The Struggle for Black Equality is an outstanding history of the civil rights movement. The book recounts the growth of the 20th Century Civil Rights Movement from the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, through the Southern segregation of the 1960's, to predominant urban problems of the 1990's. The work covers important aspects of key leadership, founding of civil rights organizations, historic incidents, political adversaries, advocates, resistance defeats, eventual triumph of Civil Rights and subsequent contemporary discrimination.

The author explains that the appointment of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference fit the need for Southern African Americans to become preeminent in the movement, which before the founding of the SCLC and additional civil rights organizations was chiefly the domain of Northerners

(Sitkoff, 56). "Now the Southern churches provided the movement with a stable base,"1 that firmly established non violence at it's core.

Sitkoff's analysis of the Civil Rights Era accurately illustrates the social protest of the period with broad clarity, including an authoritative account o

f the momentous Montgomery bus boycott. The work well noted that the Rosa Parks, December 1955 bus event "unified the black community."2 whose solidarity and resolve was expressed for over a year, throughout the boycott of Montgomery's city buses. The author depicts the men, women and children of the civil rights revolution as ordinary people living in extraordinary times.

Book Review of The Struggle for Black Equality: 1954 - 1992

Many of the movement's advocates were revealed as fearful political progressives longing to preserve peace. Sitkoff divulged leaders often revered as civil rights champions such as President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy believed Jim Crow was wrong, yet hesitated to act due to political aspirations (Sitkoff, 97). "President Kennedy needed the votes of Southern Democrats thus he "appointed segregationist to lifetime federal judgeships in the South; he delayed in issuing his promised Executive Order to end racial discrimination..." perhaps most importantly Kennedy feared the race issue would prove nationally divisive. Kennedy was forced to act due "breakdown of civilized rule... " and the successive loss of international prestige although he envisioned "the struggle against racism as a conundrum to be managed, not a cause to be championed." 3

Documents books and articles provided invaluable resources. Sitkoff utiliz

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