Redefining the color line
Subtitle: Black activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940-1970
By: John A. Kirk ; foreword, John David Smith, series editor.
Series: New perspectives on the history of the South
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Gainesville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 243
Subjects: African Americans -- Civil rights -- Arkansas -- Little Rock -- History -- 20th century.; African Americans -- Segregation -- Arkansas -- Little Rock -- History -- 20th century.; African Americans -- Arkansas -- Little Rock -- Politics and government -- 20th century.; African American civil rights workers -- Arkansas -- Little Rock -- History -- 20th century.; African American political activists -- Arkansas -- Little Rock -- History -- 20th century.; School integration -- Arkansas -- Little Rock -- History -- 20th century.; Civil rights movements -- Arkansas -- Little Rock -- History -- 20th century.; Little Rock (Ark.) -- Race relations.; Little Rock (Ark.) -- Politics and government -- 20th century.
Description: "Early civil-rights scholarship focused almost exclusively on the role played by national civil rights organizations between 1955 and 1965. John Kirk argues that only by understanding the groundwork laid by black activists at the grassroots level in the 1940s and 1950s can we fully understand the significance of later protests.

Moreover, Kirk shows that local-level black activists and black organizations were not homogeneous, but differed significantly in their goals and strategies, thereby adding a multidimensional facet to a complex struggle that was more than just white against black.".

"Drawing upon oral history interviews and new material garnered from activists' privately owned collections, as well as extensive documentation from local, state, regional, and national public archives, Redefining the Color Line charts new territory in the study of the Little Rock school crisis and forces a reevaluation of that familiar event and its place in the history of the civil rights struggle."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [213]-227) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Introduction 1; title: 1. Founding a Movement 11; title: 2. War, Race, and Confrontation 34; title: 3. Postwar Reform and Its Limitations 54; title: 4. Brown v. Board of Education 86; title: 5. The Little Rock School Crisis 106; title: 6. DismantlingJim Crow 139; title: 7. New Challenges 163.