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Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. By Raymond Arsenault. Pivotal Moments in American History. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv, 690. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-19-532714-4; cloth, $30.00, ISBN 978-0-19-513674-6.)
The past decade has seen an explosion of writing on the American civil rights movement, the bulk of which has focused on the state and local levels. Diverting attention from the great men and big events that dominated earlier scholarship on the movement, civil rights historians have recently tended toward the community-study model. Many, if not most, have concentrated on the grassroots organizers and local people who formed the backbone of modern America's most influential social movement. They have placed the famous personalities, policies of presidential administrations, and strategies of national civil rights organizations in the deep background of their accounts, if they considered them at all.
Now comes Raymond Arsenault with a passionate, dazzlingly well written narrative account of the Freedom Rides, the dramatic direct actions that seemed to draw every great man (and woman) in the United States into their orbit. The Rides collectively became the big event of 1961 and reverberated for long afterward. Arsenault draws from the deep well of recent scholarship - as well as previous monographs, syntheses, and memoirs, popular histories, forty-one manuscript collections (from archives in eleven states and the District of Columbia), dozens of newspapers and court cases, and over two hundred oral history interviews - to create what may very well be the best book yet written on the civil rights movement.
Arsenault begins with the story of Irene Morgan, whose 1944 refusal to abide by segregated seating customs on a Greyhound bus in Tidewater, Virginia, resulted in a 1946 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that racial segregation in interstate travel violated the Constitution. The decision in Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, which had been argued by attorneys provided by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), provided little more than a modest victory, but it pointed toward new possibilities for foes of segregation. Frustrated with the NAACP' s subsequent unwillingness to press its advantage through forceful direct action, activists with the newly formed Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Fellowship of Reconciliation planned to test southern...