Climbing the rough side of the mountain The extraordinary story of love, civil rights, and labor activism

A chronicle of lives of unwavering dedication. Now in their 80s, labor and civil rights activists Norman and Velma Hill recount more than six decades of struggles, triumphs, and frustrations in their tireless work as "crusaders for democracy." Beginning when they first met in 1960 on a picket line outside of a Woolworth store on Chicago's South Side, they devoted themselves to activism. "We have organized, marched, participated in sit-ins and wade-ins, and gotten ourselves arrested, yelled at, browbeaten, harassed, even bloodied," they write. "We have demonstrated and strategized from Chicago to Selma, from Montgomery to Mississippi, from Washington, DC, to Atlanta, from coast to coast; and then, around the world, including apartheid South Africa, Brazil, and Israel." Mentored by Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, the authors were invested in coalition politics and building majority support across race, class, and gender lines. Early in their career, they became part of a group of advisers to Martin Luther King Jr. "While we understood the role of nonviolence in the movement," they admit, "neither one of us believed that nonviolence meant passive nonresistance." The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which occurred on the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation, stands for them as "a defining moment for Black struggle in America," helping usher in passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Both activists held leadership positions in the national Congress of Racial Equality but resigned in 1964, when tensions between traditional civil rights ideas and Black nationalist ideas, as well as poor stewardship, weakened the organization. Velma, who had by then earned a master's degree in education from Harvard, became deeply involved in the labor movement, counting as a major success organizing paraprofessionals into the United Federation of Teachers. They continue as advocates of reform in such issues as job training, health care, education, the environment, and prisons. An inspiring joint memoir. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.