Southern Christian Leadership Conference Research Articles

“Each One, Teach One”

Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987) is one of the masterminds behind the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968). Clark frequently employed proverbs, and proverbial expressions as she worked diligently behind the scenes teaching literacy to the poor and disenfranchised so that they would be able to register themselves to vote and take part in political decision-making processes that impacted their lives daily. Clark’s autobiographies, interviews, and other biographical materials largely illustrate that proverbial language helped Clark to connect to people. Proverbial language also helped Clark to communicate important values, beliefs, and pedagogical philosophy. The adult literacy programs that Clark developed fueled the voting registration drives of several important organizations including: Highlander Folk School, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). This essay highlights some of the proverbial language that Clark used as she helped to shape the Civil Rights Movement.

From the Ashes of the Old: The Old Left and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1957–1965

How did the “Old Left”—the socialist milieu of the 1930s and 1940s—shape the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s? Focusing on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), this article examines several mechanisms of Old Left influence: personnel overlap, network ties, and organizational alliances. New findings on the Old Left backgrounds of Rev. Joseph Lowery, C. T. Vivian, and many of Martin Luther King Jr.’s teachers and friends are presented. The support that SCLC received from “red” labor unions is also highlighted. The picture that emerges is not the elaborate Communist conspiracy imagined by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI but rather a transfer of skills, money, and ideas that strengthened SCLC and influenced its strategic agenda. However, the repression and stigmatization of the Old Left during the Cold War led many SCLC activists to hide or downplay their connections to the socialist movement, which has distorted both popular and scholarly understanding of the civil rights movement.

Hosea Williams: A Lifetime of Defiance and Protest by Rolundus R. Rice

Reviewed by: Hosea Williams: A Lifetime of Defiance and Protest by Rolundus R. Rice Anthony Siracusa Hosea Williams: A Lifetime of Defiance and Protest. By Rolundus R. Rice. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xviii, 394. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-64336-257-1; cloth, $89.99, ISBN 978-1-64336-256-4.) In his biography of Hosea Williams, Rolundus R. Rice documents the man Martin Luther King Jr. relied on as a field organizer in key campaigns throughout the 1960s. Rice’s telling is largely a favorable one, arguing that Williams’s “campaigns helped to create and maintain pressure on the White House, Congress, and the federal courts, and [that] the resulting legislation and court rulings did more to topple the barriers of Jim Crow in a relatively brief period than anything in the century since emancipation and Reconstruction” (pp. 3–4). But Rice rightly balances this description of Williams by calling him a “a con man with convictions,” noting that Williams described himself as neither a conservative nor a liberal but an “opportunist” (p. 297). Chapters 1 and 2 focus on Williams’s early life and career, while the third chapter recounts his leadership in the Savannah freedom movement of the early 1960s. It was in Savannah that Williams introduced the “night marches,” a mass mobilization tactic designed to place additional pressure on local white power structures (p. 71). Williams’s work in Savannah put him on the radar of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and chapters 4–7 focus on his work with King’s organization. This section of the book is built around an analysis of Williams’s leadership of the 1964 campaign in Selma, Alabama. Notably, King told Williams to call off the famous “Bloody Sunday” march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but Williams and his colleague John Lewis went ahead with the plan after fellow SCLC staffer James Bevel deceived them into thinking that King had changed his mind. The book breaks new ground in covering Williams’s work after King’s death in 1968, most notably Williams’s role in the Poor People’s Campaign, which took him to Charleston, South Carolina, Daytona Beach, Florida, and Columbus, Georgia. Williams criticized King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, for “prostituting” her husband’s legacy by fund-raising for the King Center in Atlanta in the years after his death (p. 238). But this tension between Coretta Scott King and Williams is not sufficiently explored in the book, with Rice instead opting to let Williams’s words tell the story. This approach reveals a larger problem, as Rice does little to explain how sex and gender influenced the movement, Williams, or male senior SCLC staff members. [End Page 187] Numerous scholars of the movement have chronicled Ella Baker’s discontent and resignation from the SCLC after serving as co-founder and president, as well as the fact that King kept his family in near poverty throughout his public life. His choice to split the more than $54,000 he received for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 among civil rights groups, and other similar choices, inflicted real hardship on his wife and children—challenges that became acute when King was murdered in Memphis. Such context would have been helpful in presenting Williams’s demeaning comments about King’s widow, and the absence of a deeper analysis of sex and gender dynamics in the book—just like the absence of women in positions of leadership at the SCLC—is notable. The last portion of the book is dedicated to Williams’s life as an elected official. In 1974, Williams was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, where he served ten years before leaving that office and running—successfully—for chair of the Atlanta city council in 1985. Williams then won a DeKalb County commission seat in 1990 before retiring from politics in 1994, a fitting end to a career defined by a passion for political education and voter mobilization. At 325 pages, the book is detailed in its treatment of a figure central to the heroic era of the civil rights movement, and it is helpful as a resource for understanding the...

The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture by Deanna M. Gillespie

Reviewed by: The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture by Deanna M. Gillespie Evan Faulkenbury The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture. By Deanna M. Gillespie. Southern Dissent. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2021. Pp. xviii, 260. $95.00, ISBN 978-0-8130-6694-3.) Across Savannah, Georgia, in 1963, Black women educated community members about taking collective action against Jim Crow. Cassie Pierce led discussions that tackled current issues, noting, “The project has . . . awakened the individuals that were asleep and caused interest and understanding” (p. 89). Another teacher, Daisy P. Jones, similarly observed in her students how the material covered “changed [a student’s] attitude toward voting and helping his people and himself instead of always kowtowing to someone” (p. 89). And another instructor, Dorothy Boles, found that after Black men and women took citizenship classes, “They walk, talk, and act like new people with determination and more courage to face the future” (p. 89). Stories like these populate historian Deanna M. Gillespie’s important book, The Citizenship Education Program and Black Women’s Political Culture. Gillespie focuses on the history of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP), which originated in 1957 and ended in 1970. The CEP, Gillespie argues, was a vital, though underappreciated, component of the Black freedom movement [End Page 184] in the South. According to Gillespie, “Everyone and no one knew about CEP classes,” because they were such a regular part of Black community life across the American South (p. 3). As a result, the CEP has remained in the background of the historiography of the movement. In CEP classes, Black men and women learned how to read, write, advocate, vote, and participate in a democracy. In so doing, the CEP “contributed to the groundswell for social justice” (p. 2). The CEP first took shape in the South Carolina Lowcountry during the late 1950s. Teachers received training at the Highlander Folk School and brought their knowledge, handbooks, and course materials to local communities. They led classes in churches, community centers, and beauty salons, with a staggering amount of local interest. Students learned how government functioned, how they could get involved in political life, what they could do to maximize their citizenship capability, and how best to use their individual and collective voices to decry the racial caste system. In 1961, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took over from Highlander to administer the CEP. Operating throughout the South, the CEP, its teachers, and its students laid the groundwork for local civil rights movements in many communities. “This was subversive work in the Jim Crow South,” as Gillespie writes, “because reading, writing, and calculating was empowering” (p. 2). Drawing on oral histories, administrative files, attendance records, narrative CEP meeting reports, and other primary sources, Gillespie reconstructs this behind-the-scenes history of the civil rights movement. She focuses on several case studies from the states where the CEP was most active, including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The chapters trace the CEP’s growth, impact, and eventual decline during the late 1960s as monetary contributions dwindled and momentum shifted. But even though the program remained in the background and ended with little fanfare, Gillespie shows why we must take the CEP into account when we consider the sweep of the Black freedom struggle in the South. She quantifies the program’s impact: between 1961 and 1970, the CEP cultivated 2,349 teachers who taught 7,280 classes with an enrollment of 26,686 people. Women like Cassie Pierce, Daisy P. Jones, and Dorothy Boles were crucial to the success of not only the CEP but also the larger civil rights movement. By advertising their services, gathering around tables, teaching neighbors how to fill out forms, and informing them about their rights as citizens, these Black women sustained the movement. Gillespie’s book does their story justice. Evan Faulkenbury SUNY Cortland Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism by Nicholas T. Pruitt

Reviewed by: Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism by Nicholas T. Pruitt Kristofer Allerfeldt Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism. By Nicholas T. Pruitt. (New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 296. $45. ISBN: 9781479803545). When we encounter Protestantism in the US immigration debates of the early to mid-20th century, it is usually backing up Nordic supremacy and anti-Catholicism. In this context, Protestantism equates with nativism and restriction. This book argues that as well as fuelling anti-immigrant sentiments, over the 40 years between the harsh quotas of 1924 and their overturning in 1965, moderate, mainline, Protestant activists played a leading role in promoting religious and racial tolerance and multi-culturalism. When Pruitt calls his subjects “mainline”, he’s referring to “a collective label applied to numerically predominant, largely white denominations driven by ecumenism.” Their Protestantism was driven by “home missions, mid-century sensibilities, and internationalist views . . . to confront long-standing racial prejudice . . . and incorporate diverse immigrant groups into their churches” (p. 3). Driven by humane theoretical and practical responses to the refugee crisis of the 1930s, WWII, de-colonisation and the Cold War, they were highly instrumental in dismantling restrictions on both European and Asian migration. One of the central themes of the book is the irony that the cultural pluralism inherent in opening US borders to increased diversity was the inevitable decline in the influence of Protestantism itself. Yet, as Pruitt points out Protestantism retained its key role in defining the national identity, even as its authority seemed to wane. The shift in Anglo-Protestantism’s leadership from cultural, racial and religious gatekeepers to staunch advocates of E Pluribus Unum reflected, reinforced and drove the post-war Liberal consensus. Yet as Pruitt also points out, this was not necessarily the stance of the rank and file. He cites a Harris poll taken in 1965. On the eve of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which largely did away with the discriminatory quotas of the 1920s, 65% of American Protestant Americans objected to any increase in immigrant numbers. This thinking highlights—to my mind—one big gap in the book’s coverage of the declining influence of Anglo-Protestantism. If white Protestantism lost authority [End Page 218] over these years, the influence of African-American Protestantism powered ahead. Yet, this is barely mentioned. There is some attention paid to Mexican and Latin American immigration and migration. There is some commentary on Asian immigrants and Asian Americans. This is in spite of the fact that more than two-thirds of African Americans still identify as Protestant—and the figure for the period of the study was undoubtedly higher—their influence is largely skated over. It is also important because although church attendance generally declined over these years, that trend was slower in Black churches than in white. This is an anomaly. For if, as Pruitt argues, Anglo-Protestantism’s liberalism cost it influence, Black Protestantism’s humane stance made it far more visible and powerful, far more important, both within its own communities and on the national stage. Not only were Black churches and Black ministers vital to first the defense, then advance of civil rights, but they also formed crucial communal links in the continuing Great Migration from the Deep South. There is no analysis of liberal Protestantism’s failure to support federal anti-lynching measures, or the Federal Council of Churches for Christ’s (FCC) and National Council of Churches’ failure to make any significant inroads into integration. Professor Pruitt makes no mention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. While these are not immigration policy matters, they do show that vaunted ideals of racial equality only went so far. This omission is serious, but in general, this is a keenly observed book. It is richly researched and clearly—if densely—written. It represents a vital counterargument and revision of the standard narrative of nativism and its reverse in the twentieth century. I will certainly order a copy for Exeter University’s library. Kristofer Allerfeldt University of Exeter Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press ...

Of Movements and Markets: Religious Competition and the Problem of Black Church Relevance

Why do cross-denominational public religious movements such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference appear, despite the market-like competitive behavior of churches? Religious economy theory offers one set of explanations, based on a supply-side approach to the dynamics of numeric religious growth and decline. Namely, ecumenical movements are engaged by denominations, or religious firms, in membership decline. The history of national Black ecumenical movements, however, points to ways that religious economic theorizing fails to account for the multiple modes of social consciousness regarding church survival that motivate institutional religious activity. Black churches have existed not merely as a market but as a field where market consciousness transforms into movement consciousness at historic moments of perceived political opportunity. At such moments, unified public religious action on behalf of “the people” is understood as more important than the competitive dominance of individual firms in a private religious market.

The Underlying Role of Christianity in Political and Social Reform During the Civil Rights Movement as Exhibited by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

The Underlying Role of Christianity in Political and Social Reform During the Civil Rights Movement as Exhibited by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Second Emancipation Proclamation: Reimagining Prudence through Commemoration

AbstractThis essay examines Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign for President John F. Kennedy to issue a second emancipation proclamation, which involved a series of public speeches delivered across the nation from 1961 through 1963 as well as a 60-page Appeal memorandum composed for Kennedy by Southern Christian Leadership Conference lawyers. King challenged Kennedy’s conservative, accommodating understanding of prudence by harnessing the inventional resources of Civil War centennial commemoration, folding together the past and present to offer a vision of audacious presidential leadership. Examination of this historical moment provides insight into how commemoration creates kairotic opportunities for advocates of social change to renegotiate prudence and call forth new, bolder forms of political action.

“The Thin Veneer of the North’s Racial Self-Righteousness” Martin Luther King Jr.’s Challenge to Northern Racism

Abstract Across his adult life, Martin Luther King Jr. underlined the national character of racism and challenged northern liberals to press for change at home, not just the South. Yet this aspect of his thinking has been sidelined in most treatments of the civil rights leader, which frame King turning to the North only after the 1965 Watts rebellion. A closer examination reveals that, from the beginnings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King highlighted school and housing segregation, job discrimination, and police brutality in the North, stood with northern struggles, and called out the hypocrisies of northern liberalism for ignoring local injustice. King underlined the necessity for disruptive tactics, criticized liberal allies who decried them, and repeatedly faced reproach for it. Underscoring the crucial role law enforcement played in maintaining northern injustice, he stood with anti-police brutality movements, demanded civilian complaint review boards to provide essential oversight, challenged the tendency to cast Black behavior as the problem, and pointed to the criminality of the state. And over and over, he insisted that the story did not begin with the uprisings of the mid-1960s but with the long history of injustice and frustrated Black struggle in the North that preceded them.

Good Trouble: Pioneering the Power of Protest

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...

Red Squads and Black Radicals: Reading Agency in the Archive

Abstract Scholarly accounts of racial formation have regularly focused on the role of state actors or non-state oppressive subjects administering racial systems against a dominated population. Challenges or resistance to state racialization practices by dissenting communities, on the other hand, have not received commensurate engagement, particularly at the level of race-making. Judith Weisenfeld demonstrates in New World A-Coming that African American religious movements such as the Moorish Science Temple of America and the Peace Mission were not merely protesting a racial system but also inventing new racial subjectivities. This account of Black radical agency is deeply consequential for understanding the religious dimensions of Black radical politics and the agential architecture of racialization. In this article, I apply Weisenfeld’s method of mapping radical agency from the underside of state archives. The focus is on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Chicago campaign of 1966 and the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) that culminated in the summer of 1968. I argue that Black radical activists, despite being targeted by counterintelligence operations of law enforcement, nevertheless transformed the politics of race and power with lasting consequences by exceeding in specific ways the efforts of state actors to destroy Black liberation projects. The archival records of state entities themselves render the import of Black agency. This implies, among other things, that scholarship on Black religion and racialization broadly must shift significantly to account for a central argument of Weisenfeld’s book: dominated peoples have been agents of racial histories and not merely objects of racial governance.

Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football by Derrick E. White

Reviewed by: Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football by Derrick E. White Thomas Aiello Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football. By Derrick E. White. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. [xiv], 303. $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5244-3.) While Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference were winning civil rights victories, Alonzo “Jake” Gaither and his Florida A&M University football team were winning championships. Derrick E. White’s Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football demonstrates that while the latter might not be the equivalent of the former, sporting success was not inconsequential in the [End Page 530] era of the civil rights movement. White makes his case through a description of “sporting congregations,” emanating from “the faith in Black-controlled athletics for the betterment of the university and the community” (p. 9). These secular mirrors of the bodies led by ministers like King reflected the push for quantifiable achievement and for improved educational institutions. The successful black college football programs that those congregations supported also demonstrated the tensions between a desire for the structural benefits of integration without the sacrifice of cultural autonomy that typically came with it. White describes football’s role in and representation of such dilemmas by telling the story of Gaither, who grew up in the upper South in the early twentieth century and attended Knoxville College during the 1920s. He joined the coaching staff of Florida A&M the following decade, eventually became the program’s head coach and athletic director, and served at the helm of one of history’s most successful football programs during the volatile civil rights era, winning seven national titles while King and his congregations were winning victories of their own. Gaither and his Florida A&M team are perfect vehicles for White’s narrative, as they were on the tip of the spear for the potential costs involved with integration. To build his congregation, Gaither’s program graduated future high school coaches and placed them around Florida. He created a system whereby segregated education served as a pipeline to athletic and academic success for generations of students. It was a system that collapsed under the weight of integration, so when Gaither balked at some of integration’s dictates, some saw him as part of the problem. The Black Power movement was no more charitable, seeing Gaither as a comfortable middle-class power broker who benefited from the racial status quo. That criticism was not entirely unjust, but White’s narrative makes it clear that the story was far more complicated. After all, “[Florida A&M] spent the last three decades of the twentieth century chasing Gaither’s coaching legend” (p. 222). Such chasings were not the result of incompetence in hiring or coaching. As white universities in the South sought integration to feather their own athletic nests, the attendant media story of triumph often hid the erosion of those historically black college and university (HBCU) programs that were so central to White’s “sporting congregations.” In other words, Gaither’s wariness proved prescient. White also uses Gaither and Florida A&M to tell the much broader tale of the rise and fall of HBCU athletics, the ancillary casualties of the push for integration, and the role of racial assumptions in state educational funding and sports media priorities in the creation of hierarchies, which always gave preference to whiteness but at the same time left space for the creation of legitimate and meaningful black sporting congregations. And though Florida A&M is the principal subject of the book, the congregations at Morgan State University, Grambling State University, Tennessee State University, and Southern University all play a role in the narrative. White’s story is not a hagiographic one of triumph that sometimes enters the genre of sport history. The ebbs and flows of Florida A&M’s success, and the racial and representational reasons for such movements, are incredibly instructive for anyone [End Page 531] interested in either black college athletics...

Remembering Dorothy Cotton, 1930–2018

Civil rights pioneer Dorothy Foreman Cotton passed away on June 10, 2018, in Ithaca, New York, at the age of eighty-eight. On August 11, 2018, a Saturday afternoon, around seven hundred community members, friends, and local and national leaders gathered at Cornell University’s Bailey Hall to celebrate her life. Cotton was the highest-ranking woman in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) throughout the 1960s. She devoted her life to liberation and social justice. Remembered by many as an iconic feminist and grassroots innovator, she led an extraordinary life that undoubtedly transformed the lives of African Americans fighting for full citizenship and justice. Cotton was critical in opposing economic and social regimes of power, but she also ushered in a new sense of individual and collective subjectivity through political participation and mobilization in southern Black communities. Throughout her life, she reminded ordinary people of their vast power to effect change and transform society.

Nevertheless, They Persisted: Black Women and the Fire Within Them

12 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 82, NO 2 82 No.2 November 1968. Four years later, she launched a presidential bid that, though unsuccessful, received national attention and support. Since then, more than seventy women of color have been elected to Congress, including Carol Mosely Braun, the first Black woman elected to the Senate, in 1993 (and only the second Black senator since the Reconstruction era). It is important to note that after close to a hundred years of political mobilizing and activism, Black women are still not fully represented in Congress, and this country has never elected a Black woman to serve as the governor of a state or the president of the country. Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement The years 1954-1972, more commonly known as the modern Civil Rights Movement, were a time when Black people increased their effort and pressure to force the government to end segregation, both in theory and in practice.6 As they were during the antislavery movement of the nineteenth century, Black women were instrumental in the success of the Civil Rights Movement. Although their contributions and struggles may not be a part of the greater discussions, they must be noted and recognized in order to gain a true understanding of the role women played to advance the cause of civil rights.7 Though there are a number of Black women from the Civil Rights Movement who could (and should) be profiled—Ada Sipuel, Diane Nash, and Gloria Richardson immediately come to mind8 —this paper will specifically narrow the scope to look at those women whose contributions to strengthening the political power of the Black community were so extensive that any civil rights conversation that does not include them is not accurate, complete, or exact. These women, in a sense, are the lenses through which one can see how the Civil Rights Movement was shaped and nurtured by the commitment and contributions of Black women, as a whole. Two of the women, Dorothy I. Height and Coretta Scott King, are familiar names, but their contributions to the Civil Rights Movement may not be as well-known as they should be.9 The other three, Ella Jo Baker, Septima Poinsette Clark, and Fannie Lou Hamer, are names that may not be as familiar, but their contributions must be included (evaluated and critiqued) in the greater discussion about the Civil Rights Movement.10 Ella Jo Baker EllaJosephineBaker(December13,1903–December13,1986) worked as a field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), acting executive director for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and mentor for the students who founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).11 Born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1903, Baker was the granddaughter of slaves, and thedaughterofawaiterandateacher.In1927,afterchallenging school policies and procedures, she graduated at the top of her class from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and moved to New York City. She quickly became involved in the struggle for Black political and economic equality and later joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League (YNCL). One year later, she was elected as the league’s first national director. In 1941, Baker began working as the assistant field secretary for the NAACP. Two years later she was promoted (without her NEVERTHELESS, THEY PERSISTED: BLACK WOMEN AND THE FIRE WITHIN THEM Examining the Legacies of Ella Jo Baker, Septima Poinsette Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dorothy Irene Height, and Coretta Scott King By: Karsonya Wise Whitehead “Too long have we been silent under unjust and unholy charges; we cannot expect to have them removed until we disprove them through ourselves.” —Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin1 Black women have historically been actively involved in political and social action. From voter registration to community activism, they have effectively organized from within and on behalf of the community. During the early days of the Women’s Movement, even though their participation was not always included in the history books, they were at the meeting tables helping to organize, fundraise, and demonstrate for change.2 They fought multiple battles, including working to end American enslavement and working to establish the right to vote for Black people. When the Civil War ended...

Apollo in the Age of Aquarius by Neil Maher

Reviewed by: Apollo in the Age of Aquarius by Neil Maher Martin J. Collins (bio) Apollo in the Age of Aquarius. By Neil Maher. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 368. Hardcover $29.95. Reflecting on the 1960s, author Joan Didion wondered whether a new historical condition had emerged in which connections among events were proliferating, binding the large-scale to the small, the central to peripheral, the meaningful to the nonsensical. In short, the very notion of agency, of what related to what, with what consequence, loomed as ever more challenging to trace or assess. Neil Maher enters onto this terrain with his critically thoughtful, exhaustively researched Apollo in the Age of Aquarius. Apollo here references the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) signature spaceflight program of the 1960s and early 1970s to land a "man" on the Moon and return him safely. Age of Aquarius points to the period's key and overlapping activist grassroots social and political movements: civil [End Page 640] rights, women's rights, the environment, and the opposing politics of the New Left and the New Right. Maher's main objective is to analyze and detail the consequential interplay between these two domains, between the "squares" and those who saw the square outlook, embodied by NASA, as blinkered to everyday realities of racial and gender discrimination, capitalism, and human impact on the environment. The key flashpoint in this interplay was the Moon mission: its vast expense, its masculine and rationalist bravado, its embodiment of traditional social hierarchies, its integration into the priorities of the Cold War state made it an outsize foil for the new activism. National priorities, allocation of resources, dominant structures of value, and the entire social fabric were at stake. By the early 1970s such confrontation, Maher argues, reshaped NASA's sense of mission and, in turn, recast the discourse and actions of these various movements. Indeed, the relationship to NASA, in different ways and degrees for each movement, became symbiotic. The historiographic rationale for this framing is that NASA-centric scholarship has tended to give inadequate attention to that institution's broader impact on American cultural life (a claim less true in recent years) and, inversely, that the histories of 1960s social movements have missed the importance of NASA and spaceflight to those movements' development and agendas. This is, then, a story about historical agency in the 1960s, seeking to complicate our understanding of the circuits of power and change—and to query scholarly interpretations on the broader meaning and impact of the period. It is toward this end that Maher characterizes his effort not as cultural or social history but political history (p. 9). With this positioning, Maher provides chapter treatments of the movements for civil rights, the environment, women, and the New Right (juxtaposed with the New Left), exploring for each their interactions with NASA, spaceflight, and the larger frame of Cold War science and technology. In the main, these chapters are tours de force. The narrative is lively and often elegant, richly detailed, and draws on research from a wide range of archives and media (cartoons, ephemera, songs. alternative newspapers, and more). Familiar events and actors abound (The Poor People's Campaign, Woodstock, Stewart Brand), enriched with new insight and interpretation; as do a host of less well-known events and actors. For example, in the chapter "Spaceship Earth: Civil Rights and NASA's War on Poverty", Maher deftly unpacks the relationship between Southern Christian Leadership Conference's president Reverend Ralph Abernathy and NASA. It arced from a dramatic confrontation with NASA Administrator Thomas Paine at the Apollo 11 launch over the moral fecklessness of funding trips to the Moon as the basic needs of African Americans became more urgent (a pre-echo of Gil Scott Heron's 1970 song "Whitey on the Moon") to NASA applying "high-tech" to urban problems such as the need for energy efficient buildings. Such telling vignettes are multiplied throughout [End Page 641] the book. Perhaps the strongest material is that on the NASA/environmental movement relationship (not surprising given Maher's prior well-regarded work on the history of environmentalism), in which NASA's post-Apollo commitment to...

Grounding the Space Race

On July 15, 1969, while more than one million space enthusiasts flocked to Florida's Cape Canaveral to celebrate the final countdown of the Apollo 11 launch the following day, a less festive gathering took place just a few miles away in an empty field outside the western gate of the Kennedy Space Center. On one side of the clearing stood NASA's chief, Thomas O. Paine, with several space agency administrators, while at the other end waited the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) president, Ralph Abernathy, with twenty-five poor African American families, four scruffy mules pulling two rickety wagons, and, much to Paine's dismay, a phalanx of newspaper reporters and television news crews. When Abernathy's group began slowly marching hand-in-hand singing “We Shall Overcome,” Paine and his entourage walked forward to meet them in the middle of the field. Abernathy then took a microphone, nodded toward the Apollo 11 rocket towering in the distance, and explained that his Poor People's Campaign had not traveled to the cape to protest the Apollo launch, but instead to demonstrate against the country's distorted sense of national priorities. “I want NASA scientists,” he explained to the gathered press, “to tackle problems we face in society”.

The Evolution of Identity Politics

The Evolution of Identity Politics

FRAMING THE FIELD: THE CASE OF THE 1969 CHARLESTON HOSPITAL WORKERS' STRIKE*

We investigate how union, employer and allied actors engage in framing contests and seek to gain the upper hand in a strike event by analyzing a historically significant labor and civil-rights struggle in the 1969 hospital workers' strike in Charleston, South Carolina against the Medical College of South Carolina (MCSC). Through an analysis of newspapers, interviews, and archival materials, we show how discursive tactics by multiple actors superseded worker messages over the 100-day event. Worker messages, dignity and union recognition, competed with their ally's, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), messages of poverty and civil rights as well as claims from MCSC. The workers' weakened position within this multi-actor field and limited salience of union claims served to gradually silence worker voices, shaping the protest campaign in important ways. Our findings underscore the importance of power and inequality in the framing of social conflict.

The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North

In 1966 Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) shifted their focus above the Mason-Dixon line to Chicago. For the next year, they and their allies spotlighted racial discrimination—in particular, housing inequality—in what they called the Chicago Freedom Movement (CFM). Over five sections and twenty-one chapters The Chicago Freedom Movement attempts to restore to the historical narrative this largely dismissed dimension of the national black freedom movement and to challenge the previous “gloomy assessment[s]” of the CFM as “a failure” (p. 93). The first sections of this encyclopedic volume discuss the prelude to the CFM, narrate its major activities, and assess how it has been remembered. “In Their Own Voices” applies activist and participant oral histories to recount 1966 efforts, including the Union to End Slums tenant organizing effort, a rally at Soldier Field, and open-housing marches in Gage Park and Marquette Park. Christopher Robert Reed's chapter provides an overview of black Chicago history before the CFM, deeming it a “logical” extension of the “long fight for full citizenship rights extending back to abolitionist-era Chicago” (p. 109). James R. Ralph Jr.'s historiographical chapter summarizes scholars' negative portrayals of the CFM, which emphasize the lack of enforceable concessions that it won. Ralph concludes that scholars' renewed attention to black power activism is “unlikely” to “draw greater attention to the Chicago Freedom Movement” due to its “interracialism and nonviolent discipline” (p. 88).

Building a “Dwelling Place” for Justice: Ethos Reinvention in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Where Do We Go from Here?”

Abstract This essay examines Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 speech “Where Do We Go from Here?” Delivered at the 11th annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the speech addressed the contentious racial politics that permeated the post–Voting Rights landscape. I argue that the speech constituted King’s call for the SCLC to reinvent its ethos—both its “character” and its “dwelling place.” In issuing this call, King cultivated new possibilities for the conceptualization and practice of social justice activism.