The Political Legacy of Civil Rights : FREEDOM SONG--A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement <i> by Mary King (Morrow: $19.95; 450 pp.) </i> : FREE AT LAST--What Really Happened When Civil Rights Came to Southern Politics <i> by Margaret Edds (Adler & Adler: $18.95; 313 pp.) </i>

The agonies of idealism, the exultation of commitment and the lost illusions at the end of the crusade when hard realities become the killers of inflated hopes--these are the themes that are woven into these two highly informative books. “Freedom Song” and “Free at Last” are about the Southern Black Civil Rights Movement of the ‘60s. The first has the quality of an extended diary by a former participant in the struggle, written in wistful retrospection; the other is contemporary reportage seeking out the facts of the political aftermath of the political results of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the South of the 1980s. Both writers are white women lending a salutary flavor of gender perceptions and also cross-cultural objectivity to topics that are as racially provocative as they are politically controversial.

“Mine is not a definitive history of the civil rights movement, but a personal account,” writes Mary King, author of “Freedom Song,” but she emphasizes the fact that “I am a white woman writing about my experiences in a mostly black, largely male-led organization.” By inference, the writer poses the question as to why the civil rights “movement” was “mostly black” and “largely male-led,” but only partially answers it in terms of gender involvement. But as the author makes clear, even today many of the intimate facts about inner workings of the civil rights movement are not generally known. They have long needed retelling, and both writers have shed revealing light on a historic social movement that was much more than what recent history records as a “civil rights movement.” King reminisces that as a social movement of a special kind, “It was everything; home, family food and work, love and a reason to live . . . when we were young and in the South.” Here was capsulized the commitment of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee or SNCC, which, the author says, was one of the most “enigmatic and elusive” types of radical group to define. However, because of the pioneering organizational activities of SNCC, the United States would never be the same again.

But for the benefit of historians, King imparts a special slant--an informed perception on the workings of a social movement, SNCC, which from its inception was neither a “gender”-inspired movement, nor was it programmed for civil rights of gender, but of race. Thus, in the feverish and contentious unfolding of the SNCC program, King viewed it as a unique movement made up of men and women contending for a new kind of freedom, but gradually becoming aware that freedom might mean different things for men and women. This was, the author says, the untold story of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. Inferentially, “freedom” would mean different things for black men and white men, black women and white women. In fact, the author makes the claim that the gender issue not only informed SNCC’s loosely organized thrust, but argues that the real seeds of the women’s movement were sown in the fertile groundings of SNCC’s functional originality as a social movement without precedence in American history.

This, of course, is not (was not) a conventional interpretation of black civil rights movements in the 20th Century. While it is true, as the author implies here and there, that “It is an error by subsequent historiography not only to fail to recognize the role played by SNCC in the American civil rights movement but also to omit the role of that movement in building an American concern for the rights of women. This is all the more true because these two causes are historically linked. It takes away nothing but adds to the depths of the women’s movement to acknowledge that part of its inspiration was in the civil rights cause.” But it is also an error compounded not only by historical distance but also by the essential gender relativity vis-a-vis the disparities in the social position of the two races. To say that SNCC was largely “male-led” meant black male -led in the 1960s--as if to imply a flaw in SNCC’s “radical” consciousness. The fact that American women did not get the vote until 1920 might have indicated a flaw in the political thought of the United States in 1820, except that the evolution of ideas is governed by a variety of motivations and restraints. However, the author shows that what was more important in the ideological evolution of the politics of SNCC was that it was “a radical movement” that “sat astride some of the major philosophical and political gulfs of this era.” This not only entailed the relationships between blacks and whites, but also the choice of nonviolence as opposed to violence; the question of reform versus revolution; decentralized local authority as contrasted with centralization; relationships between men and women; democracy or authoritarianism; the question of leadership from the mass or leadership from above.

Despite having a corps of talented and committed “leadership” personalities, SNCC “was built on what you might call an existential theory of organization,” says the author. These “leaders,” such as John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael, Julian Bond, Marion Barry, Bob Moses, Jim Forman, Ella Baker and others, collaborated in cultivating the SNCC mystique of disavowing the necessity of leadership authoritarianism. Because of the flexible eclecticism of its approaches, SNCC had to splinter and fall apart from the inside at the same time that the vicious and relentless pressures of the organized Southern racists assaulted the SNCC forces from the outside.

Interestingly enough, the one black leader the author grants high grades for effectiveness was the black woman leader, Ella Baker. Miss Baker, as she is reverentially called by SNCC’s rank and file, had the ability to guide SNCC with “Socratic Insistence” to stop at every turn of SNCC’s fortunes or misfortunes and ask the question: “Now let me ask this again. What is our purpose here? What are we trying to accomplish?” In the heat of struggle in the ongoing trials and tests of intent, SNCC was forced at every turn to articulate its assumptions. In this way was the functionally existential character of SNCC made clear. Thus, 20 years later, “Freedom Song” tries, but cannot fully answer the book’s main questions: “What brought about SNCC’s agony? What killed it? Why did it die so quickly? What transformed a bold, self-confident, highly creative and fearless organization into a floundering, back-biting and paranoid group?” One can agree today that in the face of the violent physical and psychological assault inflicted on its members, SNCC died as quickly as it did because it had to die. Certain social movements, like military movements, must suffer heavy casualties in pursuit of objectives. SNCC died, not because its assumptions were illegitimate, but that its sacrifices were not destined to bear fruit for another generation. It takes youth to make determined protests against superannuated and retrograde traditions, but rarely does youth alone make lasting revolutions by idealism without instruments of force--at least not in the United States.

The findings of Margaret Edds, author of “Free at Last” bear witness to the delayed results of the sacrifices of SNCC. The present outcome of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which SNCC inspired, is not a record of lost causes and irreversible defeats as was the fate of SNCC. Rather, the South today is a mixed record of stunning black political victories here and there, such as Atlanta, Birmingham and Richmond, where the records of black mayors have verified the meaning of the “Black Power” slogan voiced by SNCC leaders more than 20 years ago in Mississippi--at least in purely political terms. But on the other hand, black political power mirrors the deflated consequences of Pyrrhic victories. The winning of political power was not enough to lift the lid off the dreary economic stagnation and underdevelopment that still grips most of the rural and small-town backwaters of the Southern states. Where in contrast to the brilliant rise of a black Richard Arrington to the mayor’s seat in Birmingham in 1979, Lowndes County, Ala., represents one of those “Counties with black voting age majorities . . . among the poorest in their respective states.” In 1980, median family income for Lowndes County blacks was $7,493, compared with $18,350 for local whites--”In timeless tradition, a half-dozen white families and a few companies owned the bulk of the county’s land.” Told in microcosm, the story of Lowndes County is what happens when blacks win political office in the rural South even on the basis of overwhelming black voting majorities. The contrast between a Lowndes County and an Atlanta, Ga., is both striking and sobering. In 1985, a John Lewis of SNCC--who in 1965 would have his skull bashed in the famous Selma, Ala., civil rights march across the Edmund Pettus bridge--would become an Atlanta city councilman and part of a neighborhood voting coalition that included as many whites as blacks. A year later, Lewis would be elected to Congress on that basis of the same black-white coalition. At that time, Lewis could speak on Martin Luther King’s birthday to the fact that all over the South, a nonviolent revolution had swept the region, resulting in a growing body of black voters and black elected officials. As in Lowndes County, these other Southern counties, as in Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, had black sheriffs, majority black county commissions and school boards. But in other Black Belt counties, a decade of black political control had freed spirits but brought little in the way of economic and educational gains. Unlike the metropolitan-urban styles of black political power, there would not accrue the political sophistication of city councils, nor black members of corporate board rooms as in Atlanta--the mecca of Southern political and financial modernism for both blacks and whites.

Thus, for Southern blacks in particular, the third decade of their political emancipation, says Edds, must be measured by tangible economic and social gains. If the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had to oversee the ongoing result of the SNCC’s seminal sacrifices, it is clear that political expectations have only been partially realized. The changes in Southern politics have been a matter of law, not revolution. No law, however, could dictate economic and social equality. “And so, as blacks embarked on the third decade of involvement in the Southern political scene, much remained to be done. Some places still waited for old formulas to be applied. In others, the time for new remedies had arrived. The metamorphosis, still incomplete, continued.”