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David S. Meyer, Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights–Era Ku Klux Klan By David Cunningham Oxford University Press. 2013. $29.95 cloth, $24.95 paper, Social Forces, Volume 94, Issue 3, March 2016, Page e88, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sou067
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Extract
Decades of advancement in the study of social movements have nonetheless left at least four conspicuous holes in our scholarly literature. First, the shelf of social-movement books tilts substantially to the left, even if that's not exactly the balance of significant movements in America or elsewhere. Second, there is an unfortunate tendency to treat social movements as unified actors (e.g., the civil rights movement; the environmental movement), masking the diversity within movements. Third, scholars too often treat a movement's battles as comprised by a match against a resistant state, rather than a struggle with multiple sides, including countermovements as well as allies and adversaries within the state. Fourth, although there is a great deal of literature on anti-racist movements, there is little explicit discussion of race within the literature.
With Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights–Era Ku Klux Klan, David Cunningham has addressed all these deficits. The book is a tremendous achievement, a critical contribution to several literatures, and a compelling read as well. Cunningham's first book, There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence, established the author as a major scholar of social movements with a particular expertise in repression. In Klansville, U.S.A., he has developed a somewhat broader and more ambitious theoretical frame; in addition to contributing to the literature on repression, he has enlivened and adapted ethnic competition theory, spoken to contemporary scholarly debates on race, and offered one of the best empirical treatments of movement-countermovement dynamics. Future scholars exploring the civil rights era in America will be unable to avoid the book.
