My Quest for a Beloved Community

As a Tennessee teenager, George Brosi joined his first picket line at a segregated laundromat in his hometown in 1961. A rebellious kid, he has continued to enjoy comical shenanigans while engaging in civil rights, peace, and Appalachian issues. His recurrent levity, but also his gravitas, is reinforced in this memoir by quotations from his voluminous FBI files and short roasts from acquaintances.

Brosi honestly evaluates his social movements’ strengths and weaknesses. He also keenly assesses the foibles and failures of his own life full of disparate challenges. The ideal of the “beloved community” serves as Brosi’s guiding light in these appraisals. In the 1960s and ’70s, Brosi worked full time for organizations including Students for a Democratic Society, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Vocations for Social Change, and Save Our Cumberland Mountains in eight states, from Atlanta to Chicago, from Washington, DC, to California. Since then, he has served as a magazine editor, a professor, and a bookseller specializing exclusively in writings about Appalachia. My Quest for a Beloved Community candidly illuminates events and personalities of the ’60s and the continuing impact of that decade. The life of this seasoned veteran of righteous causes will entertain, inform, and inspire generations of readers.