Posted 14 November 2005

The Civil Rights Movement introduces a complex phenomenon; the narrative covers the phases, campaigns, events and organisations that made up the movement.  While there are omissions and emphases other historians might avoid, the major flaw is the attempt to familiarise readers with "historiographical issues" (historians' disagreements).  Some are big issues - did the movement continue, or depart from, the 19th and early 20th century black struggle? - and some minor, even trivial (see references to SCLC below).  The author claims his "chronological arrangement" - integrating issues "into the text as they arise in … the narrative" - allows readers to "bypass" them and "still gain an understanding of … development, composition and impact".  Segregated disagreements are avoidable, but issues mixed with, or arising at the end of, narrative passages are intrusive and distracting.  For example, a discussion of the movement's origins and SCLC's role ends: "Whereas Morris regards the SCLC as an effective force … developing a mass movement through its affiliates … Fairclough argues, more convincingly, that during its first five years … [it] was little more than a paper organisation."  Readers must return to previous text to clarify this confusion, an extreme instance, perhaps, of failure to achieve a more focussed, consistent and coherent narrative.

Sources too are inconsistently cited; sometimes one gets several separate endnotes while relatively lengthy expositions, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott story, have none.  If "further reading" were better conceived, such gaps might not matter, but much is missing, e.g. King's autobiographical Stride Toward Freedom, JoAnn Robinson's memoir The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It and other specific bus boycott sources (although biographical histories like Garrow's Bearing the Cross, cited and suggested, are likely sources for Newman's account).

Fiction and autobiography, genres appealing to beginning students, are ignored (apart from Malcolm X's Autobiography, mentioned and cited once) and not found in suggested reading.  This book does not encourage students to read primary sources such as Ann Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi or insightful novels such as Alice Walker's Meridian.  In general the arts are missing; a brief, unsourced, paragraph on the Harlem Renaissance interacting with the Garvey movement is all there is.

The book features a 4¹/₂-page 1896 - 1989 chronology, and a 14-page index.  Bibliographic details are in chapter endnote citations.  Nine pages of "Suggestions for Further Reading" perhaps compensate for an absent general bibliography.  Two pages listing abbreviations, too much to memorise, needlessly including infrequent usages, demonstrate alphabetisation of numerous organisations (SCLC = Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and programmes.  Several significant typographic errors are negligible in weighing this text, which is too imbalanced in other departments to be recommended unreservedly.

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