Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma.

Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. By J. Mills Thornton III. (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, c. 2002. Pp. xiv, 733. $59.95, ISBN 0-8173-1170-X.)

The civil rights movement remains one of the most written about topics in United States history, its origins, progress, and eventual demise/metamorphosis the preoccupation of people far beyond the boundaries of the American South. Undoubtedly it is the seeming moral clarity of the issues involved that has attracted so much attention to the movement. With heroes as courageous as Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King Jr. and villains as uncomplicated as Eugene "Bull" Connor and Jim Clark, one can hardly be surprised by the size of the literature generated by these individuals' diverse activities. Anyone inclined to view the movement in excessively Manichaean terms, however, will be disappointed by this close analysis of the black freedom struggle in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. For while J. Mills Thornton III has no intention of denying that the movement had fight on its side, his narrative exhibits a pronounced tendency to highlight the fundamental ambiguities of human existence.

Readers who are familiar with Thornton's earlier writings will appreciate his capacity for providing deep contextualization for these Alabama cities, the sites of arguably the three most important campaigns in the history of the movement. His primary thesis is that the latter cannot be understood properly without an informed awareness of its municipal context. The movement, he argues, was preeminently a grassroots political struggle waged by blacks against a system, Jim Crow, that had been grounded from the outset in local power relations. Even though this contest was affected at critical stages by external influences such as the involvement of national civil rights leaders, decisions of the federal courts, and coverage of specific events by the national media, Thornton insists that our principal focus should be on the fractured southern communities that provided so much sensational newspaper copy and dramatic television footage in the middle decades of the last century. It was here, he claims, that the unglamorous yet critical day-to-day turf wars were fought, their outcome determined as much by the constantly evolving contours of municipal power relations as by the high-profile actions of national figures like King and the Kennedys.

The picture of the movement that emerges from Thornton's perspective is a compelling one. The quickening pace of black protest in each of these cities, he suggests, was the product of a growing awareness on the part of local blacks that the political situation on the ground had become malleable--that at last they could actually do something to change their situation for the better decisively. This historic shift of perception was largely a product of the progressive amelioration of urban conditions after World War II, a trend that was encouraged by white business progressives who sought to foster more amicable race relations as part of their broader developmental strategies and by white neo-populist politicians who strove to create winning coalitions on the basis of class rather than race. Even before the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, segregationist opposition to minor reforms within the Jim Crow system had begun to rear its ugly head in the shape of renewed Klan activism. But Thornton is adept at showing not only how white supremacist violence could help to unite and energize urban black communities normally divided by class and enervated by cynicism, but also how it prompted intelligent white moderates like Birmingham lawyer David Vann and federal district judge Frank Johnson to redouble their efforts to promote peaceful change.

For those in search of moral lessons, the book contains its fair share of villains--not least the many politicians and policemen who forged a poisonously symbiotic relationship with white terrorists. By contrast it supplies few untarnished heroes, for even those in the vanguard of the direct-action movement are deemed to have acted with at least one eye on their position within the local black community. Thornton argues persuasively, for example, that Birmingham's uncompromising black Baptist minister Fred L. Shuttlesworth wanted to initiate demonstrations in 1963 because of his desire to recapture the initiative from rival black moderates who regarded the likely mayoral election of Albert Boutwell as an opportunity to justify their preferred strategy of negotiating with putatively like-minded whites. Among the many strengths of this book, in fact, are Thornton's recognition of intra-racial tensions in each of his cities and, crucially, his awareness that in the long run it was often the moderates of both races who determined policy, inconsistently abetted by the federal courts.

Thornton's preoccupation with the movement as a grassroots phenomenon does not make it easy for him to incorporate Martin Luther King into the narrative. Although clearly sympathetic to King's objectives, he makes it plain that the civil fights leader's national vision did not always fit well with the aims of local black activists. However, after reading this densely packed account of the movement, one may wonder if Thornton gives quite enough credit to King (and other prominent civil tights leaders) for their efforts during the 1960s. It was, after all, the broad scope of their strategy that eventually enabled the movement to secure the federal legislation necessary to transcend the local and destroy de jure segregation in the United States. As Thornton tightly points out, the freedom struggle continued in the form of community-wide political conflicts after King's death. But without the assistance of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts (the direct fruit of King's nationally oriented Birmingham and Selma campaigns), local blacks in each of these Alabama cities would have found the going even tougher than they have done over the last thirty years.

This is not an easy book to master. J. Mills Thornton makes few concessions to the reader in terms of the remarkable amount of detail he provides and the lengths of his chapters (the Birmingham chapter alone spans 238 pages). The paucity of subheadings in the index, moreover, is a major obstacle for anyone trying to find their way around the text. Nevertheless, it is an extremely important volume that deserves a place in the movement's historiographical canon. Thornton's scholarship is impeccable, his control of the facts little short of astonishing, and his judgment sound. No one seeking a full understanding of the civil rights struggle in all its complexity can afford to ignore this exhaustive, not to say exhausting, study.

ROBERT COOK

University of Sheffield