Tales of White Birmingham: The Letter and the Bomb

Abstract

Recently in these pages, Kevin Boyle urged fellow historians to look beyond the media-spotlighted events of the 1960s to develop a richer account of the decade's struggles.1 Historians of the civil rights movement would applaud his call to some extent. We do need to know more about the less widely known southern battlegrounds: Americus, Georgia or Danville, Virginia, for instance. We need studies of other Deep South states-not just Mississippi and Louisiana, but Georgia and South Carolina as well-and a far more comprehensive history of the contest in Alabama, which currently remains the most extensively covered state via studies of the major campaigns of Martin Luther King, Jr. and of the career of George Corley Wallace.2 We need to look much more closely at African American struggles outside of the South, especially the links between the northern militancy of the 1940s, symbolized by A. Philip Randolph's March on Washington movement and the major race riots in Harlem and Detroit, and later local struggles against discrimination in housing, employment, and policing. Despite a huge increase in scholarship, a cogent, sophisticated account of the 1960s racial explosions in metropolitan communities from Newark to Oakland is still lacking. The books under review, however, suggest how much more there is still to be learned about precisely those campaigns that the press corps did highlight at the time. Their photographs of young black protesters under attack from police dogs and water cannon in Birmingham in May 1963 have become icons for the movement as a whole. In the standard, press-derived narrative, the dramatic moral spectacle of this white brutality sets the stage for Dr. King's