The Movement
The African American Struggle for Civil Rights
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The civil rights movement was among the most important historical developments of the twentieth century and one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history. Not only did it decisively change the legal and political status of African Americans, but it prefigured as well the moral premises and methods of struggle for other historically oppressed groups seeking equal standing in American society. And, yet, despite a vague, sometimes begrudging recognition of its immense import, more often than not the movement has been misrepresented and misunderstood. For the general public, a singular moment, frozen in time at the Lincoln Memorial, sums up much of what Americans know about that remarkable decade of struggle.
In The Movement, Thomas C. Holt provides an informed and nuanced understanding of the origins, character, and objectives of the mid-twentieth-century freedom struggle, privileging the aspirations and initiatives of the ordinary, grassroots people who made it. Holt conveys a sense of these developments as a social movement, one that shaped its participants even as they shaped it. He emphasizes the conditions of possibility that enabled the heroic initiatives of the common folk over those of their more celebrated leaders. This groundbreaking book reinserts the critical concept of "movement" back into our image and understanding of the civil rights movement.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Holt (Children of Fire) counters popular representations of the civil rights movement as "the individual or collective acts of heroic and charismatic male leaders" in this concise and edifying account. Though well-known figures including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thurgood Marshall appear, Holt focuses on how "the accumulated grievances of ordinary citizens" became the driving force for a sustained social movement aimed at achieving "revolutionary change." He relates how his maternal grandmother refused to leave the colored section of a Virginia bus in 1944 (the driver "decided to leave well enough alone," Holt writes) and points out the "changes in material circumstances" that made such acts of resistance possible, including allowances for the families of Black men serving in WWII and the expansion of urban labor markets to satisfy wartime demand. Among the historical milestones, Holt highlights the pioneering of the "no-bail" tactic and the harnessing of music as a motivational tool during protests in Albany, Ga., from 1961 to 1962; battles over school and housing discrimination in Boston, Chicago, and New York City; and the 1968 Poor People's Campaign. Even readers well-versed in the subject will learn from Holt's close attention to lesser-known figures, events, and organizations. This well-informed history casts the civil rights struggle in a new light.
