Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, and: Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama (review)

262Southern Cultures tention is extensive, I can't help but notice that most of his interviews on this question are with the organizers and staff of the association, not with the retired and disabled mill workers. But even these interviews reveal important aspects of the members' knowledge that may have played a greater role than the author concedes. As one of the original organizers later recalled, "the members understood the power structure in the community much better than did the staff." Although somewhat of an oversimplification, the basic issue is the highly political question of whether this was a movement organization run by its members—the retired and disabled textile workers—or orchestrated by a group of outsiders, a charge not unfamiliar to many grassroots efforts at social change in the South. As Botsch accurately points out, "When the staff left, the driving energy of the organization was gone." But we don't know what might have happened if the entire membership could no longer participate. Although many individual members did leave because of ill health, death, or compensation , there were others to replace them. Organizing the Breathless is a compelling treatise on the history and politics of the Brown Lung Association. It is also an important case study of a crucial segment of the broader occupational health movement in this country. It not only raises perennial moral questions of right and wrong but also suggests many avenues for research on social movements and grassroots activism. Finally, it tells us a lot about the modern South and what price we place on the value of human life, especially as we continue into industrialization. Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. By Danny Lyon. University of North Carolina Press, 1992. 192 pp. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $19.95; and Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama. By Charles W. Eagles. University of North Carolina Press, 1993. 323 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $19.95. Reviewed by Steven F. Lawson, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The struggles of black southerners during the early 1960s aroused concerned people across America to leave the relative comfort and safety of their homes and risk their lives in the struggle for freedom. Northerners Danny Lyon and Jon Daniels ventured southward in the early 1960s as outsiders, not as agitators. They joined a movement originated and led by African Americans seeking their own emancipation. Lyon survived, Daniels perished. Both were transformed. These two books document their stories. Twenty-year-old Lyon arrived first. A New Yorker attending the University of Chicago, he combined an interest in history with photography. Like one of his heroes a century before, Mathew Brady, he set out in 1962 to photograph a second war for black liberation . For nearly three years Lyon took photographs for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Because SNCC organized communities in some of the most remote and inhospitable areas of the South, it was crucial that the group's efforts receive attention and generate financial and legal support from the rest of the nation. Lyon's photographs of SNCC workers and local activists demonstrating, praying, and getting arrested were printed in newspapers and magazines throughout the country and the world and Reviews263 Five Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) workers at the funeral of four girls murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963. From Memories ofthe Southern Civil Rights Movement, by Danny Lyon. Courtesy of Magnum Photos, Inc. Reprinted with permission from the University of North Carolina Press. became powerful images on posters to rally people behind SNCC. Thirty years later he gathered the snapshots and wrote the accompanying narrative to produce Memories ofthe Southern Civil Rights Movement. This is not a volume filled with prints of Martin Luther King Jr. though some do appear. SNCCs path did cross with King's, most notably in Albany, Georgia, and Selma, Alabama. But for the most part SNCC encouraged local communities to determine their own leaders and rejected the kind of charismatic leadership that Dr. King practiced so well. Accordingly, Lyon shows us the 1963 march on Washington addressed not by King but by SNCCs...