Focusing on four major civil rights groups, "Power, Politics, and the Decline of the Civil Rights Movement: A Fragile Coalition, 1967-1973" documents how factions within the movement and sabotage from the federal government led to the gradual splintering of the Civil Rights Movement. Well-known historian Christopher P. Lehman builds his case convincingly, utilizing his original research on the Movement's later years--a period typically overlooked and unexamined in the existing literature on the Movement.

The book identifies how each civil rights group challenged poverty, violence, and...