The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights by Thomas C. Holt; Oxford University Press, 152 pp., $18.95
In 2005, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, published an essay in the Journal of American History titled, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past.” In it, she asserted that the movement had begun with the labor struggles of the 1930s rather than with the well-known landmarks of the mid-1950s, like the Brown v. Board decision and the Montgomery bus boycott. She also shifted the movement’s conceptual emphasis, highlighting the fight for economic justice more than the struggle for desegregation, and recast it as national in scope rather than primarily southern. Large numbers of historians embraced Hall’s call, some pushing the movement’s start date back further, to the 1920s or even the 1910s. The “long civil rights movement” has since become the dominant scholarly framework.
Thomas C. Holt’s The Movement is a succinct and powerful book that runs against this current and reasserts the importance of the “classic” civil rights movement. Holt, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Chicago, focuses on one decade in the South: from the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott to the Selma march of 1965. He distills what was unique and special about this part of the Black freedom struggle and explains why its timeline ought to be narrowed rather than broadened.
Holt begins with the story of Carrie Lee Fitzgerald, presenting his argument in its most striking form. In January 1944, bound for Danville, Virginia, Fitzgerald took a seat near the front of a bus in the section reserved for whites. When the driver ordered her out of the seat, Fitzgerald refused. Unlike Rosa Parks a decade later, she was not arrested, nor did her action spark any larger movement against segregation. Fitzgerald was Holt’s own grandmother, and he uses her example to demonstrate his larger point. Fitzgerald’s challenge to Jim Crow was “individual and momentary,” Holt writes, “at best a prelude” to the civil rights movement itself. This was “not yet a mass social movement. There would be no community mobilization to build on her individual protest, not much immediate change in her own disposition toward the oppression she had briefly challenged.” Yet actions like Fitzgerald’s in the 1940s helped plant the seeds for what was to come.
The movement that swept through the South in the mid-1950s and ’60s was defined by collective mobilizations in community after community, where, as Holt writes, “ordinary people were moving in unison to achieve what they hoped would be revolutionary change.” He contends that the most notable community mobilizing efforts emerged in 13 “New South cities”—not only in Nashville, Atlanta, and Greensboro, which were known for their moderation, but also in more forbidding places, like Birmingham, Selma, and Albany, Georgia. Holt argues that these New South cities had undergone similar processes of urbanization, migration, political change, and adjustment to the new postwar economy. He also devotes a chapter to the movement in Mississippi, though he finds the rural struggle in the Delta quite different from that in urban areas. In the Magnolia State, white brutality was more open and often more deadly than in the New South cities. Moreover, African Americans constituted 64 percent of the population in the Delta, a much larger percentage than in the cities, and Mississippi activists focused on voter registration campaigns rather than the desegregation of public accommodations. That choice altered “the character of the Movement as a whole.”
Holt’s history of events is conventional, covering the greatest hits of the civil rights era: the Montgomery boycott, the student sit-ins of 1960, the Freedom Rides, the Albany Movement, the 1963 protests in Birmingham, the March on Washington, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the Selma-to-Montgomery march. He takes a well-considered look at freedom struggles in northern cities as well.
His overall argument is persuasive. The decade of the mid-1950s to the mid-’60s did form a unique period within the longer Black struggle for civil rights, one that featured sustained direct-action protests and local organizing efforts, waged month after month in city after city. In the number and intensity of these events, the period has no parallel. Although Martin Luther King Jr. loomed large on the national stage, he does not sit at the center of Holt’s narrative. Instead, Holt acknowledges the importance of leaders like King while emphasizing the struggles of ordinary people.
Holt is comprehensive and impressively concise, yet some of his omissions are difficult to overlook. He includes only one paragraph on the Memphis sanitation strike of 1968. Even by the measure of Holt’s own argument, the Memphis strike would seem to figure as a crucial part of the civil rights movement, but because it falls outside his timeline, he only briefly mentions it. He writes that the 1965 Selma campaign “would be the last sustained, community-wide mobilization in the South of a size, character, and style comparable to those that had rocked the nation over the last decade.” Yet Selma was not the last struggle of this kind—the Memphis strike was precisely such a community-wide mobilization. A genuinely local struggle, conceived and waged by the downtrodden workers themselves, it quickly united the city’s African Americans. The omission of organizing efforts in St. Augustine, Florida, is similarly surprising. It’s unclear where St. Augustine might sit on Holt’s axis of New South versus Old South. But this community-based movement led by local NAACP activists Fannie Fullerwood and Robert Hayling took place in 1964, well within his decade.
Holt’s introduction presents a previously unknown story—that of Carrie Lee Fitzgerald—and links the story with his larger argument. Yet in the rest of the book, almost all the other people he details are already well known. Holt is clear throughout that the civil rights movement was so meaningful because of its effect on ordinary African Americans in the South. If Holt had documented more of their stories, in greater depth, the book would have been that much more powerful. As it is, he only skims the surface when it comes to the experiences of many local people. Dozens of oral history archives could have helped Holt amplify the voices of heretofore unknown figures. But then, his primary task was not to discover new stories; it was to reinterpret old ones. In this, he succeeds.
Holt’s pages are full of moving anecdotes and quotations. A skilled historian whose powers are on full display in The Movement, he knows the moments when it is best to let the participants themselves summarize the extraordinary power of their struggle. Said Mississippi activist Victoria Gray Adams, the movement was “what I’d been looking for all of my conscious existence … It was like coming home.”
