Customer Reviews

Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott

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I take issue with the reviewer who criticizes Burns for his scholarship. This work has a clear, succinct purpose: To let the boycott participants on all sides of the issue tell the story themselves. Burns never intended for this work to be definitive, only elucidating, and it is that, and more.

This publication arose out of Burns' work editing the King papers at Stanford, spurred by a suggestion from senior editor Clayborne Carson. Burns masterfully edits and assembles the letters, interviews, transcripts of court actions, newspaper clippings, and other materials, adds just enough gloss for clear understanding, and gets out of the way. It takes skill, judgment, and respect for the sources to strike such a balance, and he gets it just right.

I'll take this approach any day over a tome by some windbag scholar who has digested the sources and wants to tell me what to think about this important, complex, seminal event in American history. Read the materials yourself, and do your own thinking. That's what Burns set out to accomplish, and in my opinion, he's hit the mark admirably. I highly recommend it.

This book is another example of "hands-off" scholarship in that it appears as if the editor never visited Montgomery but rather relied on secondary sources. Though there are numerous excerpts, the editor did not perform the necessary research which would have revealed (a) that the Boycott had its roots within the American labor movement and, more specfically, events which happened in Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1930s and (b) there probably still exists in the archives of the Montgomery Improvement Association or in at least one other place financial and other records not taken to the King Center which would have told an in-depth story using primary sources. In summary, in deciding whether to purchase this book---pass!