Maurice C. Daniels. Saving the Soul of Georgia

During the past several decades, civil rights history has moved decisively away from the narrative arcs that once dominated the field: one arc was defined by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) litigation campaign that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and another ran roughly from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s to black power. The field has felt the effects of transnational history, local community studies, biography, microhistory, studies of racial formation, gender studies, and other interventions that have challenged and changed the writing of history. Yet the new interventions have sometimes led to a de-emphasis on important questions about the role of law and litigation that were once a key organizing concept in the field. Two new monographs, Yvonne Ryan's Roy Wilkins: The Quiet Revolutionary and the NAACP and Maurice C. Daniels's Saving the Soul of Georgia: Donald L. Hollowell and the Struggle for Civil Rights, both show how important law remains in the story of the movement, and both also show the challenges of narrating the history of the movement through thickly described biographical accounts.

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