Read Online The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman - Free Book Online

suitcase.’
    That was him, but when Adam looked around he wasn’t there any more. Adam was there, trying to look out for Denise McNair as everybody else on 5th Avenue brushed past, oblivious to the danger. They were killing abandoned children on that very block. There had been Jake’s legacy, but it was largely Charles McCray’s example and later, his assistance, that had led Adam to the History Department at Columbia. He went there first as an undergraduate. He graduated with a history major but, uncertain what to do next and with some guilt at leaving his mother alone, Adam returned to Australia and tried to make a career for himself as a journalist. For almost six years he toiled away but it irked him that he wasn’t progressing faster. It was Charles McCray, with whom he had kept in regular contact, who got him to consider a PhD in history with a view to becoming an academic historian. At twenty-eight, Adam moved back to New York and enrolled in the PhD program of the History Department at NYU. The fashion within civil rights history over the previous decade or so had been to eschew the ‘great man’ theory or school of civil rights history in favour of social history that focused on the nameless people who constituted the bulk of the movement.
    Adam used his father as an inspiration for reacquainting scholars with the importance of the civil rights legal strategy. His argument was a reminder that without concomitant changes in the law there would have been no grounds on which the local activists could base their fight. It was because of the success of the legal strategy in cases such as
Brown versus Board of Education
that the local activists were able to galvanise black communities around the country, particularly in the south, and tell them the law was now on their side. The fight could be taken from there. Adam’s dissertation served to remind historians in the area just how difficult it was in those days, in that climate, to win the cases from first instance all the way up to the Supreme Court and how hard it was to get civil rights legislation enacted. He wrote of the need to look again at the legal strategy, not as engaged in by one great man or great woman, but as the outcome of the concerted efforts of a group, a group of lawyers.
    All the while he was at NYU he stayed involved in the Columbia community. He took classes at Columbia and once a month came uptown for a ‘Twentieth Century Politics and Society’ seminar. He met and maintained friendships with Columbia graduate students from the History Department. It was through one of them that he met Diana, the woman who had grown not unaccustomed to the rhythm of his recent nightmares. And of course, there was Charles McCray, who was for him a cross between a mentor, an older brother and a ‘co-conspirator’. The ‘conspiracy’ was one between children of the movement. They could say things to each other that it was almost impossible to say to anyone else.
    It was a game Charles and Adam used to play, alone and in private. It involved saying things that were unacceptable within mainstream political discourse. Sometimes the ‘things’ were statements or propositions many people knew to be true or likely to be true. At other times they were simply defamatory statements they came up with to amuse each other. But none of the ‘things’ could be said, at least publicly, without contravening political correctness. Often after a few drinks, the ‘things’ were just things they both knew the other didn’t believe. This latter category of ‘thing’, even more than the former, would have them in tears of laughter by the end of an evening.
    It was on the strength of his PhD and, again, with the assistance of Charles who, though not yet chairman, was already a highly respected member of the department and a well-regarded scholar of the Reconstruction, that Adam joined the faculty at Columbia. His dissertation became the basis for a book. As the telegenic