The summer of 1964 had been "Freedom Summer" for a 
few campuses. The Student Non-Violent Co-Ordinating 
Committee (SNCC) had drawn some five hundred 
students, most of them white, from Ivy League and 
prestigious universities to help its integration 
efforts in Mississippi. An up-and-coming leader 
named Stokely Carmichael had told a group of 
prospective volunteers in New York that SNCC wanted 
to be sure that if blacks were killed for the civil 
rights cause, whites would die with them. What he 
said was prophetic, even if it wasn't popular. A 
few weeks after his speech, three young men - two 
of them white - were murdered in Philadelphia, 
Mississippi. The nation was scandalized.
  

While he wasn't aware of Carmichael's strategy when 
he decided to join a 1965 summer voter registration 
program, Dick J.Reavis felt it instinctively when he 
told his resistant father the reason he was going. 
"Dad, if we live in a country where nobody pays 
attention when Negroes die, then I guess that's the 
way it has to be. Somebody has to pay the price." 
The price the white middle-class Texan paid when he 
spent a summer on the wrong side of the tracks in 
Demopolis, Alabama, was his innocence.

    
If White Kids Die describes his gradual 
maturation as he encountered the other side of 
legally - enforced racism. Harassed by police for 
being in a white neighborhood with a black coworker, 
arrested for vagrancy, and prevented from driving by 
arcane residency laws, Reavis came to understand the 
frustration with "The System" that fueled the Civil 
Rights Movement. At the same time, he saw the 
infighting and strategizing within the Movement that 
prevented it from living up to his ideals. In the end, 
he concludes, "The System made some concessions to 
our protests, but its power was never trumped. . . . 
But history has not ended, and deep in my heart, I do 
believe that we - virtually the whole human race - 
will overcome someday."


"I was fascinated reading about the actions and 
thoughts of various figures in the movement that I had 
never heard of before. These low-level functionaries 
and local activists are what we very much need to know 
more about. . . . It is also good to have a memoir of 
a white participant . . . and one that gives us the 
view from the bottom up rather than one that deals 
with leadership decisions and conflicts. . . . It is 
unique; it is refreshing. I found its aura of naivete, 
of simplicity and wonder, a real change of pace in 
writings about the Movement." - Harvard Sitkoff, 
University of New Hampshire


_________________________________________________________

DICK J. REAVIS, member of the Texas Institute of Letters, 
a former senior reporter for the San Antonio-Express News, 
former senior editor of Texas Parks & Wildlife and Texas 
Monthly, is author of The Ashes of Waco and Diary of an 
Undocumented Immigrant, among other books. He lives in 
Raleigh, North Carolina.