In January 1991, Tom Dent began a journey that would take him through the South United States, visiting cities and towns that had been significant during the Civil Rights Movement. He began in Greensboro, North Carolina, where sit-ins at a Woolworth's lunch counter in the 1960 helped spark black protest against segregation, and ended in November in Mayersville, Mississippi, a town of just 475. Dent's fascinating journey takes place mostly on the back roads and state highways and, for the most part, he talks to ordinary folks who played vital roles in the Civil Rights Movement, but whose names will probably be lost to history. One of those was Unita Blackwell, who in the 1960s tried to register to vote in Mississippi and was told she would never work again. When Dent visited her, she was mayor of Mayersville, and she assessed the changes she'd seen this way: "I suppose what we really gained is the knowledge that we struggled to make this a decent society, because it wasn't. And maybe it still isn't now, but at least we tried." From Publishers Weekly A black youth reared in segregated New Orleans, Dent went to Mississippi for the civil rights movement, and that experience stuck with him. So in 1991, he decided to work his way south from Greensboro, N.C., to Mississippi, skirting both large cities and important officials, to talk to (mostly) black folk and to assess the movement's legacy. At times, Dent's meandering approach lacks depth and is unwieldy, but his personal connection to his inquiry informs his story with commitment. In Greensboro, the unresolved gap between blacks and whites, exemplified in an anniversary celebration of the city's historic sit-ins, remind Dent "of the strained interracial meetings of the 1950s." In Orangeburg, S.C., a black academic tells him ruefully that many social-work students go into "criminal justice" lacking the broader awareness of the politics behind the new programs. In Albany, Ga., Dent discerns signs of material progress but deep divisions not only between the races but also within the black community. In Mississippi, where he sees black political victories as having had a relatively small payoff, he becomes convinced that a new black organization is needed to supplant the NAACP to address national political issues of special concern to blacks (education, unemployment) and to monitor cases of police and official abuse and discrimination. Though not quite a complete plan, it's a constructive response to Dent's conclusion that the civil rights movement opened up doors, but "once inside, well, there was hardly anything there."

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