Stephen Tuck. We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama

Abstract

This is a lively and lengthy synthesis of what Stephen Tuck calls the black freedom struggle, an account of African Americans' efforts from 1861 to 2009 to gain full rights and equal status in American life. The book gives the general reader an awareness that the black experience in America has always been about protest, that resistance to oppression began with the end of slavery, and that the civil rights movement of the 1960s was only a late phase of the persistent determination of African Americans to secure just treatment and a fair share of national opportunities. The popular terminology in academia for looking outside the Montgomery-to-Memphis narrative of black protest—from 1955 to 1968—is to explore the “long” civil rights movement, which usually means to investigate what happened after 1968 and sometimes to explore the time before 1955. Tuck's position seems to be that the long civil rights movement began at Fort Sumter and continued at least through Barack Obama's inauguration. It is a story of the persistent and often heroic efforts of African Americans to act on their own behalf.