Ron Kovic's Born on the 4th of July

The backgrounds and experiences of Ron Kovic, as recounted in his book Born on the Fourth of July, and Anne Moody, told in her book Coming of Age in Mississippi, are quite different, yet both are radicalized as they find gaps in American society and in the failure of that society to deliver on its promises to its citizens.

Ron Kovic grew up in Massapequa, New York, a while boy in a white neighborhood in the 1950s, an era looked back on with nostalgia by many, including Kovic himself. His father was a checker in a supermarket. Kovic remembers trips to the city, movies he saw, the thrill of hearing about early space explorations, and other events of the 1950s and early 1960s. Kovic's story divides around his own physical state -- his childhood was a time of athletics, while much later he is bound to a wheelchair. The dividing point is the War in Vietnam. As a youngster, Kovic had dreams of self-improvement, noting that he did not want to be like his father: "I wanted to be somebody. I wanted to make something out of my life" (Kovic 73). Kovic joins the Marines, eager to fight for his country, so imbued with patriotic fervor that he stands for "The Star-Spangled Banner" after the late movie on his last night as a civilian.

Kovic tells his own story, but his time in the Marines and in Vietnam is told in the third person, as if he were watching someone else live this portion of his life. The War in Vietnam was a war which more than any before took place in two places

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d to such organizations as the NAACP and CORE. She grew up in the rural South as a young woman both black and poor. She experienced the racism of the time directly and intimately, and she was part of a generation that reaped the legacy of slavery and the failed promise of emancipation directly as well. The racism of the age is something she becomes aware of slowly when she is a child. She goes to the movies and finds what happens when blacks go into the white lobby. Her awareness of the reason for this is something that does not come all at once, as can be seen when she talks about the white children who played in front of her house and what happened in the white lobby: "Up until that time I had never really thought about it. After all, we were playing together. I knew that we were going to separate schools and all, but I never knew why" (Moody 38). She becomes very aware of why as she grows to adulthood and sees more and more racism all around her. She discovers the secret of the Negroes who were found floating from time to time in the river, their bodies riddled with bullets (Moody 121). Indeed, violence is a part of her childhood and of the black experience as she sees it, and this is brought home to her when Sam O'Quin

Category: History - R