TOWARDS A NATIONAL NARRATIVE OF CIVIL RIGHTS

Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland. By Peter B. Levy. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. xvii + 242 pp. Photos, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00.

American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. By Robert O. Self. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. xvi + 386 pp. Maps, photos, illustrations, notes, appendix , and index. $35.00.

Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940–1970. By John A. Kirk. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. xx + 256 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95.

Victoria W. Wolcott
University of Rochester

No longer can one speak of the Civil Rights movement as beginning in Montgomery in 1955 and ending in Selma in 1965. This traditional narrative of a nonviolent southern movement undermined in the mid 1960s by the emergence of Black Power has been thoroughly shattered by a new historiography exemplified by these three books. Peter Levy, Robert Self, and John Kirk all expand the limits of the Civil Rights movement regionally, topically, and chronologically. Through carefully researched local studies the authors point toward a new synthesis of postwar America that places African Americans as the central agents in a changing political and economic landscape. Black activists in Cambridge, Little Rock, and Oakland were not simply reacting to the growing divide between black and white; rather they were fashioning visions of a new American city where African Americans had full access to education, housing, and employment.