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

Thornton III, J. Mills

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081731170X ISBN 13: 9780817311704

Publisher: University Alabama Press, 2002

Synopsis

With this bold offering from two decades of research, J. Mills Thornton III presents the story of the civil rights movement from the perspective of community-municipal history at the grassroots level. Thornton demonstrates that the movement had powerful local sources in its three birth cities—Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. There, the arcane mechanisms of state and city governance and the missteps of municipal politicians and civic leaders—independent of emerging national trends in racial mores—led to the great swell of energy for change that became the civil rights movement.

About this title

About the Author:

J. Mills Thornton III is Professor of History at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and author of Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama 1800-1860.

Review:

"Thornton's opus is the most important book to be written on the civil rights movement in a decade. . . . It is impossible to truly understand the movement without reading, absorbing, and analyzing this first-rate study of three Alabama cities in turmoil."—Douglas Brinkley, Director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies and Professor of History at the University of New Orleans

"Dividing Lines will quickly come to be regarded as the most original and interpretively significant work of civil rights movement historiography to have been published within the past 15 or 20 years, or perhaps simply ever."—David J. Garrow, author of Bearing the Cross

About this edition

• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 081731170X
• ISBN 13: 9780817311704
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 752