Civil rights movement

=== Grassroots leadership ===
While most popular representations of the movement are centered on the leadership and philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr., some scholars note that the movement was too diverse to be credited to one person, organization, or strategy. Sociologist [[Doug McAdam]] has stated that, "in King's case, it would be inaccurate to say that he was the leader of the modern civil rights movement...but more importantly, there was no singular civil rights movement. The movement was, in fact, a coalition of thousands of local efforts nationwide, spanning several decades, hundreds of discrete groups, and all manner of strategies and tactics{{mdash}}legal, illegal, institutional, non-institutional, violent, non-violent. Without discounting King's importance, it would be sheer fiction to call him the leader of what was fundamentally an amorphous, fluid, dispersed movement."<ref name="bostonreview.net">{{Cite news|url=https://bostonreview.net/forum/occupy-future/what-should-sustained-movement-look|title=What Should a Sustained Movement Look Like?|date=June 26, 2012|website=Boston Review}}</ref> Decentralized grassroots leadership has been a major focus of movement scholarship in recent decades through the work of historians [[John Dittmer]], [[Charles M. Payne|Charles Payne]], [[Barbara Ransby]], and others.