How The Civil Rights Movement Led To Affirmative Action, Multiculturalism And Stalemate

1-21-98
University Park, Pa. --- The torrent of scholarship and comment on the persistence of racial inequality in the United States provides a general reader with little overall understanding of the solutions attempted and the resulting outcomes.

But the big picture is restored in nine original essays -- plus a 10th previously published essay -- in a new book, "Civil Rights and Social Wrongs: Black-White Relations Since World War II," recently published by Penn State Press.

The essays offer a comprehensive appraisal of how the modern civil rights movement came about and the changes it brought about in relationships between Blacks and Whites.

Contributors are: John Higham, Lawrence Bobo, Lawrence Fuchs, Erwin Chemerinsky, Douglas Massey, Nathan Glazer, Diane Ravitch, Jean Bethke Elshtain and Christopher Beem, and Gerald Early. The book as a whole is a historically grounded assessment of changes and continuities over the second half of the 20th century.

Higham, the books editor, provides in the introduction an unparalleled view of the civil rights movement and its aftermath. In a coda, he compares the reshaping of race relations after World War II with what followed the Civil War and the American Revolution. Higham ways the common features of these three egalitarian moments (reconstructions) provide some guidance toward and even a glimmer of hope for the 21st century.

Higham has arranged the chapters to expose a variety of perspectives and suggests a middle way that both Whites and Blacks can rediscover.

Higham is professor of history emeritus at The Johns Hopkins University and a past president of the Organization of American Historians. His books include "Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America" and "Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925." The book is published in association with the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, based in Philadelphia.

Established in 1956, Penn State Press is a university press specializing in art history, Black studies, general interest, history, literary studies, philosophy, political science, religion, regional studies, sociology and women's studies. The Penn State Press Home Page is at http://www.psu.edu/psupress/

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Contacts:
Janet Armstrong Penn State Press (814) 865-1327 (phone)