Struggles Before Brown

Rezensionen / Stimmen

"The civil rights movement represented one of the most consequential projects of civil repair in American history. Van Delinder's contribution is to retrieve and to help us to appreciate the significance of the 'forgotten' civil rights protests-which she calls the 'border campaigns.' Focusing on events prior to Brown that occurred in Kansas and Oklahoma, she has enriched the literature on this monumental effort to make the American civil sphere more inclusive."
-Peter Kivisto, Augustana College

"Impressively combining multidimensional theory and thoroughly documented case studies, Jean Van Delinder looks behind Brown v. Board of Education and away from the orthodox focus upon Montgomery and Birmingham to earlier civil rights campaigns in Kansas and Oklahoma. Rejecting mainstream institutional, organizational, network, and political process theories, Van Delinder proposes a unique methodology that powerfully utilizes Weber's ideal-typical approach and orientation to value-rational action. New and synthesizing pathways are blazed as agency, culture, history, and a nonlinear causality move prominently to the forefront. This sophisticated and ambitious study will set the standard for future scholarship on the civil rights movement and, quite possibly, on social movements generally."
-Stephen Kalberg, Boston University

"Jean Van Delinder illuminates a number of important and often overlooked aspects of the civil rights movements. Through interviews, archival research, and secondary sources, she developed a conceptual framework to analyze civil rights struggles that occurred in Kansas and Oklahoma before the 1954 Supreme Court Ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka."
-Aldon Morris, in Contemporary Sociology