J. Anthony Lukas

Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families

The 1986 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award was presented to Robert Norell for Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee and J. Anthony Lukas for Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families.

Also a Pulitzer Prize winner, Common Ground recounts Boston’s busing crisis in the tumultuous years following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Lukas tells the story through the lens of three families: one headed by a working-class Irish-American widow, one by a working-class African-American mother, and the other white, liberal, and upper-middle-class.

J. Anthony Lukas was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of numerous books. His groundbreaking work documenting race relations and class conflict in 20th-century America was published in numerous publications including the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The New Republic, and Harper’s Magazine. He also worked as a journalist for The New York Times for nine years. He passed away in 1997.