Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968.

Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968. By Steven F. Lawson and Charles Payne. Introduction by James T. Patterson. Debating Twentieth-Century America. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., c. 1998. Pp. viii, 167. Paper, $9.95, ISBN 0-8476-9054-7; cloth, $19.95, ISBN 0-8476-9053-9.)

This splendid volume is the first of a new series that takes a fresh approach to the task of presenting differing viewpoints about our recent past. Instead of collecting half a dozen or so sharply opposed analyses of an event or a movement, as was common in the pamphlets many of us read in college, these volumes consist of just two essays written from opposing perspectives but comprehensive in their treatment of the subject under discussion. A few selected documents follow each essay.

The virtues of this approach are abundantly illustrated in the debate over the civil rights movement conducted by Lawson and Payne. Their scholarly work has led them to conflicting views of the tumultuous years from 1945 to 1968. Yet each provides a brilliant, subtly nuanced overview of the period.

Lawson takes what is called "the view from the nation," arguing that "[i]t was the federal government ... [that] played an indispensable role in shaping the fortunes of the civil rights revolution. It is impossible to understand how Blacks achieved first-class citizenship ... in the South without concentrating on what national leaders ... did to influence the course of events" (p. 3).

Without failing to give credit to those protesters who laid their lives on the line for equal rights, Lawson's account argues that even after Birmingham and after the March on Washington the nation had not been moved to break the "legislative logjam" (p. 29) over a comprehensive civil rights bill. It took the congressional wizardry and moral commitment of Lyndon B. Johnson to do that. And useful as the Selma demonstrations were in securing passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Johnson had "instructed the Justice Department" to prepare the bill "[e]ven before the Selma campaign had begun" (p. 32). "Throughout the history of the civil rights struggle, the national state played a key role in determining its outcome" (p. 40).

Payne is sharply critical of this "top-down" (p. 109) approach, claiming that it fails "to appreciate the role `ordinary' people played in changing the country," focuses almost entirely on "large-scale dramatic events" to the detriment of "the actual social infrastructure that sustained the movement on a day-to-day basis," and emphasizes only legislative changes at the expense of understanding the civil rights movement "as a transforming experience for individuals" (p. 110). Most important, perhaps, in Payne's view, the top-down interpretation encourages a triumphalism that writes off black radicals as a fringe collection of ingrates, forgetting that by the end of their lives, "the gap between [Martin Luther] King's thinking" and that of Malcolm X was "less than one might expect" (p. 133).

Readers will perceive strengths and weaknesses in the competing arguments. Thus Lawson's suggestion that LBJ was not decisively influenced by Selma in actually pushing forward the Voting Rights Act is contradicted by Robert Dallek's account of the matter. Payne's understandable admiration for great grass-roots organizers like Ella Baker leads him to view with apparent sympathy their mixed feelings about "relatively short-term public events" (p. 125) such as Birmingham and Selma--when those very events were decisive in the civil rights revolution.

Indeed Lawson and Payne are such fair-minded and careful scholars that many readers may carry away the notion that not as much separates them in their debate as is officially claimed. Lawson admits throughout his account that only the deliberate creation of crises by King and others forced Washington to act in really decisive ways. "The federal government," he ultimately concludes, "made racial reform possible, but Blacks in the South made it necessary" (p. 42). Payne, in turn, acknowledges that "It is not an either/or choice. Scholars advocating a more bottom-up approach are not denying the critical importance of national institutions" (p. 111). That the excellence of the essays mutes some of the conflict between them does not diminish the value of this challenging approach to twentieth-century America.

MARK I. WHITMAN

Towson University