| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Peter B. Levy. Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland. (Southern Dissent.) Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2004. Pp. xvii, 242. $55.00.
South African satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys once wryly observed that the future is certain; "It is the past that is unpredictable." This is an apt description of the vicissitudes of civil rights movement scholarship in recent years. The first movement histories were constructed around a heroic narrative in which Martin Luther King, Jr., guided by the doctrine of nonviolence, successfully organized a movement and triumphed against Jim Crow. Historians' deification of King continued over the years, culminating in Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Taylor Branch's anointment of King as the "moral metaphor" of our age. In the 1990s many scholars broke from the interpretation that the movement was defined by the actions of elite leaders and national organizations and instead emphasized the role of broader and intangible forces, including the black church, newly formed direct-action organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), grass-roots and local movements, the Cold War, and the mechanization of agriculture.	1
Along with abandoning the "top-down" interpretation, the new scholars also rejected the notion that any single factor was paramount in impelling and shaping the movement. Consequently, many retreated into the intellectual safety of empiricism, in which all the historical actors had the same number of lines—and no one got the lead. What was the motor of the movement? Everything. Yet, if something is everything, then it is nothing. The empiricist interpretation allowed no room for contradictory or mutually exclusive forces within the movement. Instead, conflict and contradiction faded into a kinder and gentler world laced with classy sounding words like nuanced, complex, diverse, multivariate, and multicausal. Civil rights history became a reunion at which all was forgiven. Moderates became militants, and militants became moderates. Martin and Malcolm walked hand in hand, right off the poster and into the history books. Ironically, while scholarship grew more empiricist and took fewer intellectual risks, the public imagination underwent a rapture that transformed the movement into a civil religion, complete with its own gospel of redemptive suffering and pantheon of demigods in the form of King and Rosa Parks.	. . .

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