The Making of Martin Luther King and The Civil Rights Movement incorporates the changing focus of civil rights movement studies to focus on communities and leaders heretofore ignored or under-represented, and thereby challenges many of the agendas established by civil rights scholarship of the past twenty-five years. We learn from essays on communities in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Montgomery that key centers of black life, such as unions, schools, teachers, businessmen, and masonic lodges played important roles in the movement. We learn of the importance of influential local leaders such as...

With essays by Tony Badger, David L. Chappell, Elizabeth Jacoway, Richard H. King, Ralph E. Luker, Charles Marsh, Keith D. Miller, Linda Reed, and Lauren F. Winner

In the 1950s and 1960s the American South was in upheaval. Brilliant thinkers and writers joined on-the-ground activists to challenge segregation and the South's long established Jim Crow society. The men and women who opposed them waged a war of words in favor of the status quo.

The essays in The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South examine the interplay of thought and action in a complex and turbulent moment in...