View the Table of Contents. Read the Foreword.
"The thirteen essays in this important collection examine
grass-roots struggles for racial justice throughout the United
States from 1940-1980...Read together, these essays remind us that
activism changes people as much as society."
--"Journal of American History"
"The essays in "Groundwork" assert individually and collectively
that at the root of any national movement for change are local
activists working from the bottom up to change their communities
first, then the world. This excellent and invigorating collection
is crucial reading in an election year."
--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for
African and African American Research, and author of "America
Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans"
"A major contribution to the ever expanding historical
literature of the modern African American freedom struggle. This
book brings together outstanding examples of detailed and
thoughtful studies of northern as well as southern local
movements."
--Clayborne Carson, Professor of History and Director, Martin
Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, Stanford University
"Brilliantly conveys the vibrancy and creativity of
community-based movements that transformed America's racial and
civic landscape in the decades following World War II."
--Patricia Sullivan, author of "Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster
Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years"
"Required reading for anyone who wants to understand what the
Civil Rights Movement actually was - a national movement conceived
and executed by local people in cities and towns across this
country. They are the people who made the movement that madeMartin
Luther King, Jr.--not the other way around."
--Julian Bond, Professor of History, University of Virginia,
American University, and Chairman of the NAACP
"This work demonstrates again and again how local movements
complicate the standard civil rights narrative of nonviolence,
black power, busing, and the nature of leadership."
--Tracy E. K'Meyer, Associate Professor US History, University of
Louisville
"These essays enrich understanding of the valiant struggles to
make real the promise of a more democratic US."
--"CHOICE," highly recommended
Over the last several years, the traditional narrative of the
civil rights movement as largely a southern phenomenon, organized
primarily by male leaders, that roughly began with the 1955
Montgomery Bus Boycott and ended with the Voting Rights Act of
1965, has been complicated by studies that root the movement in
smaller communities across the country. These local movements had
varying agendas and organizational development, geared to the
particular circumstances, resources, and regions in which they
operated. Local civil rights activists frequently worked in tandem
with the national civil rights movement but often functioned
autonomously from--and sometimes even at odds with--the national
movement.
Together, the pathbreaking essays in Groundwork teach us that
local civil rights activity was a vibrant component of the larger
civil rights movement, and contributed greatly to its national
successes. Individually, the pieces offer dramatic new insights
about the civil rights movement, such as the fact that a militant
black youth organization in Milwaukee was led by a white Catholic
priest and in Cambridge, Maryland, by amiddle-aged black woman;
that a group of middle-class, professional black women spearheaded
Jackson, Mississippi's movement for racial justice and made
possible the continuation of the Freedom Rides, and that, despite
protests from national headquarters, the Brooklyn chapter of the
Congress of Racial Equality staged a dramatic act of civil
disobedience at the 1964 World's Fair in New York.
No previous volume has enabled readers to examine several
different local movements together, and in so doing, Groundwork
forges a far more comprehensive vision of the black freedom
movement.
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