The civil rights movement occupies a prominent place in popular thinking
and scholarly work on post-1945 U.S. history. Yet the dominant narrative
of the movement remains that of a nonviolent movement born in the South
during the 1950s that emerged triumphant in the early 1960s, only to be
derailed by the twin forces of Black Power and white backlash when it
sought to move outside the South after 1965. African American protest
and political movements outside the South appear as ancillary and
subsequent to the 'real' movement in the South, despite the fact that
black activism existed in the North, Midwest, and West in the 1940s, and
persisted well into the 1970s. This book brings together new scholarship
on black social movements outside the South to rethink the civil rights
narrative and the place of race in recent history. Each chapter focuses
on a different location and movement outside the South, revealing
distinctive forms of U.S. racism according to place and the varieties of
tactics and ideologies that community members used to attack these
inequalities, to show that the civil rights movement was indeed a
national movement for racial justice and liberation.