An Anti-Political Revolution: Reading the Azusa Street Revival and Civil Rights Movement within the Black Radical Tradition

This chapter offers insight on how existing paradigms within Black Studies, specifically the ideas of racial capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition, can advance sociological scholarship toward greater understanding of the macro-level factors that shape Black mobilizations. In this chapter, I assess mainstream sociological research on the Civil Rights Movement and theoretical paradigms that emerged from its study, using racial capitalism as a lens to explain dynamics such as the political process of movement emergence, state-sponsored repression, and demobilization. The chapter then focuses on the reparatory justice movement as an example of how racial capitalism perpetuates wide disparities between Black and white people historically and contemporarily, and how reparations activists actively deploy the idea of racial capitalism to address inequities and transform society.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, black southerners in the United States engaged in the series of nonviolent social protests known collectively as the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke often of the integrated "Beloved Community" that would result from this nonviolent direct action. This dissertation examines the ways in which six contemporary American novelists have created fictional narratives about the Civil Rights Movement, narratives that employ "integrationist" literary devices whereby form reflects the theme of the search for the Beloved Community across race, gender, and class lines. That is, each novelist chooses to tell his or her story about the Civil Rights Movement from the shifting points of view of black characters and white characters so that narrative strategy reflects the integrationist strategy of the Movement. Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992), William Cobb's A Walk through Fire (1994), Vicki Covington's The Last Hotel for Women (1996), William Heath's The Children Bob Moses Led (1995), Alice Walker's Meridian (1976), and Julius Lester's And All Our Wounds Forgiven (1994) all embody literary strategies characterized by multiple perspectives and themes that express and interrogate racial integration. Just as the 1960s Civil Rights Movement forced Americans to consider the ramifications of integration, these six novels engage readers in questions about the possibility, or even desirability, of integration---an issue that seems increasingly attenuated in contemporary discussions of race relations. Implicit in each novel is the author's assessment of the likelihood that racial integration can take place in the United States. Moreover, these novels alternate the perspectives of women and men, and of the disadvantaged and the advantaged. Reflecting the limitations of the Civil Rights Movement, these novels reveal that integration was and continues to be an elusive goal. However, these novels also affirm that individual blacks and individual whites can achieve meaningful relationships with each other. By engaging contemporary readers empathetically in the intense era of the Civil Rights Movement, these six novels revive the 1960s ideal of the Beloved Community and challenge readers to re-examine the problems and the promises of racial integration in the United States.

From the 1947–8 Nakba to the 2023–4 Gaza genocide, the history of Palestine appears to be stuck in a vicious circle of violence from which escape seems increasingly elusive. This leads one to ask, can one ever escape the Zionist circle? The work of Cedric Robinson provides a potential path forward. Since his death in 2016, Robinson’s name has become synonymous with the study of racial capitalism. But while racial capitalism was the background of his work, his chief concern was the Black Radical Tradition. Unlike racial capitalism, this concept has remained under-theorised, but without thoroughly accounting for it, our understanding of racial capitalism remains incomplete at best, misguided at worst. In this article, I turn our attention to the Black Radical Tradition and attempt to define it. As Robinson argued, the Black Radical Tradition is not simply derivative of racial capitalism; it actually precedes it and subverts it. Returning to Palestine, I show how Robinson’s notion of the Black Radical Tradition can contribute to our understanding of the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and I suggest that at least in some sense, the Palestinians have actually been escaping the Zionist circle all along.

This article asserts that the Black Radical Tradition (BRT), grounded in historical and structural inquiry, offers tools to reinterpret EiE radically—the BRT encompasses a tradition rooted in diverse African intellectual and activist inquiries, providing a multifaceted theoretical framework. Relevant to humanitarian scholarship, the BRT challenges omissions of colonisation, capitalism, and enslavement histories in forced migration and aid, shedding light on their roles in perpetuating ‘white saviours’. The paper, adopting my roles as a scholar and aid practitioner, critically examines the EiE sector through three BRT lenses: racial capitalism, critical race theory, and fugitivity. It employs case studies, aligning with the BRT's interconnected focus, revealing the pervasive influence of educational aid, racial injustice, and structural inequalities. These lenses collectively illuminate the potential of Black radical thought to transform the EiE landscape. By tracing EiE's genealogies through Black radical historiography, the article advocates for sector-wide introspection, emphasising power redistribution, centring marginalised voices, and challenging prevailing hierarchies in humanitarian contexts.

14 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 79, NO. 1 79 No.1 York: NYU Press, 2014), 59. 9. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Southern Negro Youth Congress, #100-HQ-6548, Part I, “Undeveloped Leads,” 28– 30. 10. Johnetta Richards, “The Southern Negro Youth Congress: A History” (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 1987), 48. 11. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 12. Ella Baker, Interview by John Britton, June 19, 1968, Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection, Civil Rights Documentation Project, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Washington, DC. 13. Robert P. Moses and Charlie Cobb, Jr., “Organizing Algebra: The Need to Voice a Demand,” Social Policy 31, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 8. 14. Robert C. Smith, We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post–Civil Rights Era (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996). 15. See Clarence Lang, “Political/Economic Restructuring and the Tasks of Radical Black Youth,” The Black Scholar 28, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 1998): 32–33; also see Luke Tripp, “The Political Views of Black Students During the Reagan Era,” The Black Scholar 22, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 45–51. 16. Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, “Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration,” American Sociological Review 24 (2009): 156–65. 17. Sarah A. Soule, “The Student Divestment Movement in the United States and Tactical Diffusion: The Shantytown Protest,” Social Forces 75, no. 3 (March 1997): 857–58. 18. Sean Ginwright, Black Youth Rising: Activism and Radical Healing in Urban America (New York: Teachers College Press, 2009). 19. Cathy Cohen, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 28. 20. David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Master Frames and Cycles of Protest,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon Morris and C. McClurg Mueller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 137. CRITICAL PEDAGOGY FOR BLACK YOUTH RESISTANCE By Tyson E. J. Marsh The rich history and tradition of Black intellectual radicalism, protest, and critical praxis draws upon and informs multiple epistemological spaces while also occupying a variety of physical places and contexts, both historically and in the present. The politics of place and space are woven throughout the Black radical tradition and struggle for social justice, as white supremacist statesanctioned violence (i.e., the maintenance and reproduction of white racial and economic supremacy through violent and racist state-sanctioned laws, policies, and practices enforced through Ideological and Repressive StateApparatuses), both overt and covert, has required that Black folk take a creative and critical approach in locating and creating spaces and places to organize, strategize, and mobilize.As Lefebvre has written, “Space has been shaped and molded from historical and natural elements, but this has been a political process. Space is political and ideological. It is a product literally¿OOHGZLWKLGHRORJLHV´2 While Black radicals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright carved out intellectual spaces for the political work of challenging white supremacy, Septima Clark, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer engaged in critical public pedagogical work in the struggle for civil rights in more formal, physical spaces and institutions. Combining the former and latter, scholaractivists Angela Y. Davis, Kathleen Clever, and others have situated their political work within the tradition of critical public intellectualism. Marc Lamont Hill3 KDVLGHQWL¿HGFXOWXUDOFULWLFLVP policy shaping, and applied work as three critical spaces in which educational researchers engage in public intellectual work. However, in acknowledging the marriage between racism and capitalism, we must also begin to position Black youth as public intellectuals in the struggle against white supremacist state-sanctioned violence. Undertaking this work requires that we acknowledge the way in which dominant culture serves to silence Black youth while simultaneously co-creating spaces with them to critique and respond to the culture of systemic violence as it manifests itself in schooling and formal/informal sites of education. Within a top-down education reform and policy context in which Black youth are the last ones consulted, if at all, we must work with them in carving out spaces to inform...

From the inception of the emerging American nation, the South is a central battleground in the struggles for freedom, justice, and equality. It is the location of the most intense repression, exploitation, and reaction directed toward Africans Americans, as well as Native Americans and working people generally. At the same time the South is the site of the most heroic resistance to these oppressive conditions of class domination, of white supremacy, and of sexist social relations in the public and private sectors. The institution of chattel slavery thrusts the Black radical tradition into the forefront of these early struggles. Today's globalization in the electronic age and neoliberal policies — the attack on the New Deal and Civil Rights reforms of the past era — again place the Black radical tradition at the center of the struggles for freedom, justice, and equality. We present a historical materialist analysis of the Black radical tradition in the South, from slave resistance and rebellions in the 1500s through the Civil War to the economic and political justice struggles in the current period. Black women — often working class — are always at the core of the Black radical tradition and are frequently in its leadership. Black radicals in each period make revolutionary demands that challenge state policy and/or capitalist property relations. But history reveals that each victory, hard fought and won, merely reforms capitalism and is only temporary. We conclude that the Black radical tradition in America calls for the liberation (i.e., the full economic, political and social equality) of the black masses. Permanent victory means that the Black radical tradition is at the heart of a working class-based movement to bring an end to the global capitalist system and to the class, color, and gender oppression that is its cornerstone.

“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: Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation by Julius B. Fleming Jr Mary Rizzo Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. By Julius B. Fleming Jr. Performance and American Cultures. (New York: New York University Press, 2022. Pp. [vi], 301. Paper, $29.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-0684-3; cloth, $89.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-0682-9.) What was the affective register of the civil rights movement? From the joyful singing of freedom songs to the palpable anger of Anne Moody’s memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), civil rights activists felt their movement as much as they intellectualized or strategized about it. In the ambitious and generative Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, Julius B. Fleming Jr. asserts that scholars have ignored a key affect of the civil rights movement—patience. As he argues, historically when Black Americans have been told to be patient—defined as bearing suffering with equanimity—it has supported white supremacy. Time becomes a key framework through which to understand a movement defined by competing calls for “freedom now” and, as Nina Simone contemptuously sang, “go slow” (pp. 9, 114). Fleming suggests that we can apprehend the workings of Black patience through Black performance, particularly the time-based medium of theater. Focusing on the “‘classical’ phase” of the civil rights movement (1954–1965), he suggests that “black theatre in the Civil Rights Movement forwarded and energized the Black Radical Tradition—not by attaching itself to communism per se, but by working to disassemble the modern structures of racial time and racial affect that energize the violent cultures of black patience” (pp. 22, 24). Through analysis of theater and performance in the civil rights movement, we see not only the functioning of Black patience but also the depiction of its other, a “fugitive affect” that “strain[s] against the affective protocols of black patience” (p. 33). Fleming examines these ideas through chapters on famous and forgotten cultural productions. Chapter 1 focuses on the little-remembered centennial [End Page 389] commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963, which included a revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, an exhibition in Chicago, and a performance of a musical drama by Duke Ellington. The temporal and geographic meanings of the Free Southern Theater’s performances throughout the rural South are the subject of chapter 2. Amiri Baraka’s “black queer trilogy” of plays is the core of the next chapter, which examines the meaning of queerness and an eroticized Black body in the movement (p. 171). Chapter 4 turns to the performance of fugitive affect in Black plays that center “white impatience” rather than Black patience (p. 183). The book concludes with a chapter that parallels the public civil rights performances of sit-ins and jail-ins with theater pieces that depict these movement tactics on stage, a kind of doubled performance. Creating a new framework to understand the classical phase of the civil rights movement is no easy task given the number of published books on the topic. However, through his focus on temporality and the links between time and affect—patience is, definitionally, about time—Fleming has done just that. Black patience is a tool of racial oppression by forever putting freedom in the future (Fleming offers a critique of Afro-futurism as counterintuitively functioning similarly). His work urges historians to think about time beyond our usual mantra of change over time to consider how time structured how activists saw themselves and their movement. Some historians may be troubled by Fleming’s definition of radicalism. While scholars like Robin D. G. Kelley, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, and Peniel E. Joseph argue that radicalism in the movement was related to labor organizing and leftist political movements, Fleming sees radicalism in theatrical and other performances that “fostered different ways of seeing, feeling, and ultimately of being black, posing a formidable challenge to the violent enterprise of black patience” (p. 24). There is little discussion here of the direct outcomes of these performances on policy. Instead, the emphasis is on how performance reveals counterhegemonic ideas within the Black artistic community...

Speaking to his supporters at end of Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that their common goal was not simply end of segregation as an institution. Rather, the end is reconciliation, end is redemption, end is creation of beloved King's words reflect strong religious convictions that motivated civil rights movement in South in its early days. Standing courageously on Judeo-Christian foundations of their moral commitments, civil rights leaders sought to transform social and political realities of twentieth-century America. In The Beloved Community, Charles Marsh shows that same spiritual vision that animated civil rights movement remains a vital source of moral energy today. The Beloved Community lays out an exuberant new vision for progressive Christianity and reclaims centrality of faith in quest for social justice and authentic community.

The East Is Black: Cold War in the Black Radical Imagination, by Robeson Taj Frazier. Durham, Duke University Press, 2015. xiv, 314 pp. $94.95 US (cloth), $25.95 US (paper). It has been seventeen years since Robin D.G. Kelley and Elizabeth Esch made the case in the journal Souls that China offered black radicals a 'colored,' or Third World, Marxist model that enabled them to challenge a white and Western vision of class struggle (Souls 1.4 [1999]: 6-41). Since the publication of their ground-breaking article, a variety of monographs, edited collections, and articles have explored aspects of the meeting ground between Chinese communism and the Black radical tradition. But now, thanks to Robeson Taj Frazier's excellent study, we finally have a book-length consideration of the imaginative and intellectual space that Kelley and Esch opened a window onto in 1999. The East Is Black ranges from the Chinese Revolution of 1949 until the death of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong in 1976, and is structured around the interactions between the People's Republic of (prc) and six Black internationalists who inhabited the overlapping categories of intellectual, journalist, activist, and educator: W.E.B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, William Worthy, Robert and Mabel Williams, and Victoria Vicky Garvin. In addition, Frazier provides two brief sections that effectively encapsulate the main contours of Chinese history during the periods under consideration, as well as a coda on the meanings of Sino-US rapprochement and a powerful, personal postscript that takes up the author's own relationship to this topic and the prospects for freedom and unfreedom in the two societies today. There are a lot of moving parts to the complex story of Black radicalism and the PRC, but Frazier's astute organization in itself brings an enhanced clarity to his analysis. An interdisciplinary work that operates in the fields of media, cold war, intersectionality, social movement, and cultural studies, not to mention African American and Chinese history, The East Is Black advances an array of academic and political debates. To point to one example from each of these areas, Frazier's account deepens the connection between political consciousness and media production and consumption, demonstrates Cold War continuities with longer histories of Western colonialism, explains how heteropatriarchal sensibilities shaped and were at times contested by pro-PRC Black internationalists, revises the still-dominant notion that states rather than social movements are the proper subject of international relations, documents how cultural production created an imagined bridge between Communist Chinese and African American contexts, buttresses the long civil rights movement paradigm, and offers a developed analysis of a relatively unexplored dimension of PRC public diplomacy during the Mao years. …

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...

If the Civil Rights Movement is `dead,'(1) and if it gave us nothing else, it gave us each other forever, wrote Alice Walker her first published essay, 1967 (Gardens 128). Her statement is true for Walker as an African American woman and as a writer. The Movement reaffirmed African Americans' connection to each other as a people and to their history of struggle against oppression. The Movement also allowed Walker to claim her self--she has described herself as to by the Movement--and to claim the lives of African American women of the rural South as the subject of her fiction (Gardens 122). Walker grew up rural Georgia, and, as a student at Spelman College from 1961 to 1962., she became involved the Atlanta Movement, working at voter registration and participating marches and demonstrations (J. Hams 33). Inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr., who urged civil rights workers to `Go back to Mississippi ... go back to Georgia,' his speech during the March on Washington 1963, she returned to the South for two summers and went to live Mississippi during the late 1960s and early 1970s, working at voter registration, teaching Headstart teachers and writing stories about rural southern black women. (Gardens 163, 27). Participation the Civil Rights Movement was central to Walker's life not only as a young woman but also as a young writer. She has written about the Movement some of her early poems, short stories, essays, and briefly her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), but Meridian (1976) is her novel of the Civil Rights Movement. Meridian is more than a novel about the Civil Rights Movement, and critics have focused on many aspects of this complex work.(2) But I would like to focus on Meridian as a novel of the Civil Rights Movement and try to show how Walker used her experience the Movement and the experience of others of her generation to deal with the social, political and philosophical issues raised by the Movement, issues that continue to engage us today. Other critics have focused on the Civil Rights Movement discussing Meridian,(3) but they do not discuss the connection between Walker's experience the Movement and the novel. Alice Walker is the only major African American woman writer who came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and participated it and the only one to write a novel about the Civil Rights Movement.(4) By 1970, when Walker began to write Meridian (J. Harris 33), the Civil Rights Movement, which offered the hope of Freedom Now! and the ideal and practice of nonviolence and and White Together, had been declared dead. Many young blacks had given up on white Americans and on nonviolence, because of their experience of white racist violence and intransigence the Civil Rights Movement. As early as 1963, Anne Moody, a young black woman active the Movement Mississippi, began to question everything I had ever believed in and to think Nonviolence is through, after a black church Birmingham, Alabama was bombed by racist whites and four young girls attending Sunday school were killed (Moody 320, 319). Despite the Movement, 1970 the United States continued to be racially divided and violent against black people. By 1970, some people, who called themselves black nationalists or black militants, and whose slogan had become Power, urged black women, who had struggled for their freedom along with black men the Civil Rights Movement, to subordinate themselves to black men, to make themselves less, for the good of their people. In an essay published 1973, while she was writing Meridian, Alice Walker quotes Barbara Sizemore, writing The Black Scholar, on the new `nationalist woman': `Her main goal is to inspire and encourage man and his children. Sisters this movement must beg for permission to speak and function as servants to men.' (qtd. Gardens 169). Both Walker and Sizemore viewed this development the freedom struggle with dismay. …

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