Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi by John Dittmer Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois, 1994. $29.95 hard, $14.95 paper
These three excellent books represent a developing and welcome trend in civil rights historiography.
Previous histories have described the modern-day 20th-century civil rights movement from the top down — as a story whose main characters are Martin Luther King, Jr., and Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Most have also described the development of the movement within a restricted time line — from the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott that introduced King and his espousal of nonviolent resistance to the passage of important civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965.
Under that time-bound restriction, the movement began suddenly out of nowhere in the middle 1950s; by the middle 1960s it had triumphed. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King and the active cooperation of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, segregation had been vanquished. The battle had been won.
In their books, Adam Fairclough, John Dittmer and Charles Payne expand that narrow time-line and enlarge the cast of characters to give readers a bottomup view of a movement which began far earlier than the middle 1950s. They place the federal government in perspective as an always reluctant participant, usually siding with segregationists and eager to avoid politically dangerous associations with Blacks.
In these books, the civil rights movement is rich in personalities, most of them sadly unknown to history.
All three authors also represent the growing genre of community studies — Fairclough and Dittmer closely examine the civil rights movement in the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, respectively, and Payne focuses his scholarly microscope on the Mississippi community of Greenwood.
