Dividing Lines

If all the South were Alabama and you read the most important book on the Civil Rights movement, it would be Mills Thornton’s Dividing Lines. Historians of the movement everywhere will have to conjure with it. Conjuring with Dividing Lines will not be cheap or easy. The publisher says it has been twenty years in the making, but Thornton interviewed many of its principle characters twenty-five years ago. Indeed, his book is a life’s work, for its author grew up in Montgomery and experienced its turbulent history as a youngster. Thornton knows the city intimately and has mastered the sources on Birmingham and Selma as well. He must assume that his readers are serious adults with serious interest in the subject, for he gives no quarter. His book, offering massive detail in 583 pages of text and 111 pages of meaty endnotes, is not for the weak or faint of heart. In his more theoretical introduction and conclusion, Thornton challenges readers with paragraphs that run beyond a page of text and sentences running to ten lines of type. They demand and reward a reader’s undistracted attention.