Not Your Grandmamma's Civil Rights Movement:" A New Take on Black Activism (original) (raw)
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Historical Narratives Project, 2019
The Civil Rights Movement is one of the most widely discussed and controversial periods of American history. Both in scholarship and in popular culture, it has become commonplace to note that different individuals and groups have fundamentally different "narratives" of the events that took place and that these accounts have political implications. But while critiques of Civil Rights narratives are common, they rarely involve an evaluation of the narratives they bring to task as narratives ; that is to say, as formal structures that effectively produce meaning. This chapter presents a formal, transmedial narratological, analysis of some of the current influential narratives of the Civil Rights Movement, in the hopes that this exercise will demonstrate the significance of narration in historical writing in general and in African American history in particular. The article makes the case that the multidisciplinary narratological and semiotic analysis of historical narratives can offer critical insights about the diversity of ways in which history is constructed and disseminated in contemporary society, and can expose the political stakes involved in the choice of, seemingly innocuous or incidental, narrative and figurative strategies.
Social Science History, 2021
The 1960s-era, Nashville nonviolent civil rights movement—with its iconic lunch counter sit-ins—was not only an exemplary local movement that dismantled Jim Crow in downtown public accommodations. It was by design the chief vehicle for the intergenerational mentoring and training of activists that led to a dialogical diffusion of nonviolence praxis throughout the Southern civil rights movement of this period. In this article, we empirically derive from oral-history interviews with activists and archival sources a new “intergenerational model of movement mobilization” and assess its contextual and bridge-leading sustaining factors. After reviewing the literatures on dialogical diffusion and bridge building in social movements, we describe the model and its sustaining conditions—historical, demographic, and spatial conditions—and conclude by presenting a research agenda on the sustainability and generalizability of the Nashville model.
2008
POWER, PRIVILEGE AND LAW: A CIVIL RIGHTS READER 1-2 (1995) (citing Alice Walker's discussion of her poem Silver Writes" and its relationship to the civil rights movement in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens 335 (1983)). Walker notes that the term "civil rights" does not capture the vibrancy of the movement she joined. 3 The goals of the Project, according to the brochure are to: [I]nvestigate the role of state, local, and federal law enforcement agencies and courts in protecting civil rights activities and activists during the mid-century movement. The Project examines the geo-politics that led to the large-scale breakdown of law enforcement, the wide-0scale repression of movement activists, and the reforms that have been designed to rectify the abuses. CRRJ initiates and assesses policy measures designed to redress the workings caused by government repression. The Project assesses legislative approaches and marshals support for state and federal laws addressing the personal harms suffered by activists in the civil rights movement. Program Brochure on file with author. 4 See SINGH supra note 1, at 1-14 (describing the typical account of the civil rights era as a "King-centric" account and a "short civil rights era" and suggesting that it misrepresents modern US history, portrays the South as an exception to national racial norms, fails to recognize the depth and heterogeneity of black struggles, narrows "the political scope of black agency" while reinforcing a "formal legalistic view of black equality." Also noting that this history obscures a violent history of black opposition to white supremacy well underway in urban areas before the southern civil rights movement, particularly in the north in reaction to de facto racial hierarchies of state and private agencies in housing, labor markets, policing and criminal justice practices."
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.
Sylviane Diouf ed. Africana Age, 2011
At the midpoint of the twentieth century, African Americans once again answered the call to transform the world. The social and economic ravages of Jim Crow era racism were all-encompassing and deep-rooted. Yet like a phoenix rising from the ashes of lynch mobs, debt peonage, residential and labor discrimination, and rape, the black freedom movement raised a collective call of "No More"! The maintenance of white power had been pervasive and even innovative, and hence those fighting to get out from under its veil had to be equally unrelenting and improvisational in strategies and tactics. What is normally understood as the Civil Rights movement was in fact a grand struggle for freedom extending far beyond the valiant aims of legal rights and protection. From direct-action protests and boycotts to armed self-defense, from court cases to popular culture, freedom was in the air in ways that challenged white authority and even contested established black ways of doing things in moments of crisis.