James R. Ralph Jr.

Northern Protest makes a major contribution to our understanding of American race relations in the twentieth century...Ralph is equally well informed about Dr. King and his advisers and about Mayor Daley and his circle, and he tells his story with vigor and dramatic force. (David Herbert Donald, Harvard University)

This is an important, well-researched, clearly written, and judiciously argued study that enriches the already extensive literature of the modern African-American freedom struggle. Ralph...sees King within a broader context, as part of a social movement. The Chicago protest movement of 1966 and 1967...marked a crucial transition in King's life and the development of the SCLC. Ralph's book, therefore, raises crucial questions regarding the effectiveness of King's nonviolent struggles as a means of confronting the social and economic problems of the era after the major civil rights reforms. This book is clearly the best on the subject. (Clayborne Carson, editor-in-Chief, Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers)

James Ralph has written the fullest and most perceptive account yet to appear of the 1966 civil-rights campaign in Chicago, a crucial event in the history of the movement. He has traced the origins of the campaign in the politics of Chicago's African-American community; he has described the uneasy relationship between local activists and the national civil-rights leaders who came to their aid; and he has explained why the 1966 campaign produced reactions in Washington so different from those the earlier campaigns in the South had created. In the process, he has helped illuminate the transformation of racial politics in America from the heroic days of the early civil-rights movement to the more fractious and ambiguous battles of the late 1960s and beyond. (Alan Brinkley, Columbia University)… (meer)