From Every Mountainside Black Churches and the Broad Terrain of Civil Rights

Essays on the civil rights movement outside the South and since the 1960s. It has become popular to confine discussion of the American civil rights movement to the mid-twentieth-century South. From Every Mountainside contains essays that refuse to bracket the quest for civil rights in this manner, treating the subject as an enduring topic yet to be worked out in American politics and society. Individual essays point to the multiple directions the quest for civil rights has taken, into the North and West, and into policy areas left unresolved since the end of the 1960s, including immigrant and gay rights, health care for the uninsured, and the persistent denials of black voting rights and school equality. In exploring these issues, the volume’s contributors shed light on distinctive regional dimensions of African American political and church life that bear in significant ways on both the mobilization of civil rights activism and the achievement of its goals. R. Drew Smith is Scholar-in-Residence in the Leadership Center at Morehouse College. He is the editor of several books, including Freedom’s Distant Shores: American Protestants and Post-Colonial Alliances with Africa and Long March Ahead: African American Churches and Public Policy in Post-Civil Rights America.