Where the civil rights movement in the United States once seemed to herald an historical "break" of major proportions, the 1980s saw the appearance of several works in black intellectual and cultural history identifying what V. P. Franklin has called a tradition of "core values"--freedom, resistance, self-determination, and education-which formed during slavery and upon which the movement of the 1950s and 1960s drew for intellectual sustenance. Moreover, historically oriented sociological studies have reconstructed the dense institutional matrix of Southern black colleges and churches, NAACP chapters, and "movement centers" staffed by independent white and black activists from which the civil rights movement emerged and by which it was sustained. Even before the bus boycott in Montgomery in 1955/56, there had been a mass campaign against bus segregation in Baton Rouge in 1953. And as Taylor Branch points out in his 1988 book Parting the Waters , the Greensboro sit-ins of February 1960, which touched off the direct action phase of the movement in earnest, had been preceded by "similar demonstrations in at least 16 other cities" in the "previous three years." (Branch, 1988)
Indeed the historiography of the movement has generally neglected much, if any, discussion of the "new" notion of politics the movement seemed to embody. Most histories of the movement, as well as works analyzing the legal and constitutional issues that emerged with and from the movement, assume that it can best be understood from within the institutional and conceptual confines of post-war liberal pluralism with its emphasis upon the pursuit of interests and defense of political and legal rights as the raison d'etre of politics (Korstad & Lichtenstein, 1988).
The larger point here is that the politics of pluralism assumes that politics centers appropriately on power, narrowly conceived in terms of control and domination, working one's will........
