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But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle

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Glenn Eskew has detailed the history of the civil rights movement in Birmingham from 1945 to almost the current time. His account is a detailed view of the struggle within the African-American community to find a way to confront segregation that was regnant in Birmingham. He has told a story riveting in its details and close observations. I lived through the period covered as a white liberal in a city undergoing enormous change. I knew many of the players who stride across these pages--Fred Shutttlesworth, Eugene T. "Bull" Connor, Abraham Woods, C. Herbert Oliver,Police Chief E.H. Brown Lucius Pitts, James A. Head, David Vann, Erskine Smith,James Bevels, Tommy Wrenn, Meatball Dothard, John and Addine Drew,Tom King,James Mills,and James A. Simpson. Culiminating in the 1963 marches lead by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr., Eskew shows the interaction of the local civil rights movement impacted by a national movement. Before King ever came to Birmingham the struggle for civil rights was carried on by local people who deserve to be valorized. Eskew does not do this. His careful and balanced interpretations make this history at its best. If you want to know how a city becomes captive to an ideology (segregation of the races) in a way that permeates all of social, political, educational and cultural life it is revealed here. You will see how dissenters are rejected and punished. You will see how newspapers, churches, pastors, businessmen--indeed every segment of society--is made to bow down to the God of Segregation. Eskew is all balance and historical objectivity. I fault his account in only one way, which is subject to argument and interpretation. He misses the fact that "vigilante activity," the blowing up of houses, the beating of rebels against segregation, and the general terror that held segregation in place was "governmentally sponsored." The Klansmen who bombed, whipped, cut, tortured and attacked were protected by the police and approved in the community generally. This is a fine study and a wonderful corrective for a generation who think that Martin Luther King was the civil rights movement. It was an indigeous protest movement and different in every community in the South. Eskew tells Birmingham's bloody story, in a fine prose and sense of drama, that brings that old struggle to life.--W. Edward Harris