Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America.

Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America. By Frye Gaillard. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, c. 2004. Pp. xvi, 419. Paper, $29.97, ISBN 0-8173-5298-8; cloth, $34.95, ISBN 0-8173-1388-5.)

Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America takes us through the dramatic events of the civil rights movement in Alabama, a pivotal state, beginning with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and going into the late 1960s. The book focuses on events after the boycott--the Freedom Rides, the Birmingham demonstrations in 1963, the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the Selma march and Bloody Sunday, and the Black Power movement in the Black Belt. It introduces the reader to many of the distinctive personalities who advanced the movement in Alabama, and, rather than focusing on well-known national celebrities like Martin Luther King Jr., it reaches down to the local level to find its heroes.

As a resident of Alabama during those years, the author brings some personal experience to the narrative; but mostly he bases this study on the wealth of primary and secondary sources that have appeared over the past twenty years. Frye Gaillard, a talented writer, weaves together a long string of events to show the building of a social movement that transformed human relations within one state. There is never any question about where the author's sentiments lie: he is fiercely proud of the achievements of African Americans during the movement and wants us to recognize and celebrate the better times, and the better place, that resulted from their efforts.

This book will be of greatest value to those who know relatively little about the movement, as the vast majority of the text covers well-plowed historical ground. For those who have studied the works of David Garrow, Taylor Branch, Diane McWhorter, and J. Mills Thornton III, however, Cradle of Freedom adds relatively little. Gaillard does cover new territory in his discussion of post-1965 events in Greene County, particularly the tenure of Thomas Gilmore as sheriff, and the various racial conflicts in Mobile, where the author was a newspaper reporter. Those already steeped in the earlier literature and who know well the events of Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma will likely be tantalized by these new subjects but hardly fulfilled. His treatment of both Greene County and Mobile leaves the reader wanting more detail and analysis, which might, in fact, point some enterprising scholar toward fertile new ground--Mobile, especially.

There is also a question about what this work adds in terms of the overall analysis of the civil rights movement. Why conduct a state-level study without a strong focus on state policies and politics, which is absent from this book? A collection of community studies from nearby towns or cities can be useful, as J. Mills Thornton so ably demonstrated in Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa, 2002). But the author should strive for a larger analytical point such as Thornton's argument for the salience of municipal politics in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma in sparking black protest. There is no such compelling analytical point in Cradle of Freedom.

Finally, this work lacks the critical approach to the study of activists and their tactics that civil rights scholarship now needs. There is a bit too much hero worship in these pages, and more than a generation after these events occurred, it is time to move on to a more substantive and well-rounded treatment of these historical actors.

ROBERT J. NORRELL

University of Tennessee