Sean Chabot’s book describes and analyzes the decades of collective struggle that produced the Gandhian approach to nonviolent resistance in the American civil rights movements, and the decades of collective learning that enabled African Americans to apply this approach. For an understanding of how innovative protest methods travel between social movements as different and distant as the Indian independence movement and American civil rights movement, scholars and activists could not do better than to read this book.

Sidney Tarrow, Cornell University, author of Power in Movement and The New Transnational Activism

More theoretically sophisticated than existing historical accounts of the adoption of Gandhian non-violence by black civil rights leaders and far richer historically than most sociological accounts of the diffusion of movement tactics, Chabot has written the best book to date on the “transnational roots of the Civil Rights Movement.” A welcome addition to both social movement studies and the historiography of the “long” civil rights movement.

Doug McAdam, Stanford University