BREAKING BARRIERS by Carl T. Rowan...

BREAKING BARRIERS by Carl T. Rowan (HarperPerennial: $13, illustrated). A prize-winning African-American journalist, columnist and diplomat, Carl Rowan, narrates his struggle to overcome a dirt-poor childhood in Tennessee and the legalized discrimination of the ‘30s and ‘40s with compelling urgency. He was obviously fascinated by Lyndon Johnson, whom he saw as a complex and often contradictory man, but “the single greatest human rights and civil rights President America has ever known.” Although Rowan offers disturbingly powerful--if circumstantial--evidence implicating J. Edgar Hoover in the assassination of Martin Luther King, he reserves his strongest dislike for Ronald Reagan, whom he describes as “a man who was so lacking in meaningful contact with black or poor people, or women who had to work for a living, that no scheme to reward the rich or punish the poor provoked objections from his conscience.” Rowan concludes that the greatest enemy minorities face in their struggle for equality is often “white people who would never utter a racist sentence in public, yet who quietly and privately will do everything they can to keep black people as the slave class in this society.”