Radio, Race, and the Re-writing of Civil Rights

Abstract

The expansion of civil rights history has been nothing short of phenomenal in recent years. Not so long ago the movement's story was told largely in biographical and organizational terms, with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference claiming pride of place. Then came a spate of marvelously rendered case studies, from William Chafe's Greensboro to the Mississippi of Charles Payne and John Dittmer. In the 1990s historians pulled the movement back in time—into Franklin Roosevelt's Washington, into the embattled union halls of the New Deal South, into the workplaces and juke joints where infrapolitics was played. Now the scholarship is surg- ing across the Mason-Dixon Line, fl ooding across national borders, moving back into the 1920s and up to the 1970s, pushing into popular culture, intent, it seems, on shattering all the boundaries that once defi ned the movement's outer edges. 1 The transformation has pulled the literature in two directions. As its defi ni- tion of activism has widened, the movement's history has gathered in a stun- ning array of people, from factory hands to professional people, sharecroppers to celebrities. Even as historians draw more groups into the struggle, though, their evaluation of the movement has grown more critical, their conclusions more pessimistic. Not that the fi rst scholars to study the movement were wildly optimistic. But they tended to stress how much the movement accom- plished rather than how much was left undone. Now the balance has tipped the other way. The struggle may have been much wider than we previously imagined, the current literature suggests, but its actions were often limited, and its victories—great as they were—proved tragically incomplete. Brian Ward's Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South slips seam- lessly into the new history. As in his previous book, the award-winning Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (1998), Ward painstakingly traces the connections between the entertainment