The Movement: The African-American Struggle for Civil Rights
by Thomas C Holt
(Oxford University Press, £14.99)

THE story of the civil rights movement is often told in a manner that glorifies certain movement organisers and leaders while ignoring the multitudes in the churches, the cotton fields, the hamlets of the South and the streets of the nation.

This portrayal exists in spite of ongoing reminders from those who have been made into heroes that it was the masses of people that forced the end of legal apartheid in the US, not particular individuals.

In part, this historical narrative is congruous with the nature of history-telling in the US in general. We are told about Abraham Lincoln but not about the farmers and homesteaders who moved to Kansas Territory to ensure its admission to the Union. And there are numerous stories of generals who led soldiers into wars, good and bad, but very little is mentioned of the millions who actually fought them.

We know about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr and Joseph Lewis, among others, but the tales of the women, men and children who marched in the streets, formed community organisations to protect their fighters and were arrested and beaten are left to those whose families remember their sacrifice.

Like Jacob Lawrence paintings, Thomas C Holt’s text paints a bold and vivid story of the everyday human made heroic through their existence.

This fact is not intended to diminish either the lives and sacrifices of those who became or were deemed leaders or the histories of the civil rights movement heroes which tell their stories. It is merely stating a truth — there are too many individuals and thus too many stories to tell.

Yet filling this void is Holt’s book The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights, a brief exploration of people in the movement who did not make it into the history books but whose actions often precipitated better-known events.

Holt focuses on the relationships between the various elements of the African diaspora in the US and the Caribbean and he relates vignettes of individuals and community organisations whose actions affected dynamics in their communities forever.

His narratives are underpinned by analysis steeped in context and an anti-racist understanding of US history.

Holt’s book begins with a black woman refusing to give up her seat on public transport. The year was 1854 and her name was Elizabeth Jennings. This was a century before Rosa Parks took a similar stance and ultimately sparked one of US history’s most effective boycotts. Mainstream civil rights history tells us that it was Martin Luther King, Jr who led this movement.

But Dr King himself would have disagreed with that telling. Like any good organiser, he knew it was up to the people to build and maintain an effective movement.

As Holt points out in his slender text, the warriors were working people and their families were tired of bigotry and legal discrimination. And they were tired too of racist institutions and the people who not only ran them but benefited from them.

Organisations founded to change this situation became like the people who joined them. The culture they created derived from existing black culture and embellished it and the result was a conscious culture of resistance and radical social change.

Holt’s book charts more than a century of resistance to US racism, combining it with an analysis that comes from hindsight and an anti-racist understanding of history. The author highlights some lesser-known individuals in the US civil rights movement and brings the grassroots to the front of history and he explores what came next in the struggle for black liberation, such as the advent of the Black Power movement and the Black Panthers.

Concise and riveting, The Movement is an excellent work for those seeking an examination of the US civil rights movement from a perspective somewhat rare in more mainstream histories. And for those seeking a deeper involvement, it is a good introduction.

The Movement will be published on April 7. This review first appeared in Counterpunch, counterpunch.org