I strongly recommend the book Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s. It's a great read and really interesting to compare and contrast the civil rights movement to what we have now. Movements need leaders and concrete goals IMO. Leaderless movements with amorphous goals are doomed. Certainly there was more than one leader and many big voices in the mix (and of course there was Malcolm X, who was leading his own revolution), but the final decision for a lot of tactics came down to what Martin Luther King Jr. felt was best. They also were in contact with politicians constantly, particularly John and Robert Kennedy. These politicians sometimes gave genuine support and sometimes only empty platitudes, but they were at least there. The civil rights movement also had tangible targets. I.e. when MLK Jr. wanted to start the Poor People's Campaign, some of his comrades opposed it because they felt it was too vague, instead of something like "desegregate buses" or "register black voters" which are clear goals with clear steps you can take to achieve them. But he remained determined in this goal to fight poverty and chose a concrete first step to take -- throwing his support behind the Memphis sanitation strikers and thus unions everywhere, recognizing that unions are an important step out of poverty.
A major problem we have nowadays is we DON'T have leaders. We have hundreds of people jockeying for clout instead, and fragile egos that get bruised if they decide they aren't being treated like a leader whether they deserve to be or not. We don't have concrete goals to hit, we have pie-in-the-sky stuff that feels good to dream about but the steps to get there are just open question marks. We have no politicians that are communicating with the movement the way politicians were in the 60s. There's no one around doing what JFK did when MLK Jr. was imprisoned in Georgia. Our politicians just issue statements. They don't intercede.
I know it's not quite what you're after, but Voices of Freedom is a pretty solid oral history on the topic.
http://www.amazon.com/Voices-Freedom-History-Movement-Through/dp/0553352326