"With this offering, J. Mills Thornton III presents a landmark publication on the struggle for racial equality in America. After two decades of painstaking research, Thornton tells the story of the civil rights movement from the grassroots perspective of community-municipal history. Thornton demonstrates that the movement had powerful local sources in its three "birth" cities - Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma.

There, the arcane mechanisms of state and city governance and the missteps of municipal politicians and civic leaders - independent of emerging national trends in racial mores - led to the great swell of energy for change that became the civil rights movement.".

"In Montgomery, the term served by liberal Dave Birmingham on the city commission, his defeat by segregationist Clyde Sellers, and the consequent search by black leaders for a way to influence the political process outside of local elections were all vital to the origins of the bus boycott. In Birmingham, civil rights protests exploded in direct response to the business community's decision to engineer the abolition of the city commission as a governing body.

And in Selma, Joe Smitherman's defeat of Chris Heinz in 1964 ignited an intense conviction in the black community that similar change could be brought to the county government.".

"In all three cities, the white municipal leadership, which had previously been united and intractable, experienced deep divisions, creating the indispensable window that permitted the resistance movements. Dividing Lines shows that the action campaigns in three southern cities that mobilized black resistance to segregation and disfranchisement grew directly from specific events of municipal politics in those cities."--BOOK JACKET.