Farther Along

Farther Along is the intimate retelling of one passionate liberal's lifelong work to change society. Over four decades, Marvin Caplan - white, Jewish, male, a native northernercrafted his career, volunteered his free time, chose his neighborhood, and raised his children against the yardstick of racial justice.

In his memoir, Caplan doesn't paint himself a hero for his actions. "Picketing, for me," he admits, "was a painful obligation." He describes qualms about risking his job to protest alongside Mary Church Terrell for the desegregation of Washington's public eating establishments, about sending his children to a school 90 percent black, and, in the early cold war years, about associating with integrationists of Communist bent.

Still, a sense of purpose so self-evidently right energized Caplan and others at the grass-roots level, and he renders with compelling eloquence the endless hours of picketing, protesting, meeting, stuffing and mailing, organizing, arguing and advocating - as well as the less public moments of quietly living one's convictions.

Today this self-described "blinkered optimist" remains rooted to his racially mixed neighborhood and committed to the causes to which he devoted years of work. In an era when "unstylish beliefs" like Caplan's provoke cynicism and dejection, his story brings the refreshing reminder and the encouraging viewpoint that forty years later we're "farther along" and "we'll understand it all by and by."