The Civil Rights Movement: Struggle and Resistance

by William T. Martin Riches

This completely revised and updated edition of a popular text focuses on the African American struggle for civil rights from 1945-2002. William T. Martin Riches shows how the black community used the institutions created by de jure segregation to overcome apartheid and white resistance. Riches emphasises their influence on other groups demanding justice in America and warns that recent events and administrations have endangered the gains made by the movement.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

220 pages, Hardcover

First published May 15, 2010

Reviews

[Anne]

The Civil Rights Movement: Struggle and Resistance by William T. Martin Riches is part of a series published by MacMillan in the UK called Studies and Contemporary History. It is an excellent, readable overview of the fight by African Americans and their allies to achieve full citizenship. It is also an instructive guide to how, in the last 40 years, the Republican Party has done whatever it can to roll back the gains blacks battled so hard for in the 60s.
Riches clearly has a point of view. He attended the University of Tennessee in the 60s and participated in demonstrations there. However, he backs up his assertions with copious footnotes and a long bibliography, so the reader can be sure that he isn't just making this stuff up.
This is a short book. It could be used by high school students, but it seems to me that Riches expects the reader to know the cast of characters and the long list of acronyms of the time. Not that he doesn't introduce people on first reference and give them a tag to help the reader if they are important for a short period of time, as he did for Eugene "Bull" Connor, "the violent, racist police chief of Birmingham, Alabama." But 70 years of history means a lot of players, from President Harry S Truman to Ralph Abernathy to Lee Atwater, and a reader less interested in history and how events play out over the decades might get bogged down.
If you want to refresh your knowledge of the period and don't have time or the intestinal fortitude to read three volume accounts Riches' book will stand you in good stead.