The Children was published by Random House in 1998. Halberstam focuses on a specific group of young people — most of them students at Nashville’s historically Black colleges in 1959-60 — who were trained in nonviolent resistance by James Lawson, a theology student who had studied Gandhian techniques in India. These students organized and conducted the Nashville sit-ins at downtown lunch counters, endured beatings and arrests, and eventually desegregated the city’s public accommodations — one of the earliest and most successful campaigns of the civil rights movement.
The book follows eight participants from the Nashville movement through the subsequent decades: John Lewis (who became a congressman), Diane Nash (who organized the Freedom Rides), James Bevel (who became one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s chief strategists), Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, Curtis Murphy, Gloria Johnson, and Rodney Powell. Halberstam traces each life from childhood through the movement years and into their later careers, some triumphant, some troubled.
Halberstam’s investment in the material is personal — he covered the Nashville sit-ins as a young reporter for the Nashville Tennessean, and these events shaped his understanding of both journalism and moral courage. The book is his most emotionally engaged work, written with an admiration for its subjects that never tips into hagiography. He is unflinching about the personal costs of activism: the marriages that failed, the careers that stalled, the psychological damage of sustained confrontation with violence.
Collecting The Children
First edition (Random House, New York, 1998): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good/very good: $5–$15
- Signed: $30–$80