“A Door to Other Doors”: Henry Threadgill Interview with Daniel Fischlin

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

76 No.2 Understanding the Local Context of the Civil (lights MovementiUsing Service Learning to Develop an Oral History of Our Community By Robert Weldon Simmons III Growing up in Detroit as the son of a mother who attended Speiman College in Atlanta, I was keenly aware of the significance of the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the lives of African Americans. What's more, I was also aware of the links that the Civil Rights Movement had to Detroit. Noting the conversations that my mother had when describing life at Speiman during the late 1960s and my uncles discussing their experience watching Detroit burn during the 1967 social uprising (or riot, as some have suggested) on 12th and Claremont (walking distance from our family home), I knew that the local context of the Civil Rights Movement and the impact of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were often overshadowed by the bigger issues presented in various history textbooks in schools. Accordingly, I have worked with pre-service teachers and co-taught with teachers in middle and high schools to understand how service learning can be utilized to create oral history projects that focus on local communities. All discussions with students regarding the local context of the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 begin with reading from Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s.1 As my teacher education students read the text, they are amazed at the complexity of the Civil Rights Movement and the story behind the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Middle and high school students seem surprised to find that the struggle for freedom and justice wasn't just a "southern thing with people fighting against the Confederate flag," as suggested by one high school student. Exposure to readings that focus attention on the Civil Rights Movement in cities like Detroit, Chicago, Boston, or Gary, Indiana, as well as how the local community was impacted by the Civil 14 I BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN Vol. 76, No. 2 Rights Act of 1964, leaves students' eyes wide and their mouths open in amazement. As one student said to me in Detroit, "I didn't know we got down like that in the D." To him I said, "We sure did and still do." For students in grades 6-12 who don't find their cities located in the text, they routinely wonder, "What was happening here during that same time period?" Accordingly, I use this type of student curiosity as an opening to educate these students not only about the Civil Rights Movement, but about the work that was done during that era in their own cities. While I was studying the impact of service learning in urban schools in a school in the Midwest, I listened to "You Must Learn" by Boogie Down Productions with a group of African American students in a high school classroom.2 As the music played and the students nodded their heads and took notes on the historical names they recognized, I realized how little they knew about the personal narratives generated by everyday African Americans associated with the Civil Rights Movement. I tossed out a name of a local legend in the Civil Rights Movement and asked them to explain who this person was. Silence fell over the room. Certainly they knew of Rosa Parks sitting on the bus and Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, but they had little knowledge of their local community's participation in the Civil Rights Movement. As my co-teaching partner and I pondered our next series of lessons, we decided to co-construct them with our students. When we initially approached our students about developing a series of lessons focusing on the local context during the Civil Rights Movement, the students were confused. One student said, "Y'all think we know something about teaching?" My response was, "Perhaps you do, but you for sure know something about learning. Now tell me what you want to learn about as it relates to your local community and the Civil Rights Movement...

Reviewed by: The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will by Russell Brooker David T. Ballantyne The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will. By Russell Brooker. ( Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. xxx, 333. $100.00, ISBN 978-0-7391-7992-5.) Russell Brooker provides an accessible overview of the black freedom struggle from the Civil War to 1950. The American Civil Rights Movement, [End Page 771] 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will is a political science– influenced accompaniment to recent syntheses of the long black civil rights struggle, such as Stephen Tuck's We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), though Brooker's account ends before African Americans made their most significant gains. His central argument concerns "people of good will"—black and white individuals who acted in African Americans' interests regardless of their motives. Black agency and pressure, not altruism, he contends, induced this conduct. The first half of his synthesis maps black activism alongside the behavior of these people of good will from 1865 to the racial nadir of the early twentieth century. The second half traces the struggle to 1950, when the southern caste system was "severely weakened" (p. xviii). The book concludes with an epilogue that reflects on connections between 1865 and 1950 and contemporary race relations. Brooker enumerates his major arguments at the outset, organizes chapters clearly, and writes in straightforward prose. He also quantifies shifting African American fortunes throughout his account, including helpful tables detailing Reconstruction-era African American college foundations, lynchings by race during "Redemption," twentieth-century black and white southern schooling data, and indices of the extent of racial segregation over time. Breaking with Tuck's nationally focused account and other scholarship examining racial unrest outside the South, Brooker portrays the civil rights struggle as a mostly southern phenomenon. His nonsouthern treatment includes shifting northern public opinion on race throughout the period, nationwide post–World War I race riots, legal decisions concerning racially restrictive covenants, and the activities of northern civil rights organizations in the South, not elsewhere. Yet while the North was a "safe haven" for African Americans in comparison with the Jim Crow South, the American civil rights struggle concerned more than destroying southern racial apartheid (p. xxi). Incorporating scholarship that examines nonsouthern civil rights struggles and that questions the nonsouthern racial consensus around the mid-twentieth century—like Thomas J. Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008)—would bring nuance to Brooker's analysis and enable him to explain with greater authority the subsequent nationwide white reaction to race that he hints at in the epilogue. Closer engagement with more recent historiography would also strengthen Brooker's discussion. First, Brooker'suse of civil rights movement to define activism between 1865 and 1950 welcomes a consideration of recent debates over the periodization of the civil rights movement—relevant works include Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past" (Journal of American History, 91 [March 2005], 1233–63) and Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang's "The 'Long Movement' as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies" (Journal of African American History, 92 [Spring 2007], 265–88). Yet in Brooker'stelling, thisworkissimply "about the civil rights movement … before it [the term] got capitalized" (p. xii). Second, given the book's justifiable emphasis on the centrality of violence in infringing on black freedoms, recent military-focused Reconstruction scholarship [End Page 772] would offer a counterpoint to Brooker's argument on the use of force to preserve black rights. The book's later portion effectively details civil rights gains and organization through the 1940s. Though social, economic, intellectual, and political developments undoubtedly weakened Jim Crow segregation by midcentury, Brooker might have engaged with works that problematize the relationship between World War II–era and later civil rights activism, such as Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein's "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement" (Journal...

Journal Article Remembering the Dream: Alice Walker, Meridian and the Civil Rights Movement Get access Roberta M. Hendrickson Roberta M. Hendrickson University of Wyoming Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 24, Issue 3, September 1999, Pages 111–128, https://doi.org/10.2307/468042 Published: 01 September 1999

Reviewed by: To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement by P. Allen Krause Josh Parshall (bio) To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement. By P. Allen Krause with Stephen Krause, edited by Mark K. Bauman. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2016. xviii + 402 pp. At the 1966 convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in Toronto, Hebrew Union College rabbinical student P. Allen Krause interviewed thirteen acting or former rabbis of Reform congregations in southern cities about the civil rights movement. Although Krause wrote a thesis based on his interviews and published some of his findings [End Page 163] (stripped of identifying information about the interviewees) in the American Jewish Archives Journal, the recordings and other research materials were partially sealed for twenty-five years. To Stand Aside or Stand Alone makes these interviews widely available as transcripts for the first time. Rabbi Krause returned to historical research around the time of his retirement in 2008 and, with encouragement from historian and editor Mark Bauman, developed the now fifty-year-old interviews into a book project. After Krause died in 2012, his son Stephen worked with Bauman to finish the manuscript, which supplements the transcripts with biographical sketches and brief local histories by Rabbi Krause as well as introductions to the interviews by Bauman. Both the author and editor provide important contextual information in their introductions, and Bauman's bibliographic essay situates the newly available primary sources in relation to the historiography of southern Jews and African American civil rights. Krause's interviews follow a standard format. Each rabbi discusses the development of local civil rights activism, the reactions of the non-Jewish white community in comparison to the views of local Jews, white Christian clergy's responses to the challenges of civil rights, their own participation or lack thereof in local struggles, and their opinions about the actions of national Jewish groups and northern Jewish activists. The rabbis' responses vary according to the hostility with which white communities reacted to the prospect of desegregation and also according to their own activities. Krause labels more progressive environments "The Land of the Almost Possible" and the most reactionary cities "The Land of the Almost Impossible." While differences in local political climate greatly affected the availability of potential allies among white Christian clergy and white civic leaders, the interviews demonstrate that rabbis' political perspectives, personal experiences with race and racism, and strengths and weaknesses as religious leaders all affected the actions that they took (or did not take) in regard to civil rights. For the most part, the interviews represent the experiences and activities of moderate progressive rabbis, and (as Krause intended) the book establishes them as part of the liberal contingent of the white South. Some, such as James Wax in Memphis and William Silverman in Nashville, publicly supported African American civil rights and were well known throughout their local communities for their progressive attitudes. A larger number promoted desegregation from their pulpits and worked behind the scenes with ministerial and civic groups to support civil rights reforms. Only a few of the rabbis expressed strong reservations about desegregation or reported no concrete civil rights action. With a few interesting exceptions, then, the rabbis featured in the book deserve credit for helping to smooth the path of desegregation in [End Page 164] their respective locales, even if courts, the federal government, and direct action by local protesters played more significant roles. At the same time, many of the interviews encapsulate the moderate liberal viewpoints of the time, which often second-guessed activists' tactics; predicated the extension of civil and economic rights on black southerners' adherence to white, middle-class norms; and exhibited a strong sense of racial and class-based paternalism. As a result, the rabbis' testimonies reflect the complicated tensions among liberal white southerners' empathy for African Americans, their internalized acceptance of segregationist logics, and the various risks—social, economic, and bodily—that constrained would-be allies in the civil rights struggle. Their stories become useful not merely as tools for praising or critiquing southern Jews and their rabbis but also for understanding how...

They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada

Racial Formation and Re-formation in Twentieth-Century Civil Rights Movements Joseph R. Stuart (bio) Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico's Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States. By Ruben Flores. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 353 pages. $29.95 (paper). Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City. By Sonia Song-Ha Lee. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xi + 332 pages. $34.95 (paper). The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi. By Stephen A. Berrey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xci + 331 pages. $29.95 (paper). Race, Religion, and Civil Rights: Asian Students on the West Coast, 1900–1968. By Stephanie Hinnershitz. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. 268 pages. $28.95 (paper). The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland. By Robyn C. Spencer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. 260 pages. $24.95 (paper). At the close of her landmark article "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," the historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall asks, "How can we make ourselves heard without reducing history to the formulaic mantras on which political narratives usually rely?" Too often, Hall argues, the ways that individuals and social structures work for or against certain groups remain "invisible to citizens trained in not seeing and in thinking exclusively ahistorical, personal terms."1 Scholars must nuance and complicate readers' oversimplified views of the civil rights movement by helping them recognize how individuals and organizations foment social, political, economic, and racial change. The past will always be used politically; it is up to those of us [End Page 291] who research and write history to reveal the messy combination of individual agency and societal structures that create the racial, gendered, political, and economic ecospheres Americans inhabit. The five books under review here affirm that civil rights histories did not begin with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education or end with Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination, and that race in civil rights movements went beyond the oversimplified black–white binary. But more than this, these five scholars make larger arguments about civil rights movements in the United States by highlighting the ways that racial formation and identification informed social movements from the 1930s to the 1970s and from California to New York City. Sonia Song-Ha Lee's Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement examines "the political world in which Puerto Ricans and African Americans conceptualized their racial and ethnic identities" in response to New York City's long civil rights movement (3). Lee argues that, although that two groups frequently lived in geographic proximity and faced similar discrimination, they were not natural allies. Americans defined Puerto Ricans as a racially "in-between" people, neither white nor black (unsurprisingly, they fought to be identified with whites rather than African Americans). Despite that preference, twentieth-century sociologists and anthropologists from Oscar Lewis to Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer identified Puerto Ricans through a racialized "culture of poverty," as did government programs, which linked Puerto Ricans with African Americans. Over time, however, many Puerto Ricans began to work with African Americans for civil rights in matters of antipoverty policy. Indeed, one of Lee's great contributions, building on the historiographical trend toward examining interracial political coalitions after World War II, is her exploration of the ways that politics and class created common ground for members of different racial groups within civil rights movements. Despite their shared economic disenfranchisement, New York's Puerto Ricans did not fight for political, social, and labor gains using the tactics embraced by African Americans before World War II. For instance, Lee shows that black and Puerto Rican members followed different paths in the struggle for justice in the workplace in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU). Puerto Ricans' fragile status in the United States made them less willing to incur the wrath of their union bosses. African Americans, who did not fear deportation or other punitive measures, fought vocally for labor rights and used their connections to black community and...

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsDavid L. Chappell, Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 266. $23.95 (paper).Ian M. McDowellIan M. McDowellTexas Tech University Search for more articles by this author Texas Tech UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDavid L. Chappell’s Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. is a work of historical recovery, reinterpretation, and continuity of the Civil Rights Movement from 1968 through the early 1990s. Chappell’s primary purpose is to expose the actions of civil rights activists following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, which were substantial yet overlooked. He maintains that the advances made after 1968 are often eclipsed by the enormity of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the symbolism of King’s leadership. However, Chappell argues that “history changing acts like those of 1964 and 1965 are extremely rare,” and they should not confine the memory of the struggle for civil rights (26). Chappell contends that a “fresh look at the post-King era” is needed, one that exposes how activists “tested the limits of equality and black power” and how “the continuing struggle for rights and equality after 1968 is central to the meaning of freedom in America” (xii–xiii).Chappell utilizes a wide range of primary sources including news articles, presidential papers, congressional records, and speeches. He draws from fifteen different archives and libraries for research including the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the presidential libraries of Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. Chappell’s analysis of articles and studies provides perspectives of both activists and their opposition. Also, a wide variety of secondary sources are utilized to both provide background on important civil rights actors, actions, and opponents as well as to highlight how such history has been depicted. Chappell presents his findings in six chapters covering the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the 1972 and 1974 National Black Political Conventions (NBPC), the fight to pass a full employment act, the creation of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns of Jessie Jackson, and discourse and publications concerning King’s infidelity and plagiarism.Chapter 1 and its assessment of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 is one of the most intriguing in Chappell’s book. Chappell argues that the 1968 Fair Housing Act “was a substantive answer to some of King’s most radical demands and his last real victory” (3). Chappell shows that for King a housing bill was important and would have been one of the demands at a mass demonstration King proposed for late April of 1968. Chappell maintains that King’s assassination is what made the passage of a fair housing bill possible. King’s death is shown to have fostered significant sympathy, or at least “the political need to express sympathy,” allowing the act to pass into law shortly after his death (21). Chappell argues that the bill was important upon signing because it helped to make common discriminatory actions such as redlining and blockbusting illegal while also improving African American access to financing and rental properties. While the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 are most associated with the memory of the Civil Rights Movement and King, Chappell contends that the 1968 act “is more properly his legacy” and “significant as the beginning of the post-King era” (25–26).One theme Chappell illustrates persistently is the power of the black vote—including its limitations and potential. Chappell shows that the desire to win black votes played a role influencing many conservatives and moderates to display sympathy and pass the housing act. Chappell demonstrates in chapter 2 how the black vote helped elect African Americans like Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, and Carl Stokes of Cleveland as mayors. However, he contends the lack of unity shown at the NBPC’s conventions of 1972 and 1974 illustrates how institutions could not muster mass voting power. Chappell maintains only when attacked did black voters “rally at the polls to rebuff the assault” (62). In chapter 3 the black vote is shown as crucial to President Jimmy Carter’s victory in the 1976 election. Also, growing black political power is illustrated as helping garner Carter’s support for a full employment bill. The bill put into law made employment a right. However, Chappell argues the final bill might have been stronger if more blacks had registered to vote. In chapter 4 Chappell shows that black political power played an important role in drawing support for a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and in helping to “keep opponents of King’s work in check on major, headline generating legislation” (123). Chappell’s emphasis on the importance of growing black political influence is perhaps best illustrated in chapter 5 with the presidential campaigns of Jessie Jackson. Chappell shows that Jackson’s charisma, voter registration drives, and the significance of an African American running for president helped boost black registration “in 1984 to an all-time high of 66.3 percent of those eligible” (145). Chappell argues that this growth helped push through legislative changes such as the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1988 and a Fair Housing Act amendment, which made the 1968 act more enforceable.Chappell recognizes there was truly no leader with King’s combination of charisma, organization, and accomplishments following his assassination. However, Chappell argues that his successors continued the struggle for civil rights and justice. Chappell’s findings show that, while not united, the movement still had some leaders. Among them, King’s widow Coretta Scott King fought resolutely for full employment legislation and a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Jessie Jackson became the charismatic voice of many African Americans, and his presidential campaigns brought increased black voter participation and political influence. Chappell maintains that the “major victories that King represented was history’s great exception” and that it should not diminish or mask recognition of the accomplishments of those who followed (91). Chappell’s book exposes an overlooked period of the struggle for civil rights, one in which courageous and significant achievements were made by less celebrated yet equally determined actors. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 104, Number 1Winter 2019 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/701090 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reviewed by: Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud, Cary D. Wintz Dolph Briscoe IV Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West. Edited By Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. 322. Illustrations, bibliography, index.) Too often we confine our study of the modern civil rights movement to the South and the cities of the North. While such a focus is understandable, the African American freedom struggle of the mid-twentieth century in fact occurred in locales throughout the United States. Historians Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz have assembled a remarkable group of scholars to expand our knowledge of civil rights in the states west of the Mississippi River. Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West [End Page 248] is a collection of articles that ponders this critical yet understudied topic. Its editors hope the book will serve as an opening dialogue to inspire further research into this often overlooked region of the country. (The essays about Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico were published previously.) African Americans throughout western states bravely organized in order to win racial equality. Events of national consequence, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision (1954), the Watts riots in Los Angeles during August 1965, and the 1966 founding of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, receive detailed coverage. The authors recover forgotten stories of ordinary black men and women, making grassroots organizing on the local level a theme in many of the essays. Not forgotten is the fact that other racial and ethnic groups, including Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, encountered discrimination and violence in the West. African Americans both cooperated and at times found themselves in conflict with other groups in this increasingly diverse region of the United States. Several of the authors begin their articles before the modern civil rights movement (defined in the book as the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s), tracing the black equality struggle in the West back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West begins with an introduction and a study of the pre-Brown period, features regionally organized overviews of different western states, and concludes with a discussion of the post-1970 years. “The Far West” section consists of chapters on the Pacific Northwest, California, and Nevada. “The Mountain States and the Desert Southwest” covers Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. “The Upper Midwest” includes articles on the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska. Perhaps most interesting to readers of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly will be “The South and the West Collide” about Oklahoma and Texas. Alwyn Barr’s essay, “The Civil Rights Movement in Texas,” is an excellent overview by a pioneering scholar of African American history in Texas. Barr particularly explains how the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People utilized the court system to attack segregation and barriers to voting in Texas. Barr further discusses black efforts to achieve equality in political representation, employment, and housing, and the challenges in these areas that persist to the present day. In editing this volume and securing contributions from numerous experts in African American history, Glasrud and Wintz have made a major contribution to historiography; it should be required reading for historians of the civil rights movement and would be worthy of assignment in undergraduate and graduate courses. Most importantly, Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West illustrates the resilience of African [End Page 249] Americans throughout the United States in the long struggle for racial equality. Dolph Briscoe IV Texas A&M University-San Antonio Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association

On the Novel and Civic Myth

The emergence of the civil rights policy regime during the 1960s in the U.S. formalized the transition from the pre–civil rights era to the civil rights era. As we see in this paper, the subsequent post–civil rights era has been shaped by increasing challenges against principles of civil rights law, chiefly by political conservatives. Indeed, opponents have had significant success in undermining key parts of the civil rights policy regime. Conservatives and others have sought to usher in an era of “color-blind” policy. Basic civil and political rights were thought by most to be questions of “settled law” in the aftermath of the relatively successful civil rights movement. However, “color blind” political opposition has challenged this assumption. Ironically, this means that there is a yet unsuccessful battle to cement foundational civil and political rights in the United States. Following Marshall, this further deters the development of more egalitarian social rights.

Reviewed by: Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement by Jorge J. Santos Joanna Davis-McElligatt (bio) Jorge J. Santos, Jr. Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement. University of Texas Press, 2019. 256 pp, $90, $29.95. Jorge J. Santos, Jr.'s Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History in Comics is a compelling exploration of graphic novels and memoirs published since the mid-1990s that document the civil rights movement from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s. Graphic narratives, Santos explains, can reframe long-established histories of the movement by highlighting habitually overlooked people, places, and narratives central to its successes. In this way, graphic texts representing the classical period of civil rights history have the power to expand and reshape readerly (mis)conceptions of the movement's legacies. Of particular interest to Santos is the way graphic narratives resist simple representations of historical figures and events, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. or the Selma to Montgomery marches. In doing so, graphic histories can challenge our understanding of the subjects and moments that have become preserved in our collective memories of the movement. Most important are the ways these "civil rights graphic memories" encourage readers to think critically about the movement's historical archive by calling into question [End Page 237] what forms of evidence—Santos discusses primarily photographs and film—we accept as truthful or accurate portrayals of the movement (3). Reinforced for the public by monuments, street signage, and national holidays, the invocation of memories of the civil rights movement is always a political act. Careful reading of civil rights graphic memories, however, can push back against our "consensus memory" of the movement, a term defined by Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford and deployed by Santos in reference to the received state-sanctioned narratives evoked in popular memory which are thus widely subject to revision and appropriation in graphic narratives (4). Through an expansion of the visual and textual narratives that underpin consensus memories of the civil rights movement, Graphic Memories demonstrates how comics can be fruitful in reenvisioning the history of civil rights in various ways. In addition to an introduction and appendix featuring an interview with Ho Che Anderson, Graphic Memories includes five chapters and a chapter-length epilogue which are thematically linked. Though the chapters and the epilogue cover unique intellectual terrain, the throughline Santos draws throughout the monograph is the way each graphic text troubles or reinforces consensus memories of the movement. The first two chapters detail how Ho Che Anderson's King: A Comics Biography and John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell's March trilogy, respectively, deliberately challenge consensus memories of iconic King-centered civil rights narratives. Anderson's King resists the figuration of an iconic MLK and defies simple categorizations of his legacy by constructing a narrative out of a complex bricolage of comics styles, photographs, and imagined dialogues which highlight King's essential unknowability. Lewis, Aydin, and Powell, conversely, elide the iconic King by troubling the relationship between the past and present through the use of panel bleeds, which encourage readers to conceive of history of the movement as ongoing rather than past. Chapters three and four explore how Lila Quintero Weaver's Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White and Mark Long, Jim Demonakos, and Nate Powell's The Silence of Our Friends engage with perspectives beyond those typically associated with the consensus memory of the movement. Santos claims that, as a Latinx woman, Weaver provides readers with an alternate perception of the movement beyond the black-white binary, whereas Long, Demonakos, and Powell's Houston-based graphic narrative shifts reader's consensus memory to an unconventional civil rights southscape. The final chapter and epilogue take up Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby and a number of different series runs of Marvel's X-Men. Despite the fact that Cruse's examination of intersecting anti-gay and antiblack sentiments in the civil rights South challenges master narrative consensus memories, Santos argues that the lynching of the white gay activist Sammy Noone whitewashes and appropriates the movement's history. In his high-spirited and deeply personal epilogue, however, Santos suggests that X-Men...

In this very special interview for Critical Studies in Improvisation, two esteemed researchers come together to discuss hip-hop, improvisation, and Black expressive culture.
 
 George Lipsitz is Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His publications include The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (co-authored with Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble), How Racism Takes Place, and Midnight at the Barrelhouse: The Johnny Otis Story. He serves as President of the Board of Directors of the African American Policy Forum and chairs the Advisory Board of the University of California, Santa Barbara Center for Black Studies Research which is an institutional partner of the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation.
 
 Tricia Rose is an internationally respected scholar of post civil rights era black U.S. culture, popular music, social issues, gender and sexuality. She is most well known for her groundbreaking book on the emergence of hip hop culture, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, considered a foundational text for the study of hip hop, one that has defined what is now an entire field of study. In 2003 Rose published a rare oral narrative history of black women's sexual life stories, Longing To Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy. In 2008, Professor Rose returned to hip hop with The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop-And Why It Matters.

Freedom Time:New Directions in Civil Rights Movement Scholarship Paige A. McGinley (bio) Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. By Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 322 pages. $89.00 (cloth). $29.00 (paper). Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson. By Shana L. Redmond. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 208 pages. $94.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement. By Victoria W. Wolcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 272 pages. $30.00 (cloth). $29.95 (paper). In December 2015, a group of scholars and activists, including Percy Green II, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tef Poe, Jamala Rogers, and George Lipsitz, gathered to discuss the "generations of struggle" in the Black freedom movement, particularly in relation to the Ferguson rebellion in the St. Louis region. Moderated by Elizabeth Hinton and introduced by Walter Johnson, the discussion ranged widely, with Rogers noting that "the connection between the generations is real, and some of the alleged intergenerational tensions are not," and Lipsitz observing that "we ought to understand that for Black people, the issue of generations is different because no group of people on earth has to struggle as much just to have succeeding generations, to create the possibility that there will be another generation at all."1 I introduce this important conversation's meditation on the notion of "generations" because of what might be at stake in describing these three new books as "a new generation" of scholarship—a discarding of the past, a confrontation or overthrow, complete with oedipal overtones. This is not the state of affairs I am attempting to chart. Civil rights movement scholarship has changed in recent decades, of course: firsthand (or nearly so) eyewitness accounts and analysis (by Aldon Morris, Clayborne Carson, Judy Richardson, and others) gave way to works that challenged the spatial and temporal bounds of "the movement" (Martha Biondi, Glenda [End Page 153] Gilmore, Hasan Jeffries, Komozi Woodard) as well as those that emphasized a grassroots organizing tradition (John Dittmer, Charles Payne, Barbara Ransby). And while Julius B. Fleming Jr.'s Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, Shana L. Redmond's Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson, and Victoria W. Wolcott's Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement are profoundly distinct, they each add new dimension and texture to our understanding of Black aesthetic expression and political practice at midcentury. Whether they represent a "new generation" is less important, perhaps, than the new discoveries they make possible, the new ways of assembling the past that they model, and the new space they open up for an engagement with a past and a project that, as Fleming notes, remains "unfinished." The ongoing unfinishedness of past liberation struggles infuses these three works, each of which charts precise and evocative temporalities of struggle. The question of time and the midcentury movement frequently comes up as a set of questions about periodization and designation: Is the civil rights era properly described as the years from the Brown decision (1954) to the passage of the Voting Rights Act (1965)? What kinds of historiographic narratives does a framework of the long civil rights movement make possible or preclude? What is at stake in discussing the midcentury movement as an intensification of or a signal departure from what came before? Is it more appropriate to think of the Black freedom struggle as beginning the moment enslaved Africans touched the soils of the Americas? While not the central concern of the three books considered here, each necessarily reckons with the question of periodization and terminology. But time and temporality are analytic—and affective—categories within each work as well, with Wolcott and Fleming signaling the temporal dimensions of their investigations in their very titles. The phrase "civil rights movement" scarcely appears in Redmond's Everything Man, and not without good reason: whether for reasons of Robeson's communist associations, ill health, or personal choice, Robeson had a tenuous association with the narrowly construed "classical phase" of the movement. And yet he gave shape and sound...

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