| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

J. Mills Thornton III. Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. Tascaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 733. $59.95.
In the late 1970s, J. Mills Thornton III began work on a study of the Montgomery bus boycott. During his 1987–1988 fellowship year at Virginia's Carter G. Woodson Institute, however, he decided to expand his research to ask a broader question: why did civil rights direct-action campaigns emerge in Alabama cities like Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma but not in somewhat comparable settings like Mobile, Alabama, Columbus, Georgia, or Meridian, Mississippi? The explanation, he ultimately concluded, lay in the complex relationship between local black communities and white-dominated municipal politics.	1
Thornton's first book, a detailed study of pre-Civil War Alabama politics, reflected his conviction that politics can only be understood by carefully examining the process at the grass-roots level. In the case of the civil rights movement, he acknowledges the impact of national trends and developments in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, but he insists that examining the local context will help us better understand how black citizens of some, but not all, black communities in Alabama came to believe that the "reality all around them, that formed the very substance of their daily existence, was in fact capable of being changed" (p. 7). His method is to sketch out this arguments for his book in brief introduction and then to describe the inner workings of race and politics in a 121-page section on Montgomery, a 240-page history of events in Birmingham, and a third, 120-page chapter on Selma. These sections, in turn, are followed by an account of race relations in the three cities in the thirty-five years since Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death and a final chapter summarizing his conclusions.	. . .

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