A Journalist Investigates Memory, Family and Race
Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop, by Joseph Lelyveld. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 226 pages, $22.
In 1964, an Ohio rabbi named Arthur Lelyveld went to Hattiesburg, Miss., and started knocking on doors in black neighborhoods, encouraging people to register to vote. A local white man promptly bashed his head in with a tire iron.
