Acknowledgements
Many people and institutions have generously supported this study of the
black civil rights movement. At Canisius College, I wish to thank the Rev.
Vincent Cooke, president, Herbert Nelson, academic vice-president, Paula
McNutt, dean of arts and sciences, and David Costello, my colleague in
the History department, for a Peter Canisius Distinguished Teaching
Professorship in the African American Experience. This award permitted me
to test my writings in my course on the civil rights movement, bring such
activists as Bernard LaFayette and C.T. Vivian to our Buffalo campus, and
finance travel to movement sites. Canisius also provided fellowships and a
reduced teaching schedule to complete this work. Ray Clough, director of
the Center for Teaching Excellence, awarded me a laptop computer on which
this book was typed.
I am particularly grateful to History department chairs Larry Jones and
Nancy Rosenbloom, department secretary Dena Bowman, all of the reference
librarians (Camilla Baker, Karen Bordonaro, Jessica Blum, Lisa Sullivan, Anne
Huberman, and Betsey Higgins), interlibrary loan technician Sally DiCarlo,
acquisitions librarian Barbara Boehnke, as well as my student research assis-
tants (Anton Strgagic, Mark Muoio, Gail McDonald, Margaret Wood, Sarah
Cosgrove, and Kathleen Kemp). Additional help came from librarians at the
US Department of Justice, the John F. Kennedy Library, the University of
Alabama, the University of Mississippi, and the state archives of Alabama.
James Giglio, Lawrence Little, Michael Mayer, Michael Birkner, Jeff Patterson,
Hilton Webb, Jr., Thomas Banchich, Henry Clark, and René de la Pedraja
each read and commented on the text, a courtesy that I cannot repay. My
good friend and colleague Bob Butler, a veteran of the Mississippi freedom
movement, not only critiqued the text but brought SCLC co-founder Fred
Shuttlesworth to our campus and team-taught a course with me in African
American studies. Discussions with my former star student Dean Kotlowski- author of a revisionist study of Richard Nixon’s civil rights policy – have
been illuminating.
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