Teaching the Long Civil Rights Movement (original) (raw)
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The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past
The Journal of American History, 2005
The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws-racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. .. and su^ests that radical reconstruction of society is the real issue to be faced.-Martin Luther King Jr. Stories are wonderful things. And they are dangerous.-Thomas King The civil rights movement circulates through American memory in forms and through channels that are at once powerful, dangerous, and hotly contested. Givil rights memorials jostle with the South's ubiquitous monuments to its Confederate past. Exemplary scholarship and documentaries abound, and participants have produced wave after wave of autobiographical accounts, at least two hundred to date. Images of the movement appear and reappear each year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and during Black History Month. Yet remembrance is always a form of forgetting, and the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement-distilled from history and memory, twisted by ideology and political contestation, and embedded in heritage tours, museums, public rituals, textbooks, and various artifacts of mass culture-distorts and suppresses as much as it reveals.'
Beyond Dreams and Mountains: Martin King's Challenge to the Arc of History
University of Memphis Law Review, 2018
I. INTRODUCTION: THE "MASTER NARRATIVE" OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT * Charles W. McKinney, Jr. is the Neville Frierson Bryan Chair of Africana Studies and an Associate Professor of History at Rhodes College. He earned his B.A. with honors from Morehouse College and an A.M. and Ph.D. in African American History from Duke University. His most recent work, co-edited with Aram Goudsouzian, is titled An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee. The author would like to thank The University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law School for inviting him to participate in the MLK50 Symposium.
Doing public history at the National Civil Rights Museum: A conversation with Juanita Moore
The Public Historian, 1995
, dashed many people's hopes for peaceful change in the United States. Twenty-five years later, on the April 4, 1993 anniversary of King's death, thousands gathered at Mason Temple, the site of his last speech, singing and preaching about regeneration and hope. Posters announcing three days of commemorative events, which included a two-day symposium evaluating the King legacy, graced the city's buses. Professor Cornell West opened the events with a keynote address linking King to African-American freedom struggles in the past and present. Young people gathered to learn about King but also to discuss their own pressing concerns with older activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Talk shows discussed the significance of King and the movement he led; clergy, union leaders, and everyday people talked about the sanitation strike that brought King to Memphis.
The American Educational History Journal, 2017
December 1, 2015 marked the 60th anniversary of Rosa Parks' arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus in 1955. One hundred years prior to Parks' act of resistance, African American schoolteacher Elizabeth Jennings was ejected from a streetcar in New York City due to her race. She sued the streetcar company, represented by future President Chester A. Arthur, and won in 1855. Although Jennings and Parks share commonalities with regard to their civil rights activism, there are differences, particularly with regard to their inclusion and portrayal in historical narratives of that often appear in the social studies curriculum. The purpose of this research is to outline similarities between Jennings and Parks in order to evaluate whether such historical comparisons are accurate. Analysis of primary and secondary sources are included in this research in order to 1) examine the historical contexts of the mid-19th century and mid-20th centuries that influenced Parks and Jennings’ lives and activism, and 2) discuss the implications of these comparisons in the context of Black Freedom narratives in the social studies curriculum.
When Negroes March: Framing a Period for a Long History Civil Rights Movement 1
The question of movement origin (like the Cha-Jua/Lang argument about movement demise) has particular relevance for how historians define a period, distinguish the black freedom movement of this era from other periods of black resistance, and the interrelated nature of civil rights to the black power movement. Within this debate lies the larger question - at what point does the modern black freedom movement mark the beginning boundaries of a period? On what basis do we define the origin of the black freedom struggle (civil rights and black power) within this period? And why or on what basis should a timeline be set or changed? This essay seeks to address these questions by positioning a middle path between the two discourses, and arguing that both sides offer useful indicators for setting the period. The discussion centers on period origin, incorporates sociological movement theories, and seeks to authenticate long historian arguments for an expanded freedom movement era. In effect, it establishes a much needed, justifiable specific date selection. The result is a black freedom movement grounded on a distinctive form of activism, which emerges from the internal, intellectual, and social transformations within the black community, as well as the impact of similar struggles internationally. This era’s embrace of a new ideological approach to activism via non-violent civil disobedience, and important areas of continuity exampled by black women’s activism around networking/community organization and activism, clearly place the freedom movement before the classical timeline, but after the 1930s, and in the World War II years.
Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Place, Memory, and Conflict
The Professional Geographer, 2000
Produced over the past decade, monuments and museums dedicated to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s have desegregated America's memorial landscape. Tracing a broad arc across the US South, the material elements of this landscape-historic markers, monuments, parks, registered buildings, and museums-present a distinct challenge to representations of an elite, white American past. This challenge, however, is offered in a distinctly gendered manner, inasmuch as the role of women in organizing and leading the movement is obscured. Further, the historical narratives concretized at these sites are mediated by conventions associated with civil rights historiography and the tourism development industry. The result is a complex, sometimes ironic landscape. Via the narratives they embed and the crowds they attract, these landscapes are co-constitutive with contemporary politics of representing the past in the United States. This paper offers an overview of current memorial practices and representations of the Civil Rights movement found at the country's major memorial landscapes.