Leading scholars reassess the origins and trajectory of the American civil rights movement. Comparisons with Britain and South Africa reveal how movement leaders secured sympathetic responses at home and abroad and how nonviolence characterised the movement.

Preface - Acknowledgements - List of Abbreviations - Notes on the Contributors - Introduction; B.Ward & T.Badger - PART 1: ORIGINS - The Civil Rights Movement in Louisiana, 1939-1954; A.Fairclough - 'He Founded a Movement': W.H. Flowers, The Committee on Negro Organizations and the Origins of Black Activism in Arkansas, 1940-1957; J.Kirk - 'Nixon Was The One': Edgar Daniel Nixon, The Montgomery Improvement Association and The Montgomery Bus Boycott; J.White - PART 2: RESPONSES - Fatalism Not Gradualism: Race and the Crisis of Southern Liberalism, 1945-1965; T.Badger - White Liberal Intellectuals, Civil Rights and Gradualism, 1954-1960; W.Jackson - Rethinking African-American Political Thought in the Post-Revolutionary Era; C.Carson - PART 3: REPRESENTATIONS - From Shiloh to Selma: The Impact of the Civil War Centennial on the Black Freedom Struggle in the United States, 1961-1965; R.Cook - Touchstones, Authorities and Marian Anderson: The Making of 'I Have A Dream'; K.D.Miller & E.M.Lewis - Politics and Fictional Representation: The Case of the Civil Rights Movement; R.H.King - PART 4: COMPARISONS - The Limits of America: Re-thinking Equality in the Changing Context of British Race Relations; T.Modood - British Responses to Martin Luther King, Jr and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968; M.Sewell - Nonviolent Resistance to White Supremacy: A Comparison of the American Civil Rights Movement and the South African Defiance Campaigns of the 1950s; G.M.Fredrickson - Index