BOOK REVIEW / POLITICS : A Visionary Appeal for a Commitment to Race Reforms : CIVIL RIGHTS AND WRONGS: A Memoir of Race and Politics, 1944-1994 <i> by Harry S. Ashmore</i> ; Pantheon, $25, 442 pages

The fires of Watts in 1965, like those of South-Central in 1992, were the beacon of a certain painful but insistent truth: Crime in the streets of America is merely the symptom of a much deeper social and economic malaise that we ignore at our own terrible risk.

What is needed to cure the ailment, argues Harry S. Ashmore in “Civil Rights and Wrongs,” is “a firm commitment to massive social reform,” a commitment articulated and embraced long ago by a nation that had declared a “war on poverty.”

“A generation later, the commitment still has not been carried through,” warns Ashmore in a memoir that amounts to a spirited appeal to the American conscience. “The steady escalation of violent crime has demonstrated the futility of relying on the criminal justice system, backed up by the military, to maintain a tolerable degree of domestic tranquillity.”

It’s telling that Ashmore invokes the solemn phrasings of the Constitution in his prose. He’s a stalwart of American democracy, a goad to the American conscience, an intellectual from the Deep South who spoke out for civil liberties as an author and editor at a time and place where men and women were paying with their lives for their commitment to social progress.

These are the credentials that Ashmore brings to bear on “Civil Rights and Wrongs,” a survey of the politics of race in America over the last half-century. Ashmore styles his book as a memoir, but it is really a work of political history. The author gives us a closely measured assessment of the civil rights commitment (or lack of it) of figures ranging from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, from Booker T. Washington to Jesse Jackson.

At times, I wished that Ashmore were chattier and more forthcoming in his storytelling, but he is so intent on calling our attention to the ills and dangers of race relations in America over the last half-century that he does not find much room in 400-plus pages to kick back and tell some war stories.

Clearly, Ashmore has some good tales to tell. Born in South Carolina, he was a combat officer in World War II, a Pulitzer-winning newspaperman, the editor in chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the leading light of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a liberal think-tank in Santa Barbara.

Now and then, though, he tantalizes us with a memorable moment from a life of commitment and engagement. When Jimmy Carter was pilloried for confessing to lust in his heart in a Playboy interview, it was the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. who vouched for his morality to the Southern electorate. “They can’t kill you for looking,” the elder Rev. King insisted. “Old as I am, they still look good.” Ashmore points out how effective the endorsement turned out to be “at an interracial peanut roast in an Atlanta park in the year of Our Lord 1976.”

Ashmore, who still lives in Santa Barbara, is an insider in California politics too. He recalls, for instance, a visit to Jesse Jackson in a poor black neighborhood near USC. When Ashmore arrived, he found Jackson stretched out on a bed, tutoring an attentive Jerry Brown in the art of presidential politics: “What you’ve got to do to attract the black vote is get identified with Africa,” Jackson intoned--and Brown, accompanied by Linda Ronstadt, promptly embarked on a well-publicized jaunt to Africa.

Ashmore is not afraid to acknowledge that there have been a good many false starts and barriers on the road to equality. He demonstrates, for example, that the Democratic Party was thrust into the vanguard of civil rights advocacy despite its historical and political roots, not because of them.

Still, Ashmore refuses to admit that the problem of race in America is hopeless or intractable, and he closes his book on a visionary note. “The task of redemption remains unfinished,” he observes, but he is encouraged by the latest Democratic President to undertake the task: “Bill Clinton came before the American people as a healer, committed to bringing together a divided nation,” Ashmore writes.

“As a politician in a poor Southern state, Clinton had also recognized the end of racial discrimination as a pragmatic necessity--not only to meet the pressure exerted by newly enfranchised blacks, but also to free whites of the crippling legacy from the racist past.”

The closing passages of Ashmore’s book--so spirited and so full of promise--are the true mark of the classic American liberal, an endangered species whose moments of glory and doubt are well described in “Civil Rights and Wrongs.” And, we come to understand, Ashmore represents exactly the kind of Americanism that is essential for the success of a democracy.