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Wesley Hogan, Sitting In and Speaking Out: Student Movements in the American South, 1960–1970, Journal of American History, Volume 99, Issue 1, June 2012, Pages 362–363, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jas057
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Jeffrey A. Turner has an ambitious goal: to tell us what was happening on black and white college campuses throughout the South during the 1960s. To do so, he has to engage several wide and deep historiographies: that of the civil rights/black power movements, the South in the post-1945 era, and the history of education in the United States. To a lesser degree, he sets out to compare southern campus activity to civil rights/black power movements; feminist activism; gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender activism; the environmental movement; and Latino activism on campuses in the North and the West. Delightfully, he largely succeeds in this innovative, visionary endeavor.
Sitting In and Speaking Out is organized chronologically and by location, starting with a snapshot of campuses in 1960, traveling through the themes of sit-ins, the Deep South riots over desegregation, movement building on and off campus, and black power on both historically black and predominantly white campuses, and ending with an overview of Vietnam War–era activism. Drawing on campus newspapers, university archives, interviews, and a wide array of memoirs and secondary sources, Turner balances a synopsis of the region with the individual voices of black and white students, administrators, and faculty.
