The 1960s civil rights movement has been properly memorialized as an era of tremendous social progress in America. Yet the integration of public accommodations and passage of federal laws started a much longer process toward racial equality and justice that still persists. In Beyond Integration: The Black Freedom Struggle in Escambia County, Florida, 1960-2000, J. Michael Butler examines the accomplishments, contradictions, and limitations of the continuing black freedom struggle in one southern community. The racial unrest that surfaced during the 1970s regarding the use of Confederate imager ... More

The 1960s civil rights movement has been properly memorialized as an era of tremendous social progress in America. Yet the integration of public accommodations and passage of federal laws started a much longer process toward racial equality and justice that still persists. In Beyond Integration: The Black Freedom Struggle in Escambia County, Florida, 1960-2000, J. Michael Butler examines the accomplishments, contradictions, and limitations of the continuing black freedom struggle in one southern community. The racial unrest that surfaced during the 1970s regarding the use of Confederate imagery at Escambia High School and the persistent police brutality that resulted in the deaths of African American men demonstrates that the local movement did not end, but evolved to confront blatant reminders that blacks remained second class citizens in Northwest Florida. The power that white civic leaders possessed over issues that effected racial minorities beyond the 1960s—and the African American powerlessness to alter the status quo—culminated in the arrest and conviction of Reverend H. K. Matthews, the county’s foremost organizer, and revealed that economic, political, and educational discrepancies plagued local race relations into the twenty-first century. Beyond Integration offers a new perspective on the literature of the black freedom struggle and reveals how with each legal step taken toward racial equality, notions of black inferiority became more entrenched in Northwest Florida.