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act - reading the Pittsburgh Courier, driving a flashy car, failing to yield the sidewalk - represented a subversion of white authority and an assertion of equality."³

It will mean uncovering the movement incubators - black churches, schools and colleges, insurance companies, teachers' associations, newspapers, civic organizations, lodges, voters' leagues, labor unions, interracial organizations, lodges, voters' leagues, labor unions, interracial organizations, left-wing groups, NAACP branches of the '30s and '40s - and others which nurtured and sustained the protest spirit in the decades before the activist movement captured national attention in the late '50s and early '60s.

It will mean exploring whether ^how class differences inhibited the movement's development, and asking why the movement exploded in Town A and not in Town B, when conditions in each seemed equally favorable.

It will mean explaining how the "academic establishment, foundations, the trade union movement, the church, and political action groups such as the Americans for Democratic Action" and other white liberals "were determined to rein in an increasingly radical social movement that was raising fundamental questions about power and privilege in America", as historian John Dittmer writes.⁴.

It will mean acknowledging the movement's trans-generational character - as in Martin Luther King Sr.'s role in forming the Atlanta NAACP; Malcolm Little's parents' role in Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA); Ella Baker's