The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change.

Abstract

This important and provocative book reflects a trend in recent scholarship concerning the modern struggles for black advancement. Scholars have increasingly moved from a national to a local perspective in their effort to understand the momentous changes in American racial relations since 1954. The newer scholarship has begun to examine the distinctive qualities of the local black movements that both grew out of and spurred the campaign for national civil rights laws. Earlier studies have told us much about nationally prominent civil rights leaders such as King, but only recently have scholars begun to portray the southern black struggle as a locally based social movement with its own objectives instead of merely as a source of mass enthusiasm to be mobilized and manipulated by the national leaders. In short, what has been called the civil rights movement is now understood as more than an effort to achieve civil rights reforms. Revisionist scholarship such as Morris's has challenged many widely held assumptions regarding black activism of the 1950's and 1960's. In the 1960's, black activism was usually categorized with other forms of collective behavior, which were seen as ephemeral outbursts of emotions. In this view, protest activity was an expression of the yearning of blacks to realize a longstanding civil rights reform agenda and thereby become part of the American mainstream. While recognizing that black protesters were impatient with the pace of racial change and with the caution of NAACP leaders, scholars nevertheless assumed that the political significance of mass militancy was limited. Mass militancy merely gauged integrationist sentiments among blacks and allowed national civil rights leaders to demonstrate the urgency of their concerns. Only such leaders, it was assumed, possessed the political sophistication and access to institutionalized power that was necessary to transform amorphous racial frustrations and resentments into an effective force for social reform. Most early studies of the civil rights movement gave little at-