Groundwork

These essays enrich understanding of the valiant struggles to make real the promise of a more democratic US. (CHOICEHighly Recommended) The thirteen essays in this important collection examine grass-roots struggles for racial justice throughout the United States from 1940-1980...Read together, these essays remind us that activism changes people as much as society. (Journal of American History) A major contribution to the ever expanding historical literature of the modern African American freedom struggle. This book brings together outstanding examples of detailed and thoughtful studies of northern as well as southern local movements. - Clayborne Carson,Professor of History and Director, Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, Stanford University Brilliantly conveys the vibrancy and creativity of community-based movements that transformed America's racial and civic landscape in the decades following World War II. - Patricia Sullivan,author of Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years Required reading for anyone who wants to understand what the Civil Rights Movement actually was - a national movement conceived and executed by local people in cities and towns across this country. They are the people who made the movement that made Martin Luther King, Jr.not the other way around. - Julian Bond,Professor of History, University of Virginia, American University, and Chairman of the NAACP The essays in Groundwork assert individually and collectively that at the root of any national movement for change are local activists working from the bottom up to change their communities first, then the world. This excellent and invigorating collection is crucial reading in an election year. - Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and author of America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans This work demonstrates again and again how local movements complicate the standard civil rights narrative of nonviolence, black power, busing, and the nature of leadership. - Tracy E. KMeyer,Associate Professor US History, University of Louisville