Rescuing Civil Rights from Black Power: Collective Memory and Saving the State in Twenty-First-Century Prosecutions of 1960s-Era Cases

Abstract

Recent historical studies have shown that the movement for black power significantly predated its 1966 emergence as a slogan during a protest march in Mississippi. Scholarly texts and memoirs have excavated numerous projects to show that radical perspectives of black power— politically, culturally, strategically—defined the post-World War II war period in multiple ways. This revisionist literature has already helped rewrite the standard narrative of the postwar period in at least two crucial ways: these monographs discuss the movement as always being a national phenomenon, rather than one distinctly Southern and then discretely Northern. The explicit articulation of “black power” in the late 1960s and early 1970s is thus presented as a more explicitly militant iteration of the black freedom struggle rather than as a deviation from the civil rights movement. Such a presentation further challenges the dichotomous view of civil rights as noble and nonviolent, black power as vicious and violent. These contributions trace a constantly evolving movement targeting deeply entrenched structures of white supremacy in the politics, culture, economics, and values of the United States writ large. The manifestations of the black freedom struggle—its goals and strategies—shifted over time, and several of these studies have documented the nuances of these ebbs and flows. But this more fluid view of the black freedom struggle eschews rigid periodization in favor of an approach emphasizing change along a continuum of repression, imagination, and resistance.