Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma

Abstract

Twenty years in the making, this book is the definitive study of the political cultures that reigned in the three Alabama cities central to the development of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. With this bold offering, J. Mills Thornton III presents a landmark publication on the struggle for racial equality in America. After two decades of painstaking research, he tells the story of the civil rights movement from the perspective of community municipal history - at the grassroots level. Thornton demonstrates that the movement had powerful local sources in its three birth cities - Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. There, the arcane mechanisms of state and city governance and the missteps of municipal politicians and civic leaders - independent of emerging national trends in racial mores - led to the great swell of energy for change that became the civil rights movement. In Montgomery, the term served by liberal Dave Birmingham on the city council, his defeat by segregationist Clyde Sellers, and the consequent search by black leaders for a way to influence the political process outside of local elections were all vital to the origins of the bus boycott. In Birmingham, civil rights protests exploded in direct response to the business community's decision to engineer the abolition of the city council as a governing body. And in Selma, Joe Smitherman's defeat of Chris Heinz in 1964 ignited intense feelings of social commitment in the black community that led to voter registration drives.