Besides its success a riveting piece of narrative writing, Stephen Tuck's account of "the long civil rights movement" is an excellent reminder about the complexities of history. The premise of the book is that the struggle for racial justice in the near century and a half since the end of American slavery has been an open-ended process of incremental local gains and enervating local losses. If the trajectory, as suggested by the election of Barack Obama as president in 2008, is positive, Tuck wants to underscore the fact that the journey has never been easy and that none of the goals of civil rights equality has even yet been fully achieved. The book integrates a great deal of material that, while reasonably well known, has rarely been brought together so effectively: for example, concerning the "red summer" of 1919 with at least twenty-five anti-black race riots in the nation that left hundreds dead, or the fact that the first year since Reconstruction without a recorded lynching was 1952.

If many were inspired in the long fight against the nation's systematic racism by deep trust in God, others were not. James Weldon Johnson, an early leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), wrote the great poem, "O Black and Unknown Bards," which described how the authors of Negro Spirituals had "sung a race from wood and stone to Christ." Yet Johnson, like many of the significant civil rights leaders, "did not believe in an active God." Tuck takes even more pains to insist that jobs have always been the key to racial progress. In this interpretation, the civil rights movement has been an economic struggle as much or more than a moral or legal battle. While Supreme Court decisions and federal legislation have been important, they have not made as much difference on the ground as persistent local efforts to secure employment, break through economic restrictions, and open avenues to the training that leads to rewarding work.

Tuck also explores some of the important international dimensions of his story. In 1912, the NAACP as a still young organization publicly commended the still younger African National Congress. Fifty years later, Martin Luther King, Jr., joined Albert Luthuli of the ANC in a joint call for economic sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Another thirty years on and Nelson Mandela, as the president of a post-apartheid South Africa, was moved to tears when he met the aged Rosa Parks, spark of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56.

Tuck, a British scholar who lectures on American history at Oxford, has carried out wide-ranging research and written with a fresh approach that enlivens the many sub-themes woven into the whole. From his angle across the waters, his story is as sobering as it is captivating.

Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author most recently of The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (InterVarsity Press).

Copyright © 2011 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.