Standing in front of one of the largest civil rights crowds ever to assemble in the United States of America, Martin Luther King delivered his now famous ‘I have a dream’ speech. He spoke directly of the possibility of social change but also of the context of brutal persecution.

King’s speech occurred at a time when the civil rights movement in the US had arguably reached a high point of empowerment. But at the same time blacks and whites still had among other things separate schools and separate designated areas in restaurants and on public transport, and were even often denied access to the vote because of poor levels of literacy. The election of Barack Obama to the US presidency perhaps reflects how far the US has progressed from those days of racial oppression (see also Gaines, Chapter 5, this volume).

Even this anecdotal glance at American social history reminds us that the ‘prejudicial’ political and social reality of the US in the 1960s did not give way simply because large numbers of previously ‘prejudiced’ whites simply overcome their ‘irrational’ bigotry. In the case of the civil rights movement of the US the ‘Montgomery bus boycott’ in Alabama in 1956, the ‘Greensboro sit-ins’ in North Carolina in 1960, the ‘March on Washington for jobs and freedom’ in 1963 and the ‘Selma to Montgomery marches’ in Alabama in 1965 were all collective actions that were central precursors to the anti-discriminatory legislation of the mid-1960s – legislation that paved the way for today’s more ‘progressive’ situation. But King’s words remind us that the historically advantaged white community did not accept such progressive social transformation meekly. Social change was an achievement precisely because it overcame reactionary attempts to prevent it.