CORE; a Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968

Drawing on archives, news clippings, other publications, and interviews, the authors chart CORE's history from its obscure beginnings in 1942 through its early activism in the late forties and initial decline during the McCarthy era to the civil rights heyday of the late fifties and early sixties to the move toward separatism and Black Power as the sixties drew to a close. They examine the group's tenets of nonviolence and interracialism and compare their public recognition with their better-known counterparts--Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. While CORE participated actively in desegregation and voter registration efforts, as well as housing and job integration in the north, its influence waned as groups like the Black Panther Party donned the mantle of the revolutionary vanguard and wealthy white donors withdrew their support. In the end, CORE was a small, splintered group, trying to find a place for itself in a radically different Black movement. (Adapted from book review by Jo Freeman in the American journal of sociology, vol. 80, no. 5 (March 1975).