Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America

Abstract

The thirteen essays in this important collection examine grass-roots struggles for racial justice throughout the United States from 1940 to 1980. Groundwork is a tribute to John Dittmer's groundbreaking Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1994), and it emulates Dittmer's focus on grass-roots organizers, whose ties and accountability to local communities distinguished them from national civil rights leaders or federal officials and whose commitment to enabling ordinary people to acquire the means to transform their own lives made them critical agents of social transformation. The editors commend Dittmer for offering an alternative portrait of poor and working-class African American communities in an era when social science literature was saturated with images of a pathological urban underclass sowing the seeds of its destruction. And the essays continue this approach—identifying myriad contexts when poor, often illiterate folk organized to educate themselves, improve their own lives and communities, and demand their full citizenship rights. The shift away from charismatic national figures and politicians in Washington is accompanied by a determined shift away from simplistic binaries such as de jure versus de facto segregation, integration versus black power, the nonviolent South versus the militant, ghetto North—indeed, the rigid distinction of South versus North gets seriously revised in this volume. That these binaries have significantly obscured our vision and limited our knowledge of the era is borne out by the fact that almost every essay features activists who were highly significant in their own time but who are now virtually unknown. Peter Levy's essay on Gloria Richardson and the movement in Cambridge, Maryland, powerfully illustrates this point. In its tactics, constituency, and goals, the movement Richardson helped to forge in the early 1960s better resembled black power than civil rights—and as a result the media, the local establishment, Washington officials, and national civil rights leaders did not know how properly to evaluate Richardson and so deemed her irrational.