Chapter 1. Introduction 1. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd ed., rev. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), and his Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951). On the controversy over the “Jim Crow thesis,” see Joel Williamson, ed., The Origins of Segregation (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1968), and his After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction , 1861–1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965) and his The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Woodward’s own re®ections on this controversy are in his American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 234–60, and his Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 81–99. 2. An excellent recent survey of the historiography of the civil rights movement is Charles W. Eagles, “Toward New Histories of the Civil Rights Era,” Journal of Southern History 66 (November 2000): 815–48; see also Steven F. Lawson, “Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement,” American Historical Review 96 (April 1991): 456–71. 3. E.g., Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984), 17–25, 40–63, 295. After the Montgomery boycott had begun, Montgomery Improvement Association leaders did contact T. J. Jemison in Baton Rouge to seek his advice on the organization of the car-pool operation, but the Baton Rouge precedent played no more role in generating the Montgomery protest than did the streetcar boycott in Montgomery itself at the beginning of the century. All three of them, rather, re®ect independently the general and persistent black resentment against racial discrimination . Professor Morris himself is a bit equivocal on the point. In his text he states®atly that King and Abernathy “were well aware of the Baton Rouge movement and consulted closely with Reverend Jemison when the famous Montgomery boycott Notes was launched in 1955” (25). But in his notes, though rejecting the contrary assertion of August Meier and Elliott Rudwick in their Along the Color Line, he nevertheless retreats to the far more defensible position, “This is not to say that the Baton Rouge movement caused the later movements, but it did play a role in their subsequent development” (295). 4. J. L. Chestnut, Jr., and Julia Cass, Black in Selma: The Uncommon Life of J. L. Chestnut, Jr. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 127–30. 5. Birmingham World, July 27, 1963. 6. On Mobile in these years, see Bruce Nelson, “Organized Labor and the Struggle for Black Equality in Mobile during World War II,” Journal of American History 80 (December 1993): 952–88; and Nah¤za Ahmed, “A City Too Respectable to Hate: Mobile during the Era of Desegregation, 1961–1965,” Gulf South Historical Review 15 (Fall 1999): 49–67. But the full story of Mobile’s civil rights struggles still has not been told. 7. Portions of the preceding several pages are adapted from my article “Municipal Politics and the Course of the Movement,” in Armstead L. Robinson and Patricia Sullivan, eds., New Directions in Civil Rights Studies (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 42–44, and they are reprinted here with the permission of the University Press of Virginia. Chapter 2. Montgomery 1. On the background of the bus boycott, see my article “Challenge and Response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956,” Alabama Review 33 ( July 1980): 163–235, from which a substantial part of this chapter is drawn. Accounts of the boycott by participants, of varying accuracy and usefulness, include Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958); Ralph D. Abernathy, “The Natural History of a Social Movement : The Montgomery Improvement Association” (M.A. thesis, Atlanta University , 1958), and his And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 112–88; Lawrence D. Reddick, Crusader without Violence : A Biography of Martin...