Gender and the Civil Rights Movement. Edited by Peter J. Ling and Sharon Montieth. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2004. 288 pp. $21.95

Abstract

Much of the scholarship on the modern Civil Rights Movement has recaptured dramatic and poignant events through eyewitness accounts and oral narratives—from letters, speeches, newspaper editorials, press releases, and photographs that summon vivid images of fire hoses and police dogs, peaceful protestors and violent rioters. The conventional approach (or master narrative) of civil rights history has focused almost exclusively upon the individual personalities and grassroots organizations that led the fight for equal protection under the law, desegregated lunch counters, and the right to vote in local and national elections. Rather than broaden and deepen our understanding of individual and collective forms of resistance, however, such an approach often simplifies and distorts a much more complex history of black militancy and activism in the United States. Most people come to associate the modern Civil Rights Movement with the famous names, places, and events that made headlines during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s—the murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi; Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott; Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the March on Washington; Bob Moses and Freedom Summer; Gloria Richardson and the Cambridge Movement; and Fannie Lou Hamer at the 1964 National Democratic Convention—and not the ordinary men and women who risked their lives in the face of mob violence.