Research on the Influence of the American Communist Front on the Civil Rights Movement After the 1960s

Reviewed by: The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will by Russell Brooker David T. Ballantyne The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will. By Russell Brooker. ( Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. xxx, 333. $100.00, ISBN 978-0-7391-7992-5.) Russell Brooker provides an accessible overview of the black freedom struggle from the Civil War to 1950. The American Civil Rights Movement, [End Page 771] 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will is a political science– influenced accompaniment to recent syntheses of the long black civil rights struggle, such as Stephen Tuck's We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), though Brooker's account ends before African Americans made their most significant gains. His central argument concerns "people of good will"—black and white individuals who acted in African Americans' interests regardless of their motives. Black agency and pressure, not altruism, he contends, induced this conduct. The first half of his synthesis maps black activism alongside the behavior of these people of good will from 1865 to the racial nadir of the early twentieth century. The second half traces the struggle to 1950, when the southern caste system was "severely weakened" (p. xviii). The book concludes with an epilogue that reflects on connections between 1865 and 1950 and contemporary race relations. Brooker enumerates his major arguments at the outset, organizes chapters clearly, and writes in straightforward prose. He also quantifies shifting African American fortunes throughout his account, including helpful tables detailing Reconstruction-era African American college foundations, lynchings by race during "Redemption," twentieth-century black and white southern schooling data, and indices of the extent of racial segregation over time. Breaking with Tuck's nationally focused account and other scholarship examining racial unrest outside the South, Brooker portrays the civil rights struggle as a mostly southern phenomenon. His nonsouthern treatment includes shifting northern public opinion on race throughout the period, nationwide post–World War I race riots, legal decisions concerning racially restrictive covenants, and the activities of northern civil rights organizations in the South, not elsewhere. Yet while the North was a "safe haven" for African Americans in comparison with the Jim Crow South, the American civil rights struggle concerned more than destroying southern racial apartheid (p. xxi). Incorporating scholarship that examines nonsouthern civil rights struggles and that questions the nonsouthern racial consensus around the mid-twentieth century—like Thomas J. Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008)—would bring nuance to Brooker's analysis and enable him to explain with greater authority the subsequent nationwide white reaction to race that he hints at in the epilogue. Closer engagement with more recent historiography would also strengthen Brooker's discussion. First, Brooker'suse of civil rights movement to define activism between 1865 and 1950 welcomes a consideration of recent debates over the periodization of the civil rights movement—relevant works include Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past" (Journal of American History, 91 [March 2005], 1233–63) and Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang's "The 'Long Movement' as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies" (Journal of African American History, 92 [Spring 2007], 265–88). Yet in Brooker'stelling, thisworkissimply "about the civil rights movement … before it [the term] got capitalized" (p. xii). Second, given the book's justifiable emphasis on the centrality of violence in infringing on black freedoms, recent military-focused Reconstruction scholarship [End Page 772] would offer a counterpoint to Brooker's argument on the use of force to preserve black rights. The book's later portion effectively details civil rights gains and organization through the 1940s. Though social, economic, intellectual, and political developments undoubtedly weakened Jim Crow segregation by midcentury, Brooker might have engaged with works that problematize the relationship between World War II–era and later civil rights activism, such as Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein's "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement" (Journal...

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

Reviewed by: To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement by P. Allen Krause Josh Parshall (bio) To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement. By P. Allen Krause with Stephen Krause, edited by Mark K. Bauman. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2016. xviii + 402 pp. At the 1966 convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in Toronto, Hebrew Union College rabbinical student P. Allen Krause interviewed thirteen acting or former rabbis of Reform congregations in southern cities about the civil rights movement. Although Krause wrote a thesis based on his interviews and published some of his findings [End Page 163] (stripped of identifying information about the interviewees) in the American Jewish Archives Journal, the recordings and other research materials were partially sealed for twenty-five years. To Stand Aside or Stand Alone makes these interviews widely available as transcripts for the first time. Rabbi Krause returned to historical research around the time of his retirement in 2008 and, with encouragement from historian and editor Mark Bauman, developed the now fifty-year-old interviews into a book project. After Krause died in 2012, his son Stephen worked with Bauman to finish the manuscript, which supplements the transcripts with biographical sketches and brief local histories by Rabbi Krause as well as introductions to the interviews by Bauman. Both the author and editor provide important contextual information in their introductions, and Bauman's bibliographic essay situates the newly available primary sources in relation to the historiography of southern Jews and African American civil rights. Krause's interviews follow a standard format. Each rabbi discusses the development of local civil rights activism, the reactions of the non-Jewish white community in comparison to the views of local Jews, white Christian clergy's responses to the challenges of civil rights, their own participation or lack thereof in local struggles, and their opinions about the actions of national Jewish groups and northern Jewish activists. The rabbis' responses vary according to the hostility with which white communities reacted to the prospect of desegregation and also according to their own activities. Krause labels more progressive environments "The Land of the Almost Possible" and the most reactionary cities "The Land of the Almost Impossible." While differences in local political climate greatly affected the availability of potential allies among white Christian clergy and white civic leaders, the interviews demonstrate that rabbis' political perspectives, personal experiences with race and racism, and strengths and weaknesses as religious leaders all affected the actions that they took (or did not take) in regard to civil rights. For the most part, the interviews represent the experiences and activities of moderate progressive rabbis, and (as Krause intended) the book establishes them as part of the liberal contingent of the white South. Some, such as James Wax in Memphis and William Silverman in Nashville, publicly supported African American civil rights and were well known throughout their local communities for their progressive attitudes. A larger number promoted desegregation from their pulpits and worked behind the scenes with ministerial and civic groups to support civil rights reforms. Only a few of the rabbis expressed strong reservations about desegregation or reported no concrete civil rights action. With a few interesting exceptions, then, the rabbis featured in the book deserve credit for helping to smooth the path of desegregation in [End Page 164] their respective locales, even if courts, the federal government, and direct action by local protesters played more significant roles. At the same time, many of the interviews encapsulate the moderate liberal viewpoints of the time, which often second-guessed activists' tactics; predicated the extension of civil and economic rights on black southerners' adherence to white, middle-class norms; and exhibited a strong sense of racial and class-based paternalism. As a result, the rabbis' testimonies reflect the complicated tensions among liberal white southerners' empathy for African Americans, their internalized acceptance of segregationist logics, and the various risks—social, economic, and bodily—that constrained would-be allies in the civil rights struggle. Their stories become useful not merely as tools for praising or critiquing southern Jews and their rabbis but also for understanding how...

Let us keep in mind that the Mexican-American can easily become the front-line of defense of the civil liberties of ethnic minorities. The racial, cultural, and historical involvements in his case embrace those of all of the other minority groups. Yet, God bless the law, he is white! So, the Mexican-American can be the wedge for the broadening of civil liberties for others (who are not so fortunate as to be white and Christian!). George I. Sanchez (1958) By embracing whiteness, Americans have reinforced the color line that has denied people of African descent full participation in American democracy. In pursuing White rights, Americans combined Latin American racialism with Anglo racism, and in the process separated themselves and their political agenda from the Black civil rights struggles of the forties and fifties. Neil Foley (1998) (1) THE HISTORY OF RACE AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH IS complex and exciting. The history of American civil rights is also promising, particularly so in regard to understanding the role of whiteness. Both selections above, the first from a American intellectual of the mid-twentieth century and the last a recently published statement from a historian of race and identity, are nominally about whiteness. But the historical actor and the historian discuss whiteness differently. The quotation from the 1950s advocates exploiting legal whiteness to obtain civil rights for both Americans and other minority groups. The one from the 1990s views such a strategy as inherently racist. The historical figure writes of Americans and African Americans cooperating in the pursuit of shared civil rights goals; the historian writes of the absence, the impossibility of cooperation due to American whiteness. This contrast is worth further consideration. This essay examines the American civil rights movement by focusing on the work and ideas of George I. Sanchez--a prominent activist and professor of education at the University of Texas--in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Sanchez is the most significant intellectual of what is commonly referred to as the Mexican American Generation of activists during this period. As a national president of the major American civil rights organization of the era, however, Sanchez's political influence within the American community was just as important as his intellectual leadership. Sanchez pondered notions of whiteness and actively employed them, offering an excellent case study of the making of American civil rights. (2) First, this work examines how Sanchez's civil rights efforts were vitally informed by an ideological perspective that supported gradual, integrationist, liberal reform, a stance that grew out of his activist research on African Americans in the South, Americans in the Southwest, and Latin Americans in Mexico and Venezuela. This New Deal ideological inheritance shaped Sanchez's contention that Americans were one minority group among many needing governmental assistance. Second, this liberal ideology gave rise to a nettlesome citizenship dilemma. During the Great Depression and World War II, Americans' strategic emphasis on American citizenship rhetorically placed them shoulder-to-shoulder with other U.S. minority groups. It also marginalized immigrant Mexicans. The significance of citizenship was controversial within the American community and coincided with the emergence of an aggressive phase of Americans' civil rights litigation that implemented a legal strategy based on their whiteness. Third, Sanchez's correspondence with Thurgood Marshall of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1940s and 1950s reveals early, fragmentary connections between the American and African American civil rights movements. All these topics address important interpretive debates about the role of whiteness. …

The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia

This chapter challenges the misappropriation of African American civil rights struggles by white LGBT advocates who present themselves as the victims of discrimination akin to that suffered by blacks, and, in the process, continue to marginalize the experiences of African Americans who are LGBT. Historically, pro-gay rights advocacy has reflected a racial ideology that invokes black civil rights symbols, political victories, and legal reforms, on the one hand, and elides contemporary black disadvantage and social inequality, on the other. The chapter shows how this “gay rights color blindness” deploys African American identity and civil rights history to advance a gay rights agenda in which black LGBT people are nowhere to be found and blackness, more generally, is marked as an identity whose civil rights aspirations have already been fulfilled.

30 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 84, NO. 1 84 No.1 GOOD TROUBLE: PIONEERING THE POWER OF PROTEST By Andrew Jezisek Introduction The right to protest is enshrined in the Constitution of the United States of America. It is the bedrock of democracy, granted to all citizens of the United States regardless of race, gender, or ethnicity. However, the power of protest has been employed by African Americans for generations. From the local level to the federal level and even on the world stage, African Americans have demonstrated the power of protest in order to forward their cause for social justice. Since the three Reconstruction Amendments were added to the US Constitution, African Americans have struggled for social change despite systemic and stigmatic obstacles at every turn. Nonetheless, they have steeled themselves by mobilizing alongside their allies in protests that have shaped the history of the United States of America. Blueprints for Action In 1954, the battle for integration began. The United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren struck down the “separate but equal” precedent established by the controversial Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896. The ruling in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education declared that school segregation policies directed against African Americans were unconstitutional.1 However, pro-segregation southern politicians had no intention of toeing the new line. A struggle between African Americans and white supremacists was inevitable. African American civil rights leaders such as John Lewis and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had a roadmap to the goal of equality drawn out. The vehicle to get to that ultimate goal was nonviolent civil disobedience as a form of protest. John Lewis, the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and future representative of Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, referred to this practice as getting into “good trouble.”2 Civil rights leaders planned to mobilize in activities that would potentially elicit legal penalties and violent retaliation. Marches, sit-ins, freedom rides, and boycotts were the manifestations of “good trouble.” Many of these nonviolent tactics had been implemented before the American Civil Rights Movement in countries that were colonized by large European empires. Most notably, India was led to independence from the British Empire in the 1940s by nonviolent protests spearheaded by Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s nonviolent movement gained a large following, especially from bystanders who witnessed the British’s violent opposition to the Indian Independence Movement.3 Drawing from the tactics of Gandhi, African American civil rights leaders such as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. reinvented the meaning of protest in the United States in order to overturn the Jim Crow status quo.4 “Good Trouble” in Practice Nonviolent protests by African Americans continued after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the establishment of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1956. Jim Crow was beginning to lose footing from 1956 to 1960 as boycotts and sit-ins organized by civil rights groups forced local communities to do away with segregation on buses and in businesses.5 These acts of nonviolent civil disobedience achieved success at the federal level after local efforts were successful. The Supreme Court declared segregated busing and segregated counters in businesses unconstitutional by 1960. Yet cities in states that ignored Supreme Court rulings on segregation, particularly Alabama, still enforced discriminatory laws.6 Additionally, African American votes were suppressed by pro-segregation politicians who sought to cling to both power and the past. As a result, the same tactics of participating in “good trouble” were employed against these more entrenched discriminatory policies. At every sit-in, every march, and every freedom ride, protestors were met with brute force from white supremacy. Alabama became a central battleground in the Civil Rights Movement as one of the most segregated states in the country, an assertion that was reinforced in 1963 by its newly elected governor, George Wallace, who proclaimed his oppositiontointegrationinhisinauguraladdress.Nonetheless, massive grassroots nonviolent protests were organized by the SCLC in Birmingham in April of 1963. As the protests persisted into May, the authorities in Birmingham drastically escalated their response; Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor allowed the police to arm themselves with nightsticks, fire hoses, and attack dogs...

Christina Greene. Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 384 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Kimberly Springer. Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. x + 228 pp. Appendices, notes, and index. $74.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper). It has been a challenge to get Americans to broaden their understanding of the civil rights movement, to see it as more than something that Martin Luther King, Jr., led and Malcolm X made more militant. Over the last few decades, however, a number of fine historians have made that task much easier by chronicling the extent to which the American civil rights movement was in fact driven by grassroots determination. As important, they added greater depth to the civil rights narrative by pointing out that without the never-ending and unglamorous work of African American women in particular, King and Malcolm X would have had little to promote. As Charles Payne put it bluntly, "Men led, but women organized."1 But, as it turns out, we still only know the half of it. Or so we realize when we delve into a new book by Christina Greene. While it is common for scholars to publish books that add depth to existing historical narratives, it is rare when they write something that deftly changes the way in which we must understand a historical moment itself. Greene has accomplished this feat in Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina. Greene's study carefully excavates the postwar history of Durham, North Carolina—a town in the South known more for its prestigious university than its civil rights legends. In going over Durham's postwar past with such a fine-tooth comb, Greene first and foremost introduces us to a city with a civil rights past whose richness clearly rivals that of the better known Greensboro and Montgomery. Far more importantly, however, Greene's study of the Bull City sheds completely new light on the origins as well as the nature of the [End Page 72] American civil rights movement and forces us to turn our own understandings of the same inside out. As this book makes clear, we should not include women in our analyses of the civil rights movement simply because they did the grunt work that allowed the men to make history. According to Greene, long before civil rights became the national cause associated with King and Malcolm X, women had already made a powerful civil rights movement. More to the point, their early activism, leadership, and courage created the militant community-based activist infrastructure that was necessary for a later mass movement to thrive. And when that mass movement did come of age, women's contributions "involved more than simply licking envelopes or running mimeograph machines it could and did frequently entail leadership" (p. 96). As Greene illustrates, well before the famed civil rights events such as King's incarceration in Birmingham or the desegregation of Little Rock made news, there was "a distinctly black female organizational base [that] provided the experiences that propelled women into a movement that would change irrevocably not only their lives, but the life of the nation" (p. 32). African American women's determination to break down racial barriers during and immediately after WW II allowed them to set the stage for, rather than merely respond to, landmark civil rights victories such as Brown v. Board (p. 49). During the 1940s and 1950s black women banded together to insist on representation in the YWCA, the League of Women Voters, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and local government positions that affected the well-being of Durham's entire African American population (p. 35). And...

They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Annual MeetingFull AccessNational Historic Site Offers Chance to Trace Footsteps of Martin Luther King Jr.Mark MoranMark MoranSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:17 Feb 2016https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2016.2b11AbstractAPA members wishing to tour the birth home of Martin Luther King Jr. will need to register at the information desk in Freedom Hall of the King Center.The birth home of Martin Luther King Jr. and the recently renovated Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King’s preaching helped ignite the civil rights movement, have given Atlanta prominence in the history of the American civil rights movement.Martin Luther King Jr. was born in an upstairs bedroom of this home at 501 Auburn Avenue in Atlanta on January 15, 1929. Reservations are required to tour the home.Aaron LevinAPA members attending this year’s Annual Meeting can visit the church and tour the home as part of a visit to the King Center, the largest repository of documents and memorabilia associated with the slain civil rights leader. It was established in 1968 by Coretta Scott King to be “no dead monument, but a living memorial filled with all the vitality that was his, a center of human endeavor, committed to the causes for which he lived and died.”The King Center is at the hub of the 23-acre National Historic Site, which welcomes some one million visitors each year. Free attractions include tours of King’s birth home and tomb, multiple exhibits, and a reflecting pool.The only place on the tour of the National Historic Site that requires reservations is the King home at 501 Auburn Avenue, where King was born on January 15, 1929. Together with his grandparents, parents, siblings, other family members, and boarders, King lived in the house in “Sweet Auburn”—the center of black Atlanta—for 12 years. The home may be visited only on tours led by a park ranger, filled on a first-come, first-served basis. The 30-minute tours, conducted hourly, begin at 10 a.m. and end at 5 p.m. and are limited to 15 people each. The rest of the King National Historic Site is self-guided, so no special arrangements are needed. There are several routes of public transportation that provide access to the park, but for APA members with access to a car, the King Center website offers the following directions for touring the site on foot: After parking in the visitors’ lot on Johns Wesley Dobbs Avenue, follow the Civil Rights Walk of Fame past the statue of Mahatma Gandhi and proceed to the Visitor Center. It is here that visitors can sign up for the Birth Home tour and check out “Children of Courage,” an exhibit that educates children about the civil rights movement. Upon exiting the Visitor Center, turn right to view the International World Peace Rose Garden. Ebenezer Baptist Church underwent renovation to restore the sanctuary and fellowship hall to their appearance in the 1960-68 period, when Martin Luther King Jr. served as co-pastor with his father.Aaron LevinFrom there, visitors can travel to the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church (Heritage Sanctuary) at the corner of Auburn Avenue and Jackson Street. Three generations of Kings served as pastors and co-pastors at Ebenezer—King’s maternal grandfather, the Rev. A.D. Williams, who became Ebenezer’s second pastor in 1893; King’s father, who served as Ebenezer’s pastor from 1933 until his retirement in 1975; and King himself, who was co-pastor in 1947 until he left to attend Crozer Theological Seminary in September 1948. King returned in 1960 and again served as co-pastor until his assassination in 1968. After leaving the church, visitors can proceed east on Auburn to enter the King Center’s outdoor campus, where they can view the crypt of King and his wife, the Eternal Flame, Freedom Walkway, and the reflecting pool. As visitors walk eastward along the pool to Freedom Hall, they can learn more about King.The King Center contains the King Library and Archives—the largest repository of primary source materials on the slain civil rights leader and the American civil rights movement in the world. The collection consists of King’s papers and those of the organization he co-founded, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as well as the records of eight major civil rights organizations and of several individuals active in the civil rights movement. The archives also include more than 200 oral history interviews with King’s teachers, friends, family, and civil rights associates.Several exhibits, including a photographic history of the lives of King and his wife and tribute rooms to Rosa Parks and Gandhi, can also be found in the King Center. ■For more information about the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, click here. To make an appointment at the Library and Archives, contact Cynthia Lewis at (404) 526-8983 or [email protected]. ISSUES NewArchived

On the Novel and Civic Myth

76 No.2 Understanding the Local Context of the Civil (lights MovementiUsing Service Learning to Develop an Oral History of Our Community By Robert Weldon Simmons III Growing up in Detroit as the son of a mother who attended Speiman College in Atlanta, I was keenly aware of the significance of the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the lives of African Americans. What's more, I was also aware of the links that the Civil Rights Movement had to Detroit. Noting the conversations that my mother had when describing life at Speiman during the late 1960s and my uncles discussing their experience watching Detroit burn during the 1967 social uprising (or riot, as some have suggested) on 12th and Claremont (walking distance from our family home), I knew that the local context of the Civil Rights Movement and the impact of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were often overshadowed by the bigger issues presented in various history textbooks in schools. Accordingly, I have worked with pre-service teachers and co-taught with teachers in middle and high schools to understand how service learning can be utilized to create oral history projects that focus on local communities. All discussions with students regarding the local context of the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 begin with reading from Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s.1 As my teacher education students read the text, they are amazed at the complexity of the Civil Rights Movement and the story behind the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Middle and high school students seem surprised to find that the struggle for freedom and justice wasn't just a "southern thing with people fighting against the Confederate flag," as suggested by one high school student. Exposure to readings that focus attention on the Civil Rights Movement in cities like Detroit, Chicago, Boston, or Gary, Indiana, as well as how the local community was impacted by the Civil 14 I BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN Vol. 76, No. 2 Rights Act of 1964, leaves students' eyes wide and their mouths open in amazement. As one student said to me in Detroit, "I didn't know we got down like that in the D." To him I said, "We sure did and still do." For students in grades 6-12 who don't find their cities located in the text, they routinely wonder, "What was happening here during that same time period?" Accordingly, I use this type of student curiosity as an opening to educate these students not only about the Civil Rights Movement, but about the work that was done during that era in their own cities. While I was studying the impact of service learning in urban schools in a school in the Midwest, I listened to "You Must Learn" by Boogie Down Productions with a group of African American students in a high school classroom.2 As the music played and the students nodded their heads and took notes on the historical names they recognized, I realized how little they knew about the personal narratives generated by everyday African Americans associated with the Civil Rights Movement. I tossed out a name of a local legend in the Civil Rights Movement and asked them to explain who this person was. Silence fell over the room. Certainly they knew of Rosa Parks sitting on the bus and Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, but they had little knowledge of their local community's participation in the Civil Rights Movement. As my co-teaching partner and I pondered our next series of lessons, we decided to co-construct them with our students. When we initially approached our students about developing a series of lessons focusing on the local context during the Civil Rights Movement, the students were confused. One student said, "Y'all think we know something about teaching?" My response was, "Perhaps you do, but you for sure know something about learning. Now tell me what you want to learn about as it relates to your local community and the Civil Rights Movement...

Image and Labor in a Longer, Broader Civil Rights Movement Kate Sampsell-Willmann (bio) Cornelius L. Bynum. A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. x + 244 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, and index. $75.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). Leigh Raiford. Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 293 pp. Photos, bibliography, notes, and index. $45.00. In the last decade, scholars have reconsidered the temporal span of the African American Civil Rights Movement (CRM): taken together, which moments of heroism and conscience are to be included in the “modern” CRM? Once considered to be tightly bracketed by the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., historians have erased that arbitrary end point, correctly extending the ongoing struggle for full political citizenship into the present. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s 2004 American Historical Association presidential address, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” is the landmark publication marking the shift.1 And although her essay and the efforts of other historians since have nominally encouraged lengthening the study of the organized movement to a place earlier in time than the 1950s, few have written in that temporal direction until recently. Fewer still have considered integrating unfettered economic participation as an essential element of full citizenship into the primary civil rights thesis. By including equal opportunity to economic justice in the panoply of civil rights and citizenship privileges, the date of the movement’s birth is easily stepped backwards in time. The books discussed here give an opportunity to extend formally, by a generation, the scope of the fully modern CRM, thus including economic opportunity as essential to civic engagement. In doing so, they also examine the classification used by authors to delineate where the timeline should begin. Cornelius Bynum’s A. Philip Randolph and the Struggle for Civil Rights seeks (beginning in its colorblind title) to reverse Randolph’s exclusion from the A-list of civil rights heroes. A. Philip Randolph is perhaps the least explored of [End Page 492] the civil rights titans and is usually dismissed as the “vanguard” or “father” of the modern CRM, someone standing outside and prior, representing more “freedom struggle” than “civil rights.” Yet, as Bynum successfully establishes, Randolph was much more than the figurehead named honorary chair of the 1963 March, the vocal Messenger editor, or the footnoted organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph was a political ideologue whose leadership is especially relevant in the present atmosphere of race, labor, and Republican Party agenda. (This is relevant especially in that Party’s attempt to redefine the notion of “civil rights” from one of King’s pursuit of access to society’s segregated spaces to one more about Glenn Beck’s individualistic rationale for avarice2). The freedom to organize peacefully, engage in collective action, and demand economic fairness is also a civil right. Why are Randolph’s contributions relegated to the prehistory of civil rights, even though one of his major triumphs preceded by only seven years Rosa Parks’ brave refusal to vacate her seat? Randolph’s invisibility might be explained by his 100 percent, unapologetic, no-holds-barred embrace of socialism; yet, he was also, to the same degree (after early flirtation with the doctrine), an anticommunist. “Socialist” is today’s easy epithet used to smear others with a stench of un-American behavior, not unlike McCarthy-era accusations of communism. Randolph remained committed to socialism as the path to economic justice for all workers throughout his life, but he saw no value in communism to help American workers. Perhaps because of his inconvenient ideological commitment, or perhaps because he initially pursued a colorblind approach to economic justice, Randolph is conspicuously absent from the modern civil rights pantheon (as is Bayard Rustin, who, despite convincing King to employ active nonviolence, was inconveniently homosexual). Bynum’s A. Philip Randolph is divided into four sections based on Randolph’s intellectual progression from his childhood, riding the circuit with his minister father; to his move to Harlem in 1911; to the era...

murder of the African American teenager Emmett Till in 1955 and the acquittal of his confessed murderers constitute watershed events in the American Civil Rights movement whose legacy continues into the present. Many people can vividly recall their first viewing of Emmett Till's postmortem picture, which shows a bloated and disfigured body lying in an open casket or on the coroner's slab, and cite it as a consciousness-altering moment in their lives. power of those images and the story leading up to them continues into the present. In a 2004 press release in which the Department of Justice announced the reopening of the nearly 20-year-old case, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, R. Alexander Acosta, is quoted as having stated, The Emmett Till case stands at the heart of the American civil rights movement ... This brutal murder and grotesque miscarriage of justice outraged a nation and helped galvanize support for the modern American civil rights movement. We owe it to Emmett Till, and we owe it to ourselves, to see whether after all these years, some additional measure of justice remains possible (USDOJ). remarkable feature of the Emmett Till case-sadly not the only incident of a racially motivated murder in the Jim Crow South-is its visibility. Indeed, the visual accessibility of the multiple stages in this case-from the body's discovery to its burial to its deliberate and disturbing display at the funeral, and extending even to its virtual visibility in a Mississippi courtroom-set this episode in the history of civil rights agitation apart from others. As this article will demonstrate, the exceptional invocation of the power of the visual in this event illustrates a key concept in play on both sides of the civil rights argument-namely, how the mechanics of visual recognition are central to a concept of humanity. This article examines three major sites wherein Emmett Till's body was figured as a spectacle-the funeral home/morgue, the funeral, and the trial. Taking into account how each of these venues might position the spectator in a specific way, the article analyzes how issues of distortion and misrecognition are negotiated in relation to an overarching notion of humanity. As I will demonstrate, these visually oriented events derive their power in part by appealing to the same rhetorical and ideological features of traditional memorial photography, the memento mori's Nevertheless, in the representation of a disfigured body, the spectator's visual encounter is significantly different than that of the memento mori's viewer. In this case the visible dead body not only instructs the spectator on issues of mortality but also illustrates the sometimes frustrating relationship between mortality and justice. Without denying that the images in the Emmett Till case-especially the images of his dead body-are powerful because they are perceived as supplying documentary evidence of a brutal act, this article asserts that the spectacle of Till's body is rooted in a visual aesthetic and ideology other than realism. This nonrealist logic is an essential misrecognition required by the concept of humanity. spectacles and images of Till's body accomplish their political work by situating an unrecognizable body that is, nevertheless, recognized by the spectator as human into a narrative of human suffering. After assessing the effect produced by visually beholding the human body, this article concludes with the site in which the acts of recognition and narration are made fundamentally political-the courtroom. A series of image-centered events punctuated the Emmett Till lynching, funeral, and trial of 1955. Several elements of the story of Till's murder have been contested, including how many people were involved in the actual abduction and murder (the case has been recently reopened in hopes of resolving these questions); however, the crux of the story is that 14-year-old Emmett Louis Till of Chicago, IL, was visiting his great-uncle Moses Wright, a share cropper, and other relatives in Mississippi on a summer vacation. …

(2000). The Life Magazine Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore 1958–1965. Journalism History: Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 126-139.