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FREEDOMWAYS THIRD QUARTER 1966 these which can be unqualifiedly recommended as reading especially for youth. There is a hunger for knowledge about this period, as well as a public need. Community leaders, civil rights workers, the schools are faced with a dearth of material. Last year, for example, it was reported in the Saturday Review, that out of 5,206 children's books launched by 63 publishers, fewer than seven per cent so much as mentioned Negroes; and among these we must assume that many of them represented the old stereotypes or derogatory treatment. Thus, these two books are most timely. Sisters and Brothers is an exciting, dramatically constructed historical novel, set against the background of the anti-slavery movement: it centers around the slave-holding Grimké family of South Carolina, two of whose daughters became the most celebrated women leaders among the Abolitionists. There is evidence that Mrs. Stevenson did a great deal of careful research for this book through conventional sources as well as unpublished documents and oral informants. An award-winning playwright, she has marshalled her facts in compelling sequence, as she follows the fortunes of the two sectors of the Grimké family-one white and wealthy, the other black and enslaved by their own kin-and the chance events that bring them together in the Reconstruction Era. It is hard to find, in or out of fiction, a more vivid evocation of the personalities of the anti-slavery movement and their strengths and weaknesses. Angelina Grimké and her husband, Theodore Weld, are fully drawn characters, through whom are revealed the uncompromising fervor of the Abolitionists and their steadfastness in the face of endless assaults, which helped shape the events of their times. Intentionally, I believe, Mrs. Stevenson handles her material to suggest striking parallels to our own times. For then, as today, freedom for black Americans was a central issue of national conflict, pursued on all sides with a passion history books cannot bring to life as the novelist does here. The counterparts of her carpetbaggers, who were often beaten, assaulted, and maligned, are the civil rights workers of the deep South; the rank and file of the anti-slavery movement was as heterogeneous as the freedom marchers of today. And the opposition, one sees, is also unchanging: the practitioners of violence who stone the meeting of the Women's Anti-Slavery League where Angelina Grimké is the chief speaker; the lynch mob after Weld, the procession of masters and total strangers who brutally 278
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Reopened for Editing 2024-02-09 13:59:04