Courage to Dissent

Book excerpt: According to conventional wisdom, the split between integrationism and black power in the civil rights movement occurred in the mid-1960s, ushering in a much more radical and contentious era. In this tale, before 1965 the movement favored integrationism. However, as Tomiko Brown-Nagin shows in her novel history of the movement in Atlanta from the 1940s to 1980, conflict and friction plagued the civil rights movement long before Stokely Carmichael achieved fame in 1966 for advocating black power.