Foot Soldiers for Democracy: The Men, Women, and Children of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement

Foot Soldiers for Democracy: The Men, Women, and Children of the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement Edited by Horace Huntley and John W. McKerley. Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Oral History Project. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, c. 2009. Pp. [xxxviii], 222. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-252-07668-8; cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03478-7.)

Birmingham's "big events" have long occupied an important place in both scholarly and popular narratives of the civil rights movement. While recent scholarship has made clear the importance of local leaders like Fred Shuttlesworth, homegrown organizations such as the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, and local political developments to Birmingham's civil rights history, we really know very little about the thousands of activists, many of them young people, who built the black freedom struggle in Birmingham and who propelled the city and the racial problems it symbolized into national consciousness in the early 1960s. Horace Huntley and John W. McKerley's collection of oral history interviews is a valuable resource for...