Jackson, 1964 · And Other Dispatches From Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America

From bestselling author and beloved New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin, a deeply resonant, career-spanning collection of articles on race and racism from the 1960s to the present

In the early sixties, Calvin Trillin got his start as a journalist covering the Civil Rights Movement in the South—first for Time and later for The New Yorker. Over the next five decades of reporting, he often returned to scenes of racial tension. Now, for the first time, the best of Trillin’s pieces on race in America have been collected in one volume.

In the title essay of Jackson, 1964, we experience Trillin’s riveting coverage of the pathbreaking voter registration drive known as the Mississippi Summer Project—coverage that includes an unforgettable airplane conversation between Martin Luther King, Jr., and a young white man sitting across the aisle. (“I’d like to be loved by everyone,” King tells him, “but we can’t always wait for love”).

In the years that follow, Trillin rides along with the National Guard units assigned to patrol black neighborhoods in Wilmington, Delaware, long after the riots there have ended; looks into a Boston disco whose doormen ask black patrons for more photo IDs than most people carry; reports on the case of a black homeowner accused of manslaughter in the death of a white teenager in an overwhelmingly white Long Island suburb; and chronicles the remarkable fortunes of the Zulu Social Aid Pleasure Club, a black carnival krewe in New Orleans whose members parade on Mardi Gras in blackface.

He takes on issues that are as relevant today as they were when he wrote about them. Excessive sentencing is examined in a 1970 piece about a black militant in Houston sentenced to thirty years in prison for giving away one marijuana cigarette. The role of race in the use of deadly force by police is highlighted in a 1975 article about an African American shot by a white policeman in Seattle.

Uniting all these pieces is Trillin’s unflinching eye and graceful prose. Jackson, 1964 is an indispensable account of a half-century of race and racism in America, through the lens of a master journalist and writer who was there to bear witness.

Praise for Calvin Trillin

“[A writer] of painterly, impeccably crafted journalism.” — People

“There can never be enough of Calvin Trillin. He has become a literary treasure over the past four decades.” — The Washington Times

“Without false rhetoric . . . [Trillin] can suddenly bring into focus the whole confused story of Civil Rights by examining in detail one particularly significant episode.” — The Times Literary Supplement