Pathbreaking essays on the power of local activism on the broader
Civil Rights movement
Over the last several years, the traditional narrative of the civil
rights movement as largely a southern phenomenon, organized primarily
by male leaders, that roughly began with the 1955 Montgomery Bus
Boycott and ended with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has been
complicated by studies that root the movement in smaller communities
across the country. These local movements had varying agendas and
organizational development, geared to the particular circumstances,
resources, and regions in which they operated. Local civil rights
activists frequently worked in tandem with the national civil rights
movement but often functioned autonomously from—and sometimes even
at odds with—the national movement.
Together, the pathbreaking essays in Groundwork teach us that
local civil rights activity was a vibrant component of the larger
civil rights movement, and contributed greatly to its national
successes. Individually, the pieces offer dramatic new insights about
the civil rights movement, such as the fact that a militant black
youth organization in Milwaukee was led by a white Catholic priest
and in Cambridge, Maryland, by a middle-aged black woman; that a
group of middle-class, professional black women spearheaded Jackson,
Mississippi's movement for racial justice and made possible the
continuation of the Freedom Rides, and that, despite protests from
national headquarters, the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial
Equality staged a dramatic act of civil disobedience at the 1964
World’s Fair in New York.
No previous volume has enabled readers to examine several different
local movements together, and in so doing, Groundwork forges a
far more comprehensive vision of the black freedom movement.