Historians and the Civil Rights Movement

What was the civil rights movement?When did it begin and end, and what did it achieve ?As time distances historians from the events they study, periods that once appeared sharply defined become fuzzy at the edges, and changes that contemporaries thought sudden and profound seem less impressive than underlying continuities.The popular "Montgomery to Memphis" time-frame brackets the movement with the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1955-68.In their search for origins, however, historians have traced the civil rights movement beyond Montgomery, beyond Brown v. Board of Education, and beyond even World War II.It was during the Great Depression, Harvard Sitkoff argues, that " the seeds that would later bear fruit" were planted; by 1940 blacks believed "that a new page in American history had been turned."According to Robert Norrell, the late 1930s and 1940s revealed "not just a few tantalizing moments of protest, but a widespread, if not yet mature, struggle to overthrow segregation and institutionalized racism."Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein place the beginning of the civil rights era in the labor radicalism of the early 1940s, "when the social structure of black America took on an increasingly urban, proletarian character," and half a million black workers joined CIO unions.During the 1940s, moreover, the NAACP increased its membership from 50,000 to 450,000, growth that occurred mostly in the South.These years also saw blacks agitating for the ballot, founding political organizations, and, in the wake of Smith v. Allwrigbt (1944) -a landmark decision ably documented by Darlene Clark Hine -becoming registered voters in significant numbers.