October 5, 2020
Historian Holt (Children of Fire) counters popular representations of the civil rights movement as “the individual or collective acts of heroic and charismatic male leaders” in this concise and edifying account. Though well-known figures including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thurgood Marshall appear, Holt focuses on how “the accumulated grievances of ordinary citizens” became the driving force for a sustained social movement aimed at achieving “revolutionary change.” He relates how his maternal grandmother refused to leave the colored section of a Virginia bus in 1944 (the driver “decided to leave well enough alone,” Holt writes) and points out the “changes in material circumstances” that made such acts of resistance possible, including allowances for the families of Black men serving in WWII and the expansion of urban labor markets to satisfy wartime demand. Among the historical milestones, Holt highlights the pioneering of the “no-bail” tactic and the harnessing of music as a motivational tool during protests in Albany, Ga., from 1961 to 1962; battles over school and housing discrimination in Boston, Chicago, and New York City; and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. Even readers well-versed in the subject will learn from Holt’s close attention to lesser-known figures, events, and organizations. This well-informed history casts the civil rights struggle in a new light.
October 30, 2020
This current moment in the United States echoes past moments when Black Americans, people of color, and their allies fought for the rights often denied to those who weren't white. In most cases, our sense of this history shrinks to one or two memorable landmarks. For some the death of Emmett Till, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the March on Washington are the Civil Rights Movement. Our reductive cultural memory fixates on the highlights and leaves the messy details to the historians. In his new book, Holt (American & African American history, Univ. of Chicago; Children of Fire) provides a succinct reminder of the broader history of the Civil Rights Movement, covering the social conditions that lead to the Movement as well as the different groups (Albany Movement, Freedom Riders, etc.) the coalesced into the Civil Rights Movement. While the book doesn't go into the depth of detail like Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, Danielle McGuire's At The Dark End of theStreet, or Jill Watts's The Black Cabinet, it does provide readers a worthy introduction. VERDICT Holt provides a brief but full picture of the Civil Rights Movement in America that will appeal to high school and college students. --John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston
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Starred review from November 1, 2020
A slender but potent history of the civil rights movement, which extends well before the 1950s and '60s. In this lucid account, Holt, professor of African American history at the University of Chicago, notes that "the challenges to the Jim Crow order between 1955 and 1965 were clearly rooted in the generations of resistance that came before, and they cannot be understood without that prior history." Certainly it is not well known that in July 1917, 10,000 African Americans staged a silent parade in Manhattan to protest anti-Black violence or that, a decade before Rosa Parks' protest in Alabama, a 66-year-old Virginia woman named Carrie Fitzgerald refused to move to the "so-called 'cullid' seats" of a long-haul bus. "The driver," writes Holt, "decided to leave well enough alone, Virginia law and custom be damned," thus adding a moment to a long series of acts of resistance that "made a broader rebellion possible ten years later." The author makes several salient points, among them the fact that much of this antecedent protest was mounted by women and that international events such as World War I and the Great Depression were important in loosening the hold of the Jim Crow South on the U.S. government. One effect of the Depression was that dispossessed rural Whites came in number to places like Montgomery, Alabama, a city that had earlier been roughly equal in racial makeup, a migration that "ironically destabilized rather than confirmed the political grip of the city's traditional white elite." That did not make White resistance to civil rights any less intransigent, but neither was it monolithic: The first lunch-counter protests were staged in Nashville and led to the desegregation of many of the city's downtown diners. Conversely, when Black children marched against racism in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, police chief "Bull" Connor had no qualms about turning firehoses and police dogs on them, which only strengthened the movement. Essential for students of American history as well as activists in the ongoing struggle for civil rights for all.
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