Book Review

The outpouring of studies regarding the modern African American freedom struggle continues to prove that still more are needed. Local movement studies published in the 1980s and 1990s transformed the field by constructing a variety of narratives rather than a single one featuring Martin Luther King Jr. and other proponents of national civil rights reform. Those studies demonstrated that the transformation of American black-white relations occurred differently in different localities. The timing of crucial events at the local level often did not coincide with the nationally publicized watershed events--the Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins and freedom rides, the Birmingham campaign, the Mississippi Summer Project, and the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Ambitious synthetic studies such as Taylor Branch's in-progress trilogy, America in the King Years (1988, 1998), have illuminated the ways in which black grass-roots movements interacted with the major civil rights organizations and leaders. We now know much more than we once did about how the African American freedom struggle affected and was affected by broad state, national, and international sociopolitical trends. Yet we are still some distance away from a convincing historical synthesis on a national scale of previous outstanding social, cultural, and political studies of American black-white relations during the period from the 1930s to the present.

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