20世紀における最も重要な歴史的展開で、米国史上最も注目すべき大衆運動のひとつが公民権運動です。公民権運動と聞いて多くの人が思い浮かべるのは、リンカーン記念堂で演説するキング牧師の姿でしょう。そうしたイメージに対し、著者は、この社会運動としての自由闘争の発展が、参加者が形成していったものであると同時に、運動が参加者を形成していった側面もあることに注目し、一般大衆の英雄的なイニシアチブを可能にした条件を強調しています。有名指導者の役割より、これが大衆による運動であったことを再認識させる、繊細な解説を提供します。
  

• Provides an informed and nuanced understanding of the origins, character, and objectives of the civil rights movement
• Emphasizes the aspirations and initiatives of the ordinary, grassroots people involved
• Re-centers our understanding of the freedom struggle around the critical concept of "movement"

         
The Civil Rights Movement was among the most important historical developments of the twentieth century and one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history. Not only did it decisively change the legal and political status of African Americans, but it prefigured as well the moral premises and methods of struggle for other historically oppressed groups seeking equal standing in American society. And, yet, despite a vague, sometimes begrudging recognition of its immense import, more often than not the movement has been misrepresented and misunderstood. For many, a singular moment, frozen in time at the Lincoln Memorial, sums up much of what Americans and the world know about that remarkable decade of struggle.
      
In The Civil Rights Movement: A Very Short Introduction, Thomas C. Holt provides an informed and nuanced understanding of the origins, character, and objectives of the mid-twentieth-century freedom struggle, privileging the aspirations and initiatives of the ordinary, grassroots people who made it. Holt conveys a sense of these developments as a social movement, one that shaped its participants even as they shaped it. He emphasizes the conditions of possibility that enabled the heroic initiatives of the common folk over those of their more celebrated leaders. This groundbreaking book reinserts the critical concept of "movement" back into our image and understanding of the Civil Rights Movement.