| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Origins of the African American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1956. By Aimin Zhang. (New York: Routledge, 2002. xxii, 166 pp. $75.00, ISBN 0-415-93382-X.)
In the last decade the scholarship on the twentieth-century African American freedom struggle has expanded to such an extent that it now encompasses a plethora of subdisciplines. This literature has made African American history a vibrant field, but it has also complicated and fractured the story of the movement so that it now defies easy comprehension.	1
By contrast, Aimin Zhang's The Origins of the African American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1956, provides us with a reassuringly neat narrative of a movement he sees as culminating in the "complete liberation of African Americans" (p. xvi). His thesis is that the underlying contradiction of white racism in the face of constitutional provisions for equal citizenship was the underlying cause of the civil rights movement. Furthermore, he maintains that African American migration to the urban North and South and the economic, social, and political developments brought about by the New Deal and World War II were the movement's catalysts. While he accuses American scholars of an "elusive" (p. xv) approach to white racism in contrast to his own presumably more direct attack, the argument he proposes is hardly a new one.	. . .

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