The Civil Rights Movement. By Bruce J. Dierenfleld. (New York: Pearson Longman, 2004. Pp. xi, 190. $22.99.)
In this book, the author attempts to give his readers a short but concise history of the modern civil-rights movement in the southern United States. To some degree, he has succeeded in his objective.
Using a top-down approach to the civil-rights movement, Bruce J. Dierenfleld's main thesis is that the movement was a series of local struggles that ultimately forced the national government to eliminate apartheid and enfranchise African Americans. Chapters three through twelve support this thesis by providing incredibly engaging stories about white people who tried to maintain white supremacy and the black people who worked to overthrow it. These chapters are some of the best pieces ever written about the localized nature of the movement.
Yet, the top-down approach forces Dierenfield to privilege national political and civil-rights figures, all of whom are men, over very important women activists. One example is the coverage of Martin Luther King Jr. He is profiled in detail and found throughout this book, but Ella Baker, whose organizing philosophies and activism did so much for the movement, gets very little coverage. Consequently, it will be easy for readers less knowledgeable about the era to get the idea that King was the movement. Furthermore, even though Dierenfield acknowledges that women were the backbone of the movement, his extensive coverage of male activists, combined with the book's cover and photos (all of which have men as their focus) and its primary sources written by individuals (all men), genders the movement as male (99).
The author also gives short shrift to some important topics, such as the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and its rift with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Dierenfield gives no indication that a large part of the rift between the organizations' members stemmed from their competing views of community leadership and liberation strategies. SCLC was a hierarchical, leader-driven organization, while SNCC was a group-centered, member-driven organization. Both organizations had positive and negative points with regard to their ability to organize people for the black-liberation struggle. Yet Dierenfield fails to inform his readers of these significant details.
The chapter on Black Power also has its problems. Less than half of it actually deals with Black Power ideology and organizations and what these did for black-people's liberation. Instead, the chapter is mainly a critique of Black Power as an irrational antiwhite movement. Interestingly, Dierenfield allots more coverage in this chapter to Martin Luther King than he does to the founders of the Black Panther Party, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton. A revised edition of this book should address these issues so that readers do not get a distorted image of this important and complex phase of the civil-rights movement or its activists.
Although the text contains a glossary, it is lost in the back of the book. Italicizing glossary words in the main text would remedy this problem. Overall, this book succeeds in providing a short top-down history of the civil-rights movement.
Joseph R. Fitzgerald
Temple University