A Question of Leadership

Abstract

The move away from national, televised events and the summitry of Kennedys and King has been one of the strongest currents in the recent historiography of the civil rights movement. This bottom-up perspective draws support from veterans of the freedom struggle, notably those associated with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). They were always unhappy with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) emphasis on high-level politicking. Historians, whose recent professional training has stressed the social scientific merits of the individual case study, also endorse a more localized approach. This methodology promotes the view that the civil rights movement was in a key sense not one movement but many. Its dynamics were different in Greensboro than in Monroe, North Carolina, and different again in Greenwood and Jackson, Mississippi, or in Birmingham, Montgomery, or Tuskegee, Alabama.1 Local studies have also strengthened the scholarly recognition that the classic phase of the freedom struggle (1954-1968) had a lengthy prologue. To understand the movement in Louisiana, historian Adam Fairclough begins in 1915 with the formation of the New Orleans chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).2 Historians do tend to mistrust the pronouncements of sociologists because their abstract and generalized models are too far away from the local realities, yet these theoretical frames have consistently informed the historical study of social movements.3 In 1982, Doug McAdam argued that the civil rights movement's dynamics reflected a changing political process within which large-scale structural changes provided periods of enhanced, and then contracted, political opportunity for insurgent social movements.4 The sociologists' shift to a more local perspective on the movement came in 1984, when Aldon Morris applied the resource mobilization model of social movement theory to find the key origins of insurgency within African American communities.5 Since then a fruitful dialogue with European social theorists, who have