Thomas Dewey, the progressive Republican governor of New York from 1942 to 1954 famously “snatched defeat from the jaws of victory” in the presidential election of 1948. It was an election that everyone, with the possible exception of Harry S. Truman, had expected Dewey to win. Truman, like much of the historiography, credited his victory to the farm vote, and this was undoubtedly an important factor, but it is clear that without the votes of African Americans Truman could not have won. This piece will examine why Dewey lost, surveying his record on civil rights as governor (arguably the best in the nation) and his abject failure to convert, indeed, to even attempt to convert, this record into African American votes in 1948. This failure is made more curious by the fact that he was constantly being warned by African American Republicans and his closest confidante about the pivotal nature of the African American vote. Yet Dewey, a notoriously lethargic campaigner, would ignore their admonishments.

“A disgrace to the State of Iowa”, moaned the Des Moines Register concerning the events that had transpired at Sioux City's Memorial Park Cemetery. On 28 August 1951, mourners had departed after paying their last respects to Sergeant First Class John Raymond Rice, an eleven-year veteran of the United States Army who had been killed in the Korean War, when cemetery officials halted the burial before the casket had entered the earth. Lots at Memorial Park, it turned out, had clauses in their contracts restricting burial to Caucasians, and Rice was Native American, a member of the Winnebago tribe. The insult enraged many Americans, including President Harry S. Truman, who soon arranged for the soldier's burial in Arlington National Cemetery.

In November 1954, Eugene “Gene” Hood, a former executive of North Carolina's Cone Mills, wrote an unsolicited letter to Wesley Critz George, Emeritus Professor of Histology and Embryology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Hood was writing in his capacity as de facto leader of an enclave of hard-line segregationists, based in North Carolina's Piedmont region. Six months had passed since the Supreme Court's Brown decision had effectively rendered segregation unconstitutional, and Hood and his colleagues were becoming increasingly agitated by the lack of an organised, coherent response to the Court's edict in the Tar Heel State. The Piedmont segregationists, a disparate group of lawyers and businessmen, refused to be cast as pariahs in the wake of Brown. Rather, they believed that a sizeable majority of white North Carolinians shared their views on the continued segregation of the races, and, moreover, that a significant number of them would be willing to join a crusade for all-out resistance to federally mandated desegregation. The group's overarching problem was one of trying to devise a strategy that would harness that pro-segregation opinion for maximum effect. On 22 November, after another round of discussions between the group members provided no satisfactory answers, Hood decided that it was time to seek an external stimulus. “I am convinced that we need a state-wide organization,” he wrote to George, “and I am wondering if you and your associates would consider doing something along that line.”

Shortly after 7 o'clock on the morning of 20 April 1962, Louis and Dorothy Boyd arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. The journey from their native New Orleans had taken forty-three hours. With the Boyds were their eight children, five girls and three boys aged between three and twelve years old. Between them the family carried their entire worldly possessions in three cardboard boxes and an old foot locker.

On 30 December 1963, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) executive committee approved Bob Moses' proposal for a summer voter registration project involving hundreds of white volunteers. Initially intended to highlight the brutality inherent in Mississippi's culture and to register large numbers of disfranchised black voters, the plans expanded to include more long term and holistic methods of addressing civil rights that encompassed what SNCC and its sister organizations in Mississippi called “educational and social” programmes. As freedom schools co-ordinator Liz Fusco asserted, this represented an acceptance that what could be done in Mississippi, could be deeper, more fundamental, more far-reaching, more revolutionary than voter registration alone … [It was] a decision to enter into every phase of the lives of the people of Mississippi … a decision to set the people free for politics in the only way that people really can become free, and that is totally. Freedom schools were central to SNCC's programme. Both institutions emphasized that knowledge of one's culture was crucial to the individual. In the case of the freedom schools, students would be encouraged to think freely and develop their own ideas about a free society. Charles Cobb, who conceived the idea of the freedom schools, envisaged the schools to be places “where the students could freely ask questions about all those things, political as well as academic, which troubled and excited them.”

Between September 1964 and April 1971, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a domestic covert action program named COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE. This counterintelligence program endeavored to discredit, disrupt, and vitiate the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist vigilante organizations. While historians are quite familiar with the FBI's efforts to nurture anticommunism and to discredit civil rights and leftist movements, the FBI's role in discrediting KKK groups in the American South during the late 1960s has not been systematically assessed. This article provides an analysis of the first aspect of this three-pronged attack. It describes how the FBI secretly coordinated efforts to discredit Klan organizations before local Southern communities that continued to tolerate vigilante violence. Intelligence information on Klan activities, provided discretely by the FBI to liberal Southern journalists, politicians and other molders of public opinion, helped those white Southerners who were opposed to Ku Klux Klan activity to transform their private dismay into public rebuke and criminal prosecutions. The article also analyzes corresponding COINTELPRO operations that discredited Ku Klux Klan leaders before rank-and-file Klan members. FBI agents and their clandestine informants circulated discrediting information about KKK leaders among rank and file Klan members, inculcating disillusionment among Klansmen and prompting resignations from Klan organizations.

Early histories of the civil rights movement that appeared prior to the 1980s were primarily biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr. Collectively, these works helped to create the familiar “Montgomery to Memphis” narrative framework for understanding the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. This narrative begins with King's rise to leadership during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, and ends with his 1968 assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. Since the 1980s, a number of studies examining the civil rights movement at local and state levels have questioned the usefulness and accuracy of the King-centric Montgomery to Memphis narrative as the sole way of understanding the civil rights movement. These studies have made it clear that civil rights struggles already existed in many of the communities where King and the organization of which he was president, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), ran civil rights campaigns in the 1960s. Moreover, those struggles continued long after King and the SCLC had left those communities. Civil rights activism also thrived in many places that King and the SCLC never visited. As a result of these local and state studies, historians have increasingly framed the civil rights movement within the context of a much longer, ongoing struggle for black freedom and equality, unfolding throughout the twentieth century at local, state and national levels. More recently, a number of books have sought to place the civil rights movement within the larger context of international relations. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott next year, the event that launched King's movement leadership, it seems an appropriate point to return to the existing literature on King and to assess what has already been done, as well as to point to the gaps that still need to be filled, in what remains important field of study.