1968 - A Story As Relevant Today As It Was Then

By William Natale

At 6:05 p.m. on Thursday April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and the world, especially America, and even more so the black man in America, was forever transformed. For the people who worked at Anderson Inc., a small factory owned by a white man but staffed almost entirely by blacks, the summer was going to be long and hot. When white Fire Chief John Beriso decides to use his clout to get his two sons summer jobs at the factory, black foreman Clarence Wilson has to renege on the summer jobs he promised to the families of his black co-workers, including one whose son desperately needed the job to enroll in college and avoid being caught in the draft of thousands (of young black men) fighting and dying in the rice paddies of Vietnam. That scenario insured that the brothers-Beriso, Vince and Joe face resentment and disrespect from their very first day of work at the plant. Joe Beriso, the younger of the two, has big dreams about being a drummer and eventually his love of jazz cuts through the foreman's anger and wins Clarence's respect. But the battle is far from over and as the summer temperature rises, so does the tension. Between vicious street gangs, isolated and divided neighbor-hoods, police brutality and the summer of riots, each of the main characters must rise to a new level of compassion and understanding if they are to survive in the summer of 1968! Based in part upon a true story, 1968 mirrors the anger, pain and fear that is boiling over in the streets of America once again -- Baltimore, Seattle, Santa Barbara, Ferguson, New York, Berkeley and many others. Time may have passed but the times are far from "a changing." In that sense, "1968" is as timely today as it was then.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0692406964
• ISBN13: 9780692406960
• Release Date: August 2015
• Publisher: Image Press
• Length: 230 Pages
• Weight: 1.76 lbs.