CYNTHIA GRIGGS FLEMING. In the Shadow of Selma: The Continuing Struggle for Civil Rights in the Rural South. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. 2004. Pp. xix, 349. Cloth $72.00, paper $24.95.

Abstract

Most students of the civil rights movement know about the pivotal role that the dramatic confrontations between demonstrators and police in Selma, Alabama, played in convincing the federal government to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Less well known is the story of civil rights activism that occurred in neighboring rural counties of Alabama during this period. Cynthia Griggs Fleming recounts the experiences of the “forgotten” rural black people of Wilcox County whose participation in the movement, although not as highly publicized as the Selma protests, was equally important to its achievements. Following other scholars who have located the origins of the civil rights struggle well before the 1950s and 1960s, Fleming discusses the history of slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow in Wilcox County before moving to an analysis of black activism at mid-century. Much of what she recounts in the first few chapters reinforces what historians of the South's plantation regions have found in other states. Sharecropping, economic dependence, inadequate school facilities, and violence severely circumscribed the lives of black people in the county and limited their ability to engage in open protest. Beneath the contented masks presented to white people, however, African Americans harbored strong feelings of resentment and participated in subtle acts of resistance. Traditions of support for education and of armed self-defense against white violence existed in Wilcox County as in other parts of the rural South. In the 1930s, federal intervention in the form of New Deal programs began to shake the social order. African Americans in the all-black community of Gee's Bend, in particular, benefited from a Farm Security Administration project that transformed them from tenant farmers into landowners. As in Mississippi and Louisiana, black landowners and veterans of World War II took the lead in establishing local civil rights groups in the 1940s and 1950s. Activists from national organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference assisted local people in their struggles for political participation, school integration, and improved public services in the 1960s.