to feel the new sensation of having the wind at their backs.”

In his latest book, The New World of Negro Americans, Mr. Isaacs assiduously labors to explain the private reasons for this new upsurge in militancy among the twenty million Negroes in America. He has interviewed, as he states in his introduction, more than one hundred prominent Negro writers, teachers, social scientists and government officials. Using a sort of “See-It-Now” compendium of opinion, Mr. Isaacs literally narrates verbatim the extended interviews he had with 55 persons in this group. Not since the July 29 Newsweek has the country been given such a thoroughly detailed version of what makes “The Negro” run.