That style would be adopted by Mississippi movement stalwarts, like Cleveland's Amzie Moore and the young militants from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Payne, Dittmer and Fairclough also argue convincingly against the movement leadership model commonly accepted by historians -- male, clerical and middle class. Payne shows that the rural working class, sharecroppers and women provided the most militant and courageous leadership in Mississippi's dangerous Delta, as elsewhere in the South, and that Black churches were reluctant late-comers to the freedom fight.
These books refute the standard King-centric and Kennedy-centric accounts. Without denigrating King and his important role, they shine a bright light on generations of activists. Without them the 1960s movement would have been impossible.
But, as Payne notes in a bibliographic essay, "It is still possible to write Blacks out of much history, to write women out, to write Southerners and working class people out, and still be taken seriously."
Payne, Dittmer and Fairclough have made the history of the Southern freedom struggle more complete. Their books will make it difficult for any future scholar who tries to write the movement's main actors out to be taken seriously.
Julian Bond is a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Governmental at The American University and a Lecturer in History at the University of Virginia.
COPYRIGHT 1996 Cox, Matthews & Associates
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