Too repetitive
3 steloj
While The World Watched is an intensely personal memoir in which Mckinstry shows us her life as a young African-American girl growing up in Birmingham, Alabama. I already had some knowledge of the degradation caused by segregation, but hearing first-hand accounts of her dying grandmother being relegated, practically untreated, to a hospital basement and of children trying to gain a school education from cast-off textbooks scrawled with racist slogans did drive the situation home to me. With almost no other leisure opportunities open to black people, their churches were the focal point of life and social interaction which is one reason the Klan church bombings were so shocking. Black people already had practically nothing else! I am confused why Klan members bombed churches too because I thought that they also considered themselves Christians and no doubt would have been horrified at the thought of their own churches being similarly attacked. …
While The World Watched is an intensely personal memoir in which Mckinstry shows us her life as a young African-American girl growing up in Birmingham, Alabama. I already had some knowledge of the degradation caused by segregation, but hearing first-hand accounts of her dying grandmother being relegated, practically untreated, to a hospital basement and of children trying to gain a school education from cast-off textbooks scrawled with racist slogans did drive the situation home to me. With almost no other leisure opportunities open to black people, their churches were the focal point of life and social interaction which is one reason the Klan church bombings were so shocking. Black people already had practically nothing else! I am confused why Klan members bombed churches too because I thought that they also considered themselves Christians and no doubt would have been horrified at the thought of their own churches being similarly attacked.
The vicious injustice and hypocrisy of many Southern whites in the 1950s and 1960s is shown in their own words in While The World Watched by the fascinating inclusion of a number of speech transcripts so we get to hear the words not only of civil rights leaders such as Dr Martin Luther King Jr, but also of civic officials such as Bull Connor and Governor George Wallace. The vitriol the latter two publicly spout is incredible to hear and if this was a fiction book I would think the author had seriously overegged her characters!
Mckinstry fervently maintains her Christian faith across the decades despite everything the world has thrown her way. At times its profession does make listening to the book feel like being preached to which, for me, is an unusual experience although it fitted well with the memoir. I was disappointed by the repetitious padding though which I felt diluted what should have been a powerful recounting of an extraordinary life. My audiobook edition lasted nine hours and a good third of that was repeating information we had already been told or speeches we had already heard.