Class and Politics in the Mississippi Movement: An Analysis of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party Delegation

Abstract

A NEW GENERATION OF CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORIANS HAS BEGUN TO subvert top-down, uplifting narrative that characterized earlier literature. These not only have extended standard movement time line of Montgomery Memphis both backward and forward but also have tried shift spotlight from black elite who led national organizations that tried influence policy in Washington, D.C., such as Roy Wilkins at National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Martin Luther King Jr. at Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), shine on equally deserving, lesser-known, and more often lower-class activists in local communities. In contrast a prevailing civil rights literature that consisted mainly of studies of major national civil rights leaders and their organizations, historians are digging deeper into local struggles against racism rescue these brave activists from oblivion. (1) They lament that most scholarship on movement gives credit famous, national civil rights leaders at expense of grassroots, local activists who, according David J. Garrow, were the actual human catalysts of movement, people who really gave direction movement's organizing work, individuals whose records reflect greatest substantive accomplishments.... [and] who had greatest personal impact upon course of southern (2) Their pointillistic histories describe how before, and even after, legislative victories were secured in Washington, local people in remote southern communities had win civil rights county by county, town by town, and even swimming pool by swimming pool. But advantages of bottom-up perspective go beyond merely restoring credit those who have been overlooked. Such studies also have laid a foundation for reshaping movement and demand a rethinking of what and who we think is important. According Emilye Crosby, studying ... movement's local indigenous base fundamentally alters our picture of movement and its significance and call[s] into question many of top-down generalizations introduced and reinforced by studies of national leaders, major events, and pivotal legal and political milestones. (3) Clayborne Carson contends that a local perspective broadens our sense of civil rights movement include leaders and groups that displayed a wide range of ideologies and proto-ideologies, involving militant racial or class consciousness that went beyond King's Christian-Gandhianism. (4) As J. Todd Moye writes, The way civil rights historians tended frame their narratives placed well-educated African Americans with good, stable jobs at center of stories. But as a result of new, local bottom-up history, scholars now understand civil rights movement have been more female, more grass roots, less philosophically nonviolent, and less pulpit-directed than they understood it be thirty years ago. (5) Jeanne Theoharis asserts that a focuse[d] on specific--on a locality, an organizer, or a campaign--has started to map black freedom struggle in new and important ways, including question[ing] most basic aspects of story--who led and undertook these movements, what movement was actually about, where it took place, when it happened, and why people engaged. (6) Charles M. Payne summarizes all ways new civil rights scholarship requires rethink critical issues such as the top-down and triumphal underpinnings of narrative; overemphasis on South as a site of struggle; extent of nonviolence; character of white resistance, including idea that it was mostly a problem of South; continued marginalization of women; chronology; role of liberals; equation of Black Power with end of movement; separation between civil rights history and labor history; and related tendency underemphasize economic goals of movement. …