Negro Politics in the South

In that best and worst of times for the South, the decade from 1955 to 1965, a remarkable drama unfolded. The best came out of “The Movement,” the loose coalition of civil-rights groups. The Movement’s young people, black and white, went into the Negro communities to persuade the people to organize, to march in peaceful demonstration, as a means of gaining back what the white man had taken away unlawfully in the first place —the right to vote, to dine and travel freely, to be decently schooled and treated with respect at the courthouse. The worst occurred in those towns and cities where the white community’s response to The Movement’s demand for freedom and justice was met with implacable hostility, intimi...