Laura Visser-Maessen. Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots.

Over the past several decades, scholars of the civil rights movement have shifted their focus from a top-down study of national events, leaders, and organizations to a bottom-up study of various local grassroots community-organizing campaigns that, these scholars contend, formed the bedrock of civil rights struggles. In Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots, Laura Visser-Maessen cautions them against what Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worker James Forman referred to in the 1960s as “‘Local people-itis,’ the idea that ‘local people could do no wrong,’ and that ‘no-one, especially somebody from outside the community, should initiate any kind of action or assume any kind of leadership’” (214–215). She makes the case for more critically interrogating the dynamics of local struggles, and in particular for more carefully examining the importance of leaders who formed a vital bridge between local communities and wider outside influences. Robert Parris Moses is the perfect vehicle for doing this. As Visser-Maessen puts it, Moses is a “legendary figure” in grassroots organizing circles, he was the “personification of SNCC’s public image of group-centered leadership,” and he is the “embodiment of the community organizing tradition” (310–311).