Common Ground

1968-a time of unprecedented social activism, a time when new political responsibilities and intense personal dedication seemed to presage real change. Then, in April, Martin Luther King was assassinated and cities across America began to burn. Soon came Robert Kennedy's death, the riots at the Democratic Convention, and the election of Richard M. Nixon. Common Ground is a powerful account of the decade that followed — of the realities of day-to-day living in urban America during a period when people's expectations were lowered, their dreams deflated.

In an extraordinary tour de force of reportage seven years in the making. J. Anthony Lukas brings this turbulent time alive in the most profoundly human and astutely political terms. He explores how the great issues of race and class converged in the nation's streets, invading the lives of count less Americans. He shows what happened, and why and how, by concentrating on the storm that plunged Boston into virtual civil war: the school integration crisis, which shattered the uneasy peace in which the "three nations of that city-Irish, black, and Yankee had lived for generations. He makes us understand what it was like to live in that crucible, foreshadowing the ordeals that other cities across the country would undergo as the decade progressed