The Civil rights movement : a very short introduction

Author / Creator

Holt, Thomas C. (Thomas Cleveland), 1942- author

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Summary

The Civil Rights Movement was one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history. Not only did it decisively change the legal and political status of African Americans, it prefigured the...

The Civil Rights Movement was one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history. Not only did it decisively change the legal and political status of African Americans, it prefigured the moral premises and methods of struggle for other historically oppressed groups seeking equal standing in American society. Thomas C. Holt provides an informed and nuanced understanding of the origins, character, and objectives of the mid-twentieth-century freedom struggle, privileging the aspirations and initiatives of the ordinary, grassroots people who made it. His analysis of the critical moments--Freedom Summer, the Poor People's Campaign, and the Greensboro sit-ins--conveys the sense of a social movement that shaped its participants even as they shaped it--back cover.

"It may seem odd that a very short book should have incurred such a long list of people to whom I am endebted, but most of these debts were acquired long before this project was even conceived. Some are owed to my maternal grandmother Carrie for the stories she shared during idle moments on our back porch about the history of the place we inhabited and in other more emotionally charged moments when she silently modeled for a preadolescent boy how one might negotiate its hostile terrain with dignity. Others are owed to my father, whose stories about how our family's history evolved in that hostile place and about the different worlds he had seen far beyond its confining and sometimes confounding boundaries somehow enabled me to think differently about my own place in the world. Growing up in a hostile world can make one self-destructive, but somehow these stories delegitimized its rule and suggested that building a very different world was possible"--

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