By Jo Freeman

Review of A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope and Innocence Lost

By Frye Gaillard

Published by New South Books 2018, 687,  xvi pages

"If you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there" is a statement that has been attributed to many people.

Frye Gaillard remembers the sixties and took almost 700 pages to tell us about it. Born in 1946, the Sixties shaped his life — especially during his active years at Vanderbilt University. Between 1964 and graduation in 1968, he met Robert Kennedy, William Buckley, Julian Bond, Eldridge Cleaver and many others who made the Sixties such a memorable decade. Of all these, it was RFK who made the deepest impression; he appears in a lot of pages in this book. 

Growing up in Mobile, Alabama, Gaillard stayed in the South, initially as a journalist. He wanted to be a writer from an early age and succeeded admirably, this being his 29th book. Those books have focused heavily on his native South.  A Hard Rain does in the same way.  Since a good deal of the actions of the Sixties happened in the South this is fitting, though activists in other states might feel a bit slighted.

People who didn’t live through the Sixties are often told that it was about sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. That might be true for those who only know about 1967 – also known as the Summer of Love. But that was only a small sliver of the many things that made their mark. As Gaillard makes clear, the Sixties was really about race and war. Race dominated the first half of the decade and war dominated the second.

Pages: 1 · 2

More Articles

• Jo Freeman Writes: It’s About Time
• Jo Freeman Reviews: Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight
• Women in Congress: Biographical Profiles of Former Female Members of Congress
• Population Changes Across the Country Since the 2010 Census: "our nation is growing slower than it used to"
• Jo Freeman Writes: Sex and the Democratic Party – In Brooklyn
• Updated With Key Takaways: Watch on YouTube House Select Committee Hearings at House on January 6th: "So many citizens are downplaying on what happened that day"
• Jo Freeman Reviews MADAM SPEAKER, Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons Of Power: “An iron fist in a Gucci glove”
• UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ: ‘I always felt like a pioneer’
• Jo Freeman Reviews Mazie's Hirono's Heart of Fire: An Immigrant Daughter's Story
• New York's Jewish Museum: Photography and the American Magazine; When Avant-garde Techniques in Photography and Design Reached the United States via European Emigrés