As its name suggests, the civil rights movement is an ongoing process, and the scholars contributing to this volume offer new geographical and temporal perspectives on this crucial American experience. As Clayborne Carson notes in the introduction, the movement involved much more than civil rights reform--it transformed African-American political and social consciousness. In this timely volume John Dittmer provides a new assessment of the effects of grass-roots activists of the movement in Mississippi from 1965 to 1968, to show what happened after the famous Freedom Summer of 1964. George C. Wright shows how African Americans in Kentucky from 1900 to 1970 faced the same racial restrictions and violence as blacks in Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. W. Marvin Dulaney traces the rise and fall of the movement in Dallas from the 1930s through the 1970s while the nation's attention was focused elsewhere.
The movement for civil rights in America peaked in the 1950s and1960s; however, a closely related struggle, this time over themovement's legacy, has been heatedly engaged over the past twodecades. How the civil rights movement is currently being rememberedin American politics and culture - and why it matters - is the commontheme of the thirteen essays in this unprecedented collection.Memories of the movement are being created and maintained - in waysand for purposes we sometimes only vaguely perceive - throughmemorials, art exhibits, community celebrations, and even streetnames.
The decade of the 1960s was an era of protest in America, and strides toward racial equality were among the most profound effects of the challenges to America's status quo. But have civil rights for African Americans been furthered, or even maintained, in the four decades since the Civil Rights movement began? To a certain extent, the movement is popularly perceived as having regressed, with the real issues tabled or hidden. With a view to assessing losses and gains, this collection of 17 essays examines the evolution and perception of the African American civil rights movement from its inception through today.
With essays and commentaries by David Levering Lewis, Clayborne Carson, Steven F. Lawson, Nancy J. Weiss, David J. Garrow, John Dittmer, Neil R. McMillen, Charles V. Hamilton, Mark V. Tushnet, William H. Chafe, and J. Mills Thornton III The Civil Rights Movement warrants continuing and extensive examination. The six papers in this collection, each supplemented by a follow-up assessment, contribute to a clearer perception of what caused and motivated the movement, of how it functioned, of the changes that occurred within it, and of its accomplishments and shortcomings. Its profound effect upon modern America has so greatly changed relations between the races that C. Vann Woodward has called it the “second revolution.” In a limited space, the eleven scholars range with a definitive view over a large subject. Their papers analyze and emphasize the Civil Rights Movement's important aspects: its origins and causes, its strategies and tactics for accomplishing black freedom, the creative tensions in its leadership, the politics of the movement in the key state of Mississippi, and the role of federal law and federal courts. In this collection a scholarly balance is achieved for each paper by a follow-up commentary from a significant authority. By deepening the understanding of the Civil Rights Movement, these essays underscore what has been gained through struggle, as well as acknowledging the goals that are yet to be attained.
Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History Finalist for the 2022 Lincoln Prize Winner of the 2022 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 A groundbreaking history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, Northern and Southern, in the decades before the Civil War. The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states’ insistences that states were merely trying to maintain the domestic peace with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, and they fought in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. Long stymied by hostile white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, the movement’s ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, particularly among supporters of the new Republican party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were the landmark achievements of the first civil rights movement. Kate Masur’s magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Activists such as John Jones, a free Black tailor from North Carolina whose opposition to the Illinois “black laws” helped make the case for racial equality, demonstrate the indispensable role of African Americans in shaping the American ideal of equality before the law. Without enforcement, promises of legal equality were not enough. But the antebellum movement laid the foundation for a racial justice tradition that remains vital to this day.
Praised by The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Bitch Magazine; Slate; Publishers Weekly; and more, this is “a bracing corrective to a national mythology” (New York Times) around the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. This fable, featuring dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, has shuttered the movement firmly in the past, whitewashed the forces that stood in its way, and diminished its scope. And it is used perniciously in our own times to chastise present-day movements and obscure contemporary injustice. In A More Beautiful and Terrible History award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis dissects this national myth-making, teasing apart the accepted stories to show them in a strikingly different light. We see Rosa Parks not simply as a bus lady but a lifelong criminal justice activist and radical; Martin Luther King, Jr. as not only challenging Southern sheriffs but Northern liberals, too; and Coretta Scott King not only as a “helpmate” but a lifelong economic justice and peace activist who pushed her husband’s activism in these directions. Moving from “the histories we get” to “the histories we need,” Theoharis challenges nine key aspects of the fable to reveal the diversity of people, especially women and young people, who led the movement; the work and disruption it took; the role of the media and “polite racism” in maintaining injustice; and the immense barriers and repression activists faced. Theoharis makes us reckon with the fact that far from being acceptable, passive or unified, the civil rights movement was unpopular, disruptive, and courageously persevering. Activists embraced an expansive vision of justice—which a majority of Americans opposed and which the federal government feared. By showing us the complex reality of the movement, the power of its organizing, and the beauty and scope of the vision, Theoharis proves that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the progress that occurred. A More Beautiful and Terrible History will change our historical frame, revealing the richness of our civil rights legacy, the uncomfortable mirror it holds to the nation, and the crucial work that remains to be done. Winner of the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize in Nonfiction
No other book about the civil rights movement captures the drama and impact of the black struggle for equality better than Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968. Two of the most respected scholars of African-American history, Steven F. Lawson and Charles M. Payne, examine the individuals who made the movement a success, both at the highest level of government and in the grassroots trenches. Designed specifically for college and university courses in American history, this is the best introduction available to the glory and agony of these turbulent times. Carefully chosen primary documents augment each essay giving students the opportunity to interpret the historical record themselves and engage in meaningful discussion. In this revised and updated edition, Lawson and Payne have included additional analysis on the legacy of Martin Luther King and added important new documents.
“We Shall Overcome” is an American folk song that has influenced American and world history like few others. At different points in time it has served as a labor movement song, a civil rights song, a hymn, and a protest song and has long held strong individual and collective meaning for the African-American community, in particular, and the American and world communities more generally. We Shall Overcome: Essays on a Great American Song, edited and compiled by Victor V. Bobetsky, comprises essays that explore the origins, history, and impact of this great American folk song. Inspired by a symposium of guest speakers and student choirs from the New York City Public Schools, chapters cover such critical matters as the song’s ancestry, Pete Seeger’s contribution to its popularization, the role played by the SNCC Freedom Singers in its adoption, the gospel origins and influences of the song, its adaptation by choral arrangers, its use as a teaching tool in the classroom, and its legacy among other freedom songs. We Shall Overcome: Essays on a Great American Song constitutes an invaluable resource for the music and music education community as well as for members of the general public interested in music, education, history and the civil rights movement. The book provides readers with a wide and unique spectrum of information about the song relevant to researchers and teachers.
No one experienced the Freedom Summer of 1964 quite like Tracy Sugarman. As an illustrator and journalist, Sugarman covered the nearly one thousand student volunteers who traveled to the Mississippi Delta to assist black citizens in the South in registering to vote. He interviewed these activists, along with local civil rights leaders and black and white residents not directly involved in the movement, and drew the people and events that made the summer one of the most heroic chapters in America’s long march toward racial justice. In We Had Sneakers, They Had Guns, Sugarman chronicles the sacrifices, tragedies, and triumphs of that unprecedented moment in our nation’s history. Two white students and one black student were slain in the struggle, many were beaten and hundreds arrested, and churches and homes were burned to the ground by the opponents of equality. Yet the example of Freedom Summer—whites united with heroic black Mississippians to challenge segregation—resonated across the nation. The United States Congress was finally moved to pass the civil rights legislation that enfranchised the millions of black Americans who had been waiting for equal equal rights for a century. Blending oral history with memoir, We Had Sneakers, They Had Guns draws the reader into the lives of the activists, showing their passion and naïveté, the bravery of the civil rights leaders, and the candid, sometimes troubling reactions of the black and white Delta residents. Sugarman’s unique reportorial art, in word and image, makes this book a vital record of our nation’s past.
Explores the ways in which civil rights have been given, cemented, overturned, or left unrecognised, from the first uprisings to the present day. This two volume work contains more than 350 in-depth essays that analyse the events that have shaped American attitudes from the start of the civil rights movement into the new millennium.
