On Roe at Forty

Do Supreme Court decisions matter? In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that railroad segregation laws were permissible under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1954 the Court's decision in Brown v. the Board of Education held that the same constitutional provision invalidated statutes segregating public schools How great an impact did judicial rulings such as Plessy and Brown have? How much did such Court decisions influence the larger world of race relations? In From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, Michael J. Klarman examines the social and political impact of the Supreme Court's decisions involving race relations from Plessy, the Progressive Era, and the Interwar Period to World Wars I and II, Brown and the Civil Rights Movement. He explores the wide variety of consequences that Brown may have had--raising the salience of race issues, educating opinion, mobilizing supporters, energizing opponents of racial change. He concludes that Brown was ultimately more important for mobilizing southern white opposition to racial change than for encouraging direct-action protest. The decision created concrete occasions for violent confrontation--court ordered school desegregation and radicalized southern politics, leading to the election of politicians who calculated that violent suppression of civil rights demonstrations would win votes. It was such violence--vividly captured on television--that ultimately transformed northern opinion on race, leading to the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation in the mid 1960s. A fascinating investigation of the Supreme Court's rulings on race, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, spells out in exhaustive detail the political and social context against which the Supreme Court Justices operate and the consequences of those decisions on the civil rights movement and beyond.

Z. Alexander Looby (1899-1972) and Avon N. Williams, Jr. (1921-1994) were the most prominent civil rights attorneys working in Tennessee during the post-World War II period. They filed dozens of lawsuits pertaining to school desegregation, racial discrimination in employment and public accommodations, and other areas. Looby and Williams's work in school desegregation cases alone encompassed every major case in the state (with the exception of Northcross v. Board of Education), and entered the highest realms of legal activity. Federal judges at the circuit, appeals, and U.S. Supreme Court levels cited and considered many of their cases as the post-Brown v. Board of Education (1954) litigation world unfolded. Looby and Williams also followed their civil rights work into the political world--Looby as Nashville city councilman and Williams as state senator--where they became part of the first major resurgence of black lawmakers in Tennessee since Reconstruction. As Professor Bobby L. Lovett argued, electoral poli tics became the next arena in the fight for equal rights, despite suggestions in the mass media from the early 1970s that the Civil Rights Movement ended when sit-ins, mass marches, and freedom rides were no longer the dominant strategy. (1) In this sense, Looby and Williams set important examples by extending their legal skills beyond the courtroom and into legislative bodies. But more fundamentally, Looby and Williams's civil rights work in the legal and political arenas made them among the most important and widely recognized leaders in Nashville's African American community, and beyond. In addition to legal and political activities, they served their community in numerous other ways that included the churches, schools, and civic organizations. (2) Looby and Williams countered a deeply imbedded tradition in this regard, for prior to their work, many (perhaps most) whites and African Americans alike held little respect for black attorneys in general. For Looby and Williams to emerge as prominent community l eaders presented a impressive example to the contrary, to say the least. AFRICAN AMERICAN ATTORNEYS AND LEGAL ASPECTS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT Many historians have tended to neglect the legal aspects of the Civil Rights Movement, when in fact, litigation and other matters related to the law were often crucial determinants of success or failure. For example, the legendary Montgomery, Alabama, Bus Boycott (1955-56) involved absolutely indispensable legal work that fundamentally influenced the final outcome of that historic and symbolic event. (3) In contrast, an absence of legal help often proved disastrous for civil rights activists, particularly when local and state authorities passed discriminatory laws, issued injunctions against activists, sanctioned massive arrests, and otherwise attempted to enforce segregation or disrupt organized protests. (4) As legal scholars Donald Barnett King and Charles W. Quick observed in 1965, Both positively and negatively, [law] has been instrumental in defining the rights of the Negro in almost every realm of life. (5) Many scholars have almost completely ignored the leadership role of African American attorneys within their immediate communities. The scholarship has also tended to remain rooted in an earlier, disparaging view of black lawyers, who were unfairly caught in a vicious cycle during the Jim Crow era. Before the mid-1940s, these attorneys struggled for respect against the odds of discriminatory legal education, lack of esteem in the black community, inadmissibility to bar associations, shortage of honorable clients, and mistreatment at the hands of racist judges and court officials. African Americans also suffered discrimination in law school admissions. If they managed to earn a law degree, they immediately encountered further discrimination in the legal system. Since a racist and predominantly white society favored white lawyers in the courtroom, many African Americans were disinclined to hire lawyers of their own race. …

76 No.2 Understanding the Local Context of the Civil (lights MovementiUsing Service Learning to Develop an Oral History of Our Community By Robert Weldon Simmons III Growing up in Detroit as the son of a mother who attended Speiman College in Atlanta, I was keenly aware of the significance of the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the lives of African Americans. What's more, I was also aware of the links that the Civil Rights Movement had to Detroit. Noting the conversations that my mother had when describing life at Speiman during the late 1960s and my uncles discussing their experience watching Detroit burn during the 1967 social uprising (or riot, as some have suggested) on 12th and Claremont (walking distance from our family home), I knew that the local context of the Civil Rights Movement and the impact of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were often overshadowed by the bigger issues presented in various history textbooks in schools. Accordingly, I have worked with pre-service teachers and co-taught with teachers in middle and high schools to understand how service learning can be utilized to create oral history projects that focus on local communities. All discussions with students regarding the local context of the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 begin with reading from Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s.1 As my teacher education students read the text, they are amazed at the complexity of the Civil Rights Movement and the story behind the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Middle and high school students seem surprised to find that the struggle for freedom and justice wasn't just a "southern thing with people fighting against the Confederate flag," as suggested by one high school student. Exposure to readings that focus attention on the Civil Rights Movement in cities like Detroit, Chicago, Boston, or Gary, Indiana, as well as how the local community was impacted by the Civil 14 I BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN Vol. 76, No. 2 Rights Act of 1964, leaves students' eyes wide and their mouths open in amazement. As one student said to me in Detroit, "I didn't know we got down like that in the D." To him I said, "We sure did and still do." For students in grades 6-12 who don't find their cities located in the text, they routinely wonder, "What was happening here during that same time period?" Accordingly, I use this type of student curiosity as an opening to educate these students not only about the Civil Rights Movement, but about the work that was done during that era in their own cities. While I was studying the impact of service learning in urban schools in a school in the Midwest, I listened to "You Must Learn" by Boogie Down Productions with a group of African American students in a high school classroom.2 As the music played and the students nodded their heads and took notes on the historical names they recognized, I realized how little they knew about the personal narratives generated by everyday African Americans associated with the Civil Rights Movement. I tossed out a name of a local legend in the Civil Rights Movement and asked them to explain who this person was. Silence fell over the room. Certainly they knew of Rosa Parks sitting on the bus and Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, but they had little knowledge of their local community's participation in the Civil Rights Movement. As my co-teaching partner and I pondered our next series of lessons, we decided to co-construct them with our students. When we initially approached our students about developing a series of lessons focusing on the local context during the Civil Rights Movement, the students were confused. One student said, "Y'all think we know something about teaching?" My response was, "Perhaps you do, but you for sure know something about learning. Now tell me what you want to learn about as it relates to your local community and the Civil Rights Movement...

They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada

John D. Skrentny. The Minority Rights Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. 496 pp. Notes and index. $35.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). For students and scholars accustomed to thinking of the years following the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act as a period of conservative reaction and white backlash, John David Skrentny's The Minority Rights Revolution offers an arresting counter-narrative. In Skrentny's account, the same decade (1965–1975) that witnessed the election and re-election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California and Richard Nixon as president; the urban violence of Watts, Detroit, and Newark; and the stiff resistance to school desegregation in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles also witnessed "a remarkable flowering of minority rights" (p. 133). Swiftly and without substantial lobbying or heated controversy, a bipartisan group of federal actors—members of Congress, presidential staffers, agency bureaucrats, and judges— passed laws, promulgated executive orders, issued bureaucratic rulings, and rendered court decisions that "established nondiscrimination rights" and the policies and programs to implement them for "groups of Americans understood as disadvantaged" (p. 4). Asian immigrants and their Asian American advocates won the elimination of the national origins quota system as a result of the 1965 Immigration Act. Latinos (and other English-language learners) secured the right to language accommodation in schools as a result of the 1968 Bilingual Education Act and Lau v. Nichols, the 1974 Supreme Court case best described as the Brown v. Board of Education for language minority students. Women received educational equality as a result of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The disabled achieved equal access rights as a result of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Most significantly, Latinos, Asian Americans, women, and American Indians all benefited, in varying degrees, from "the most important policy in the minority rights revolution": affirmative action in federal employment, federally supported small business development, and higher education (p. 85). Collectively, these policies and programs, which emanated from deep inside the D.C. beltway and redounded to the favor of some 60 percent of the population, [End Page 278] formed the core of what Skrentny calls the "fantastic decade" that was the minority rights revolution (p. 328). How did it happen? Skrentny advances two basic arguments over the course of his two-part book on the "government's role in the recognition and protection of minorities" (p. 165). He emphasizes the first—the "perceived needs of national security"—in chapters two and three and the second—the "legacies of the black civil rights movement"—in chapters four through nine (p. 7). In the process, he discounts a third, and perhaps the most commonly held, explanation: that social movements originating beyond the nation's capital generated waves that crashed upon D.C.'s shores and forced a recalcitrant government to take action. The Minority Rights Revolution is not a book about the southern, African American civil rights movement—a revolution from the outside in—but rather a book about what that movement wrought for groups of Americans perceived by policy makers to be "analogous to blacks"—a revolution from the inside out (p. 328). With respect to the book's first part and first argument, Skrentny presents the years 1941 to 1965 as "the prehistory of the minority rights revolution" (p. 16). World War II and the Cold War, he contends, served to catalyze (and, in some respects, constrain) the pursuit of "nondiscrimination rights" (p. 21). Beginning with President Roosevelt's 1941 creation of the federal Committee on Fair Employment Practices, and continuing with, among other things, President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights and its To Secure These Rights report in 1947, and the Department of Justice's contributions to Supreme Court cases that successfully challenged racially restrictive housing covenants (Shelley v. Kraemer [1948]), segregation in interstate train dining cars (Henderson v. United States [1950]), and segregation in public K...

The civil rights movement has broken away from its religious roots which once provided it firm support and, indeed, it has become a threat to those roots. In fact, the past thirty years evidence two civil rights movements. The original civil rights movement promoted equal opportunity and presupposed a constrained vision of human possibilities compatible with Christianity, The revised civil rights agenda, which had replaced it by 1971, promoted preferential policies dubbed "affirmative action" based on an unconstrained vision incompatible with both Christianity and the American founding. The most visible threat to religious liberty is the expansion of civil rights protections to include homosexuals despite the overwhelming rejection of homosexuality as a lifestyle by the majority of Americans, including Christians.

The civil rights movement has had a lasting impact in the United States through its influence on social policies, political alignments, public opinion, and other social movements. Even though many of its fundamental goals were never realized and other gains have been rolled back, the civil rights movement is still viewed as one of the most influential social movements in U.S. history. For example, Aldon Morris, in The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, argues that the civil rights movement had “a profound impact on American society” (1984: 266). Similarly, Dennis Chong points to the movement as “the quintessential example of public-spirited collective action in our time” that “spark[ed] radical changes in American society” (1991: 1). Nevertheless, our understanding of how the civil rights movement (and movements more generally) brought about change is limited. I use the civil rights movement to demonstrate the theoretical insights that emerge from a closer analysis of the process by which movements generate change. In short, I argue that our understanding of the cause and form of movement impact is underdeveloped. In this chapter, I will compare explanatory strategies that focus on the organizations and the public activity (e.g., demonstrations, boycotts) of movements and propose that organizations and movement activity may work together to bring change. I begin by addressing general questions about movement outcomes. Then, I describe causal mechanisms through which movement organizations and events can produce broader changes. I illustrate these dynamics using examples from the civil rights movement from my own research on the Mississippi movement and from the broader scholarship on this influential case.

During the 1930s and 1940s, three unified Communist front organizations were established under the auspices of the Communist Party of the United States of America: The National Negro Congress, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. The strategies employed by the National Negro Congress not only contributed significantly to the civil rights movement of the 1960s but also established a framework for collaboration among interracial civil rights organizations. The Southern Negro Youth Congress fostered a tradition of activism among Black youth, particularly in Birmingham, Alabama, thereby creating a robust foundation for the subsequent civil rights movement and cultivating numerous civil rights leaders who emerged in the 1960s. Members of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare were staunch supporters of the civil rights movement during the 1960s, and its successor organization, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, provided both financial assistance to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and guidance on civil rights principles. Collectively, these three Communist front organizations exerted a significant influence on the civil rights movement in the United States post-1960s, and their activities served as a vital origin for the contemporary American civil rights movement.

Let us keep in mind that the Mexican-American can easily become the front-line of defense of the civil liberties of ethnic minorities. The racial, cultural, and historical involvements in his case embrace those of all of the other minority groups. Yet, God bless the law, he is white! So, the Mexican-American can be the wedge for the broadening of civil liberties for others (who are not so fortunate as to be white and Christian!). George I. Sanchez (1958) By embracing whiteness, Americans have reinforced the color line that has denied people of African descent full participation in American democracy. In pursuing White rights, Americans combined Latin American racialism with Anglo racism, and in the process separated themselves and their political agenda from the Black civil rights struggles of the forties and fifties. Neil Foley (1998) (1) THE HISTORY OF RACE AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH IS complex and exciting. The history of American civil rights is also promising, particularly so in regard to understanding the role of whiteness. Both selections above, the first from a American intellectual of the mid-twentieth century and the last a recently published statement from a historian of race and identity, are nominally about whiteness. But the historical actor and the historian discuss whiteness differently. The quotation from the 1950s advocates exploiting legal whiteness to obtain civil rights for both Americans and other minority groups. The one from the 1990s views such a strategy as inherently racist. The historical figure writes of Americans and African Americans cooperating in the pursuit of shared civil rights goals; the historian writes of the absence, the impossibility of cooperation due to American whiteness. This contrast is worth further consideration. This essay examines the American civil rights movement by focusing on the work and ideas of George I. Sanchez--a prominent activist and professor of education at the University of Texas--in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Sanchez is the most significant intellectual of what is commonly referred to as the Mexican American Generation of activists during this period. As a national president of the major American civil rights organization of the era, however, Sanchez's political influence within the American community was just as important as his intellectual leadership. Sanchez pondered notions of whiteness and actively employed them, offering an excellent case study of the making of American civil rights. (2) First, this work examines how Sanchez's civil rights efforts were vitally informed by an ideological perspective that supported gradual, integrationist, liberal reform, a stance that grew out of his activist research on African Americans in the South, Americans in the Southwest, and Latin Americans in Mexico and Venezuela. This New Deal ideological inheritance shaped Sanchez's contention that Americans were one minority group among many needing governmental assistance. Second, this liberal ideology gave rise to a nettlesome citizenship dilemma. During the Great Depression and World War II, Americans' strategic emphasis on American citizenship rhetorically placed them shoulder-to-shoulder with other U.S. minority groups. It also marginalized immigrant Mexicans. The significance of citizenship was controversial within the American community and coincided with the emergence of an aggressive phase of Americans' civil rights litigation that implemented a legal strategy based on their whiteness. Third, Sanchez's correspondence with Thurgood Marshall of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1940s and 1950s reveals early, fragmentary connections between the American and African American civil rights movements. All these topics address important interpretive debates about the role of whiteness. …

Ellis paints a portrait of a politician who, like many other politicians, often publicly sailed with the prevailing political winds of the day but who, in private, constantly exhibited a fundamental commitment to fairness and justice. Freedom s Pragmatist is a provocative and indispensable volume for students, teachers, researchers, and the general public alike in rethinking Johnson s lifelong relationship with the struggle for African American freedom and equality. John A. Kirk, editor of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement This comprehensive and balanced study of Lyndon Johnson and civil rights is a major contribution to the field of recent U.S. history. Ellis argues convincingly that Johnson s moral vision and practical political skills were absolutely crucial to the passage of major legislation advancing the legal rights of African Americans. A splendid analysis. ?Anthony Edmunds, Ball State UniversityLyndon B. Johnson made several major contributions to the black freedom struggle during his time in the White House. He provided much-needed moral leadership on racial equality; secured the passage of landmark civil rights acts that ended legal segregation and ensured voting rights for blacks; pushed for affirmative action; introduced antipoverty, education, and health programs that benefited all; and made important and symbolic appointments of African Americans to key political positions. This examination of Johnson s life from childhood through his lengthy career in politics argues that place, historical context, and personal ambition are the keys to understanding his stance on civil rights. Johnson s viewpoint, in turn, is essential to understanding the history of civil rights in the United States.

SPSSI psychologists' involvement in the early civil rights movement in the postwar United States was epitomized by their involvement in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. This article examines how social scientists sought to maintain the persona of objective, scientific expert when asked to prepare briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court for the Brown case. The social scientists believed that only by collapsing what they saw as an artificial distinction between objectivity and advocacy could the social scientist become a social activist. This article is based on extensive research in numerous archives, including the papers of Gordon W. Allport, Kenneth B. Clark, Stuart W. Cook, David Krech, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Theodore M. Newcomb, Robert Redfield, and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.

Reviewed by: Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement by Victoria W. Wolcott Alison Collis Greene Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement. By Victoria W. Wolcott. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. x, 262. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-226-81725-5.) Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement links several cohorts of twentieth-century utopian radicals who worked to build a world they envisioned in the midst of one they lamented. Among the broader range of liberal and radical freedom movements, Victoria W. Wolcott focuses on utopians tied by an emphasis on racial and economic justice and a commitment to cooperative economics, interracialism, and nonviolent direct action. This “matrix of intentional communities” included key members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and, later, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) (p. 10). Wolcott argues that these utopians—all well-documented individually—together “situated utopian interracialism and radical nonviolence at the center of the civil rights movement” (p. 10). Wolcott’s first chapter opens with “The Workers” at Brookwood Labor College in New York, founded in 1921 by the pacifist Christian labor organizer A. J. Muste, and Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, established by Myles Horton in 1932. The workers’ education movement “went beyond trade unionism to advocate for a new and more just world that would embrace racial and gender equality” (p. 18). Brookwood and Highlander provided a practical democratic education to many women and created “a new generation of Black activists,” including Ella Baker, Pauli Murray, and Rosa Parks (p. 18). This chapter establishes an argument central to the socialist utopianism of the 1920s and 1930s that Wolcott traces directly into the civil rights movement: that “the working classes could only rise on the basis of full racial equality,” and that Black workers in particular faced myriad forms of individual and systemic injustice based specifically on race and not reducible to class (p. 17). To live into a future of racial and economic justice in the midst of the profoundly segregated North was difficult and often dangerous; to do so in the Jim Crow South could be deadly. Chapter 2, “The Cooperators,” explores the Christian socialist dreams that shaped Delta and Providence farms, two agricultural cooperatives constructed to house displaced Black and white sharecroppers in Depression-era Mississippi. As historian Robert Hunt Ferguson has recently argued in his book Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi (Athens, Ga., 2018), the farmers’ own dreams carried them through two remarkable decades of work before they fell to racism from within and without. “The Divinites” of chapter 3 proved “the most successful utopian community in the twentieth century”; theirs is not coincidentally also the first Black-led movement that Wolcott discusses (p. 88). Following the lead of scholars Judith Weisenfeld and Father Divine biographer Jill Watts, Wolcott analyzes both the religious and the political work of the Peace Mission movement to demonstrate the real-world value of a utopian vision in which class, racial, and gender hierarchies (and even gendered difference) did not exist and where self-sufficiency came from shared resources and vision. Chapters 4 and 5, “The Fellowshippers” and “The Pacifists,” follow the utopian dreams of the pre–World War II era into Cold War antiradicalism and [End Page 391] the freedom movements led by FOR, CORE, and the inheritors of the prewar socialist Left. Here, Wolcott focuses on a number of outward-facing communes, from cooperative farms to the Catholic Worker movement to the Harlem Ashram. Wolcott contrasts—and defends—these activists’ radical, provocative, and nonviolent interracialism with the ameliorative liberal interracialism of more conventional white-led organizations. Wolcott demonstrates a coherence of vision across civil rights efforts where historians have more often seen fracture and rupture. This is not a consensus history, but it is a history of coherent, deeply rooted, and ideologically cohesive dissent—and a plea for its continuation. Alison Collis Greene Emory University Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

The past fifteen years have seen renewed interest in the civil rights movement. Television documentaries, films and books have brought the struggles into our homes and classrooms once again. New evidence in older criminal cases demands that the judicial system reconsider the accuracy of investigations and legal decisions. Racial profiling, affirmative action, voting districting, and school voucher programs keep civil rights on the front burner in the political arena. In light of this, there are very few resources for teaching the civil rights at the university level. This timely and invaluable book fills this gap. This book offers perspectives on presenting the movement in different classroom contexts; strategies to make the movement come alive for students; and issues highlighting topics that students will find appealing. Including sample syllabi and detailed descriptions from courses that prove effective, this work will be useful for all instructors, both college and upper level high school, for courses in history, education, race, sociology, literature and political science.

Reviewed by: The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights by Thomas C. Holt Raymond Arsenault The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights. By Thomas C. Holt. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 151. $18.95, ISBN 978-0-19-752579-1.) An abbreviated format poses a daunting challenge to any author, especially when the subject at hand is as complex and important as the American civil rights movement. Limited to approximately 120 pages of text, Thomas C. Holt had no choice but to avoid literary flourishes and potentially interesting digressions in his effort to produce a book that covers the major topics related to the history of the movement. With this restriction in mind, he set out to write a book that could transcend its brevity by keeping its "eyes on the prize," in the words of a popular movement anthem. The prize, in his view, is to capture the spirit and essence of a grassroots movement that depended heavily on the contributions and sacrifices of the mass of activists commonly known as "foot soldiers" (p. 19). Holt hopes to dispel a common misunderstanding of the civil rights struggle: the belief that the momentum and success of the movement were primarily a function of charismatic leadership and careful management from above. "Freedom," he writes in the final paragraph of the book, "is a prize won not in a single campaign, but in a long struggle waged by a determined and committed people. And, ultimately, it is not exceptional leaders but ordinary people themselves, conscious of the historical possibilities of their moment and acting collectively, who have the capacity to win that fight and change their world" (p. 120). While Holt does not deny the importance of organizational leadership, he is determined to challenge its centrality. This perspective allows him to treat leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and Stokely Carmichael as flesh and blood figures without turning them into mythic heroes. It also encourages greater appreciation for the critical role that women played in advancing the struggle, and a nuanced and balanced assessment of the relationships between local and national movements and the relative importance and connection between legal battles in the courts and the nonviolent direct-action struggle in the streets. The result is a highly sophisticated account that does full justice to both the strengths and the weaknesses of the movement. The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights is truth-telling history that studiously avoids the pitfalls of a comforting, celebratory narrative. Holt begins fittingly with a highly personal, prologue-like introduction that focuses on his grandmother Carrie Lee Fitzgerald, a Black Virginian who [End Page 423] refused to move to the back of a segregated bus in 1944. This simple act of resistance and courage, much like Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat eleven years later, introduces the intimidating world of Jim Crow that movement activists confronted in the years to come. The six chapters that follow offer an effective mix of chronological and thematic analysis, emphasizing change over time and the geographic diversity of discrimination and civil rights activism. One chapter titled "Before Montgomery" sets the stage for two chapters dealing with "Communities Organizing for Change," one subtitled "New South Cities," and the other subtitled "The New 'Old South,'" and a chapter focusing on "Organizing in the 'American Congo': Mississippi's Freedom Summer and Its Aftermath." The final two chapters address "Freedom Movements in the North" and "Legacies: 'Freedom Is a Constant Struggle.'" Despite their brevity, the six chapters offer a wealth of information and interpretive insight on the nature of the post–World War II African American freedom struggle. Holt's command of the secondary literature is sure-handed and reliable, and his conclusions about the complexities of racial discrimination and resistance bear the mark of a veteran scholar at the top of his game. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more valuable or thought-provoking introduction to the history of a movement that changed all of our lives. Raymond Arsenault University of South Florida Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

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