Ask any americanist and they will concede that culture is one of the most difficult concepts to define. Thus any study of the use of cultural forms within the civil rights movement is likely to be partial. Joe Street's selection of the Freedom Songs as the primary musical means of cultural organizing in the integrationist movement of the early 1960s can provoke little argument, although in a work that also addresses jazz and soul one might expect more engagement with Brian Ward's prizewinning study Just My Soul Responding (1998) and Graham Lock's Blutopia (2000). Street's extensive treatment of the 1964 Summer Project in Mississippi similarly covers familiar ground, although his account of Dick Gregory's performative protests and the development of the Free Southern Theater is highly informative and engaging.

While Street documents the important contribution of the Highlander Folk School to the emergent movement culture, there is less of a wholehearted attempt to connect the culture war of the 1960s with the “cultural front” that Mike Denning discerned in the late 1930s and the 1940s. Precursory figures such as Paul Robeson or Josephine Baker receive little or passing mention, and the cultural activities of groups such as the NAACP or the National Negro Congress in the 1940s and 1950s are underplayed. The “singing movement” is linked more compellingly to the folk revival than to the birth of “rock and roll.” Similarly, jazz for Street is seen largely through the lens of Amiri Baraka, the cultural artist whose work probably receives most attention here, although not all of it is laudatory; Street can be a harsh critic. Coretta King's concerts in particular are portrayed as intent on “establishing her own credentials as a singer” and “more about her own ambitions and dreams” (105). Street lists Mrs. King's many failings as a contrast to the Freedom Singers. The latter were formed out of grassroots organizing efforts before they went on to have a fund-raising role whereas the operatically trained Mrs. King was engaged in fund-raising and public relations for predominantly white and well-to-do audiences.

Baraka's dramatic works from Dutchman to Slave Ship provide the chief means for Street to complicate his account of cultural developments within the movement and to link northern and southern African American freedom struggles. He concludes, “the relationship between the civil rights organizations and African American culture is much more complex than a simple equation involving the freedom songs and African American Christianity.” In this light, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was particularly inept at cultural organizing since in Street's view it believed that “religion was all the culture that black Americans needed” (172). This critique of the limits of religious culture as a basis for insurgency would have been strengthened by a parallel exploration of the Nation of Islam and other chiliastic sects that thrived in northern black communities in this period.

With the exception of Baraka, the northern-based artist whose work receives greatest attention in this book is Emory Douglas, the graphic artist chiefly responsible for the powerful appeal of the Black Panther magazine. This forms part of Street's larger argument that the contrast between the BPP and United Slaves (US) has been overstated as a binary divide between political and cultural revolutionary activism. Street concedes that by 1969 the Panthers did use the term “cultural nationalist” “as an all-encompassing term of abuse” for African Americans who failed to adhere to the BPP line (151) and he equally acknowledges that Ron Karenga as leader of US rejected the concept of class struggle and essentialized Africa in culture terms. Finally, he admits that the BPP was “more concerned with the ‘nationalism’ in cultural nationalism than it was with the ‘culture’” (157). The difference between the BPP and US, he nonetheless concludes, “was simply in terms of the use that could be made of this culture and the relative merits of an exceptional African American culture versus an all-encompassing African culture” (160). This is a fine distinction that leaves scope for one to conclude that difference was more telling than were similarities.

Street brings together many different cultural strands in this work and argues cogently that they were an important part of a movement that affirmed African American self-belief at the same time as it demanded freedom and equality. The term “movement culture” has utility here, but arguably only if it can be distinguished from other constellations of culture that coexist at the same time. Historically, we still know too little about the African Americans who did not march or did not protest; we need to know these, whom Malcolm X termed “sleep-walkers,” before we can gauge the character of Street's cultural warriors.