COMPARATIVE CIVIL RIGHTS: Notes on the Field of Black-Brown Relations and Multiethnic Freedom Struggles

Abstract

T past decade has witnessed an explosion of scholarship on the civil rights era. Scholars in history, sociology, anthropology, and ethnic studies, among other disciplines, have offered new and exciting accounts of civil rights activism and movements that have departed considerably from the now outdated, King-centered, 1954–68, Montgomery-to-Memphis trajectory. In doing so, they have shifted the boundaries of what constitutes “the civil rights movement,” adding new characters, events, and ethnic communities to the mix. One of the most noteworthy areas of this new scholarship is the development of histories that examine the African American and Latino/a civil rights struggles within a comparative or relational framework. While African American and Latino/a historians have explored for decades the individual stories of these communities, the scholarship of either group has often been hidden from the other, and the two fields have not frequently been in communication. Comparative civil rights history has attempted to change this, bringing together seemingly disparate narratives in order to show both commonalities and differences, shared and separate activism, coalitions and bifurcations, and the opportunities and challenges that come with working between and across community lines. This article demarcates some of the boundaries of this developing field. Given the complexities of the communities involved, the numerous locales and people and events considered, and the stressful nature of civil rights work generally and interracial collaboration specifically, it is relatively impossible in these few pages to encapsulate all the nuances of the field. Instead, I examine two of the strongest areas of this comparative scholarship: African