All Politics Are Local: The Primacy of Race, Class, and Municipal Politics on the Civil Rights Struggle in Alabama

J. Mills Thornton III. Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. xi + 744 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $59.95.

In one bold, highly effective stroke, J. Mills Thornton III has stripped the Civil Rights Movement of its ethereal majesty. Thornton's Dividing Lines, with its polarized voting districts, decaying political machines, segregated neighborhoods, and unrelenting class warfare, is clearly no inspirational retelling of how America's wayward soul was saved by the shedding of blood in the cities of Alabama. Instead, for Thornton, Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma are simply the political battlegrounds upon which their inhabitants vied for local power and control. No more. No less.

In the traditional canon of civil rights lore, Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma are the mystical, dark places where America's soul was so clearly lost that the nation could only be redeemed by the blood. In this national baptism by fire, Montgomery immortalized Rosa Parks, anointed Martin Luther King, Jr., and emboldened plain, ordinary black people, who walked in fearless defiance of bombs, Klansmen, and the threat of imprisonment. They walked until they had brought an unrighteous city to its knees. Yet America still had not been redeemed because in the immoral wilderness of Birmingham, Klansmen beat Freedom Riders senseless. Fire hoses slammed black bodies against brick buildings. And four little girls lay mangled under the rubble of their Sunday sanctuary. This national descent from Grace was far from over because through the Valley of the Shadow of Death lay Selma: "Bloody Sunday" Selma with its bullwhips and storm troopers crucifying the right to vote in a spectacle so horrific that its interruption of ABC's "Movie of the Week," Judgment at Nuremberg, seemed providential. ¹

Viewing the slaughter at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a horrified nation listened as President Lyndon Johnson declared, "There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma." Just as Lexington, Concord, and Appomattox had offered up bodies in the name of democracy, so, too, now had Selma. "Many were brutally assaulted. One good man, a man of God, was killed," Johnson said. But now, after one death too many, the nation was finally ready to hear the "cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people [who] have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great government—the government of the greatest nation on earth." From now on the U.S. would fulfill its destiny; it would take up the fight that black people had waged for so long, sometimes alone, in the cause of democracy. Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, therefore, not only symbolized how far America had fallen, but those cities would now become the hallowed ground upon which a national community would restore its faith in justice and reaffirm its belief in the redemptive power of American democracy and the U.S. Constitution. ²

For Thornton all of this simply misses the point and is at the very root of the disillusionment that followed the civil rights era. "Much of the animosity that came to characterize race relations in the United States in later years," Thornton notes, "seems to have proceeded from the widespread white belief that" with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, America had met its obligation to ensure equality before the law. To go any further, many whites contended, was unwarranted, unnecessary, and nothing but African Americans demanding preferential treatment. On the other hand, African Americans, knowing the intensity and the depth of the discrimination they faced in housing, employment, education, the voting booth, and the criminal justice system, pushed for "ever more rigorous and racially conscious enforcement of the statutory provisions." That wide divergence of opinion over what the...