A new generation of civil rights historians has begun to subvert the top-down, uplifting narrative that characterized the earlier literature. These scholars not only have extended the standard movement time line of Montgomery to Memphis both backward and forward but also have tried to shift the spotlight from the black elite who led the national organizations that tried to influence policy in Washington, D.C., such as Roy Wilkins at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Martin Luther King Jr. at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to shine on equally deserving, lesser-known, and more often lower-class activists in local communities. In contrast to a prevailing civil rights literature that consisted “mainly of studies of the major national civil rights leaders and their organizations,” historians are digging deeper into local struggles against racism to rescue these brave activists from oblivion.1 They lament that most scholarship on the movement gives credit to famous, national civil rights leaders at the expense of the grassroots, local activists who, according to David J. Garrow, were “the actual human catalysts of the movement, the people who really gave direction to the movement’s organizing work, the individuals whose records reflect the greatest substantive accomplishments. … [and] who had the greatest [End Page 269] personal impact upon the course of the southern movement.”2 Their pointillistic histories describe how before, and even after, legislative victories were secured in Washington, local people in remote southern communities had to win civil rights county by county, town by town, and even swimming pool by swimming pool.