Southern Civil Rights Movement Research Articles

The Making of a Movement: An Intergenerational Mobilization Model of the Nonviolent Nashville Civil Rights Movement

The 1960s-era, Nashville nonviolent civil rights movement—with its iconic lunch counter sit-ins—was not only an exemplary local movement that dismantled Jim Crow in downtown public accommodations. It was by design the chief vehicle for the intergenerational mentoring and training of activists that led to a dialogical diffusion of nonviolence praxis throughout the Southern civil rights movement of this period. In this article, we empirically derive from oral-history interviews with activists and archival sources a new “intergenerational model of movement mobilization” and assess its contextual and bridge-leading sustaining factors. After reviewing the literatures on dialogical diffusion and bridge building in social movements, we describe the model and its sustaining conditions—historical, demographic, and spatial conditions—and conclude by presenting a research agenda on the sustainability and generalizability of the Nashville model.

“So sensual, so languid, and so private”: James Baldwin’s American South

James Baldwin has frequently been written about in terms of his relationship to geographical locations such as Harlem, Paris, St. Paul-de-Vence, Istanbul, and “the transatlantic,” but his longstanding connection to the American South, a region that served as a vexed and ambiguous spiritual battleground for him throughout his life and career, has been little discussed, even though Baldwin referred to himself as “in all but no technical legal fact, a Southerner.” This article argues that the South has been seriously underconsidered as a major factor in Baldwin’s psyche and career and that were it not for the challenge to witness the Southern Civil Rights movement made to Baldwin in the late 1950s, he might never have left Paris and become the writer and thinker into which he developed. It closely examines Baldwin’s fictional and nonfictional engagements with the American South during two distinct periods of his career, from his first visit to the region in 1957 through the watershed year of 1963, and from 1963 through the publication of Baldwin’s retrospective memoir No Name in the Street in 1972, and it charts Baldwin’s complex and often contradictory negotiations with the construction of identity in white and black Southerners and the South’s tendency to deny and censor its historical legacy of racial violence. A few years before his death, Baldwin wrote that “[t]he spirit of the South is the spirit of America,” and this essay investigates how the essential question he asked about the region—whether it’s a bellwether for America’s moral redemption or moral decline—remains a dangerous and open one.

Lawyers and Embedded Legal Activity in the Southern Civil Rights Movement

We introduce the concept of embedded legal activity to capture the ways in which lawyers and legal organizations can become intertwined in the ongoing activities of social movements. Embedded legal activity is characterized by diverse issues and venues and comprises legal activities that help support movement infrastructure, close coordination between movement lawyers and other activists, and responsiveness to constituent needs. Investigating a comprehensive data set on legal activity during the southern civil rights movement, we identify forms of legal activity beyond the typical focus of legal mobilization, including defense for movement participants charged with misdemeanors and other crimes, movement assistance on organization‐level legal matters, and general legal aid to movement constituents. These were by far the more common types of legal activity and emerged from the embeddedness of lawyers in a mass movement. We argue that embedded legal activity is likely where movements prioritize grassroots leadership and community organizing and face significant countermobilization, hostile legal and political opportunity structures, and substantial social and economic inequality.

White Women in the 1960s Freedom Movement, From Memory to History: The writing of “Shiloh Witness,” a chapter in Deep in Our Hearts

In this article, Joan C. Browning, a white female veteran of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, reflects on the writing of an autobiographical chapter she wrote for a collective book published in 2000 (Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement). Focusing on the dialectical tension between memory and history, she discusses several questions ranging from the genesis of the book project to her regrets at censoring herself in anticipation of criticisms. The essay sheds new light on her personal experience of the Southern Civil Rights Movement—especially her participation in the Albany Freedom Ride in 1961, the role of religion in her commitment to the Movement, and her feelings about the movement’s evolution after 1964. The author describes the profound impact of the Movement on her life and her identity as a white, Southern woman. In addition to this personal account, she probes into the scientific issues of writing the history of the Civil Rights Movement, i.e. the place of women in historiography, the relationship between historians and their living subjects, the question of privacy, the tension between objectivity and subjectivity, and the difficult negotiation between history and activism in the self-writing process.

Sounds of Freedom: Songs in the 1960s Southern Civil Rights Movement

Songs are part of a long tradition of dissent and struggle in American culture since the seventeenth century. In the twentieth century, this tradition is well illustrated by the Freedom Songs of the 1960s civil rights movement, a distinctive feature of the struggle for black freedom in the South. Freedom songs were used within and outside the movement to sustain as well as to publicize the struggle. The present article analyzes the nature and function of those songs, demonstrating that they represented much more than protest songs. It shows that beyond their most obvious function, which was to mobilize and cement collective participation in the various demonstrations and actions of nonviolent resistance to segregation, Freedom Songs had a transforming power over individuals. In the context of the southern Freedom Movement, singing became an existential experience, a second birth through which African Americans re-appropriated their culture and constructed a new identity for themselves and for their people. Freedom songs thus can be said to have contributed not only to defeating white supremacy in the South but also to empowering African Americans by reconnecting them to their culture and by providing each individual the way to achieve his or her inner liberation.

“Keep up the agitation” - Rev. Jerry Forshey and a KKK Cross from Jackson, Mississippi

I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in our struggle for freedom Some have been kicked out of their churches, and lost support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have gone with the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. These men have been leaven in the lump of the race. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times.-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.Letter From A Birmingham Jail, April 1963REV. GERALD E. FORSHEY Chicagoan, but not by birth. He in Long Beach, California in 1932, the son of casino pit boss. Influenced by Methodist ministers while attending UCLA, Forshey decided to train for the ministry at the Iliff School of Theology after graduation. He went to Denver as a blue collar kid with expanding horizons. He left seminary with a theology and sense of mission that would shape his life and work. He also met and married his wife Florence, who came to study in Denver from her home in Mobile, Alabama.2Chicago became their home in 1958, when Rev. Forshey took an assignment as pastor of the Armitage Avenue Methodist Church, mixedrace, inner-city parish near Lincoln Park. In ways that Jerry and Florence Forshey could not possibly have foreseen, their lives would be intertwined with those of thousands of other migrants headed to Chicago, most of them African American coming from the Deep South. From the late 1940s through the 1960s, half million migrants came to Chicago and their arrival affected nearly every aspect of city life.Like many other migrants, Rev. Forshey was entranced by the big city and all it had to offer. He witnessed the explosive growth under Mayor Richard J. Daley that included the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the construction of the expressway systems, new mass transit lines, convention center, and the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, as well as the opening of the then tallest building in the world-Sears Tower.Forshey not starry-eyed idealist; he spent years working in string of Methodist congregations as the white pastor in racially mixed or all-black congregations. Rev. Forshey lived in neighborhoods that were going through rapid racial change, and his approach to the ministry shaped by the experiences of his congregants, both black and white. The black migrants' very presence forced existing residents and institutions to change-often in wrenching, and soul-searching ways in the face of ingrained patterns of racism. He watched as his African American congregants scrambled to find housing in city where strict racial segregation maintained through custom, coercion and sometimes violence.3Because of his ministerial appointments, Forshey came to devote himself particularly to the cause of civil rights. Not only did he see the problems encountered by his own parishioners, but he also saw connections to the southern Civil Rights Movement. He arrived in Chicago just few years after the 1954 Supreme Court decision desegregating schools (Brown v. Topeka, KS Board of Education) and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott that catapulted the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to national prominence.Forshey moved to action by the challenges posed by segregation in housing, education, and jobs in Chicago, but he heeded the call of national civil rights leaders and became part of church desegregation efforts in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963. Spurred on by his experiences in Chicago and Jackson, Forshey worked for the desegregation of the Methodist Church. Separated before the Civil War over the issue of slavery, the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church South and the Methodist Protestant Church merged in 1939. It new denomination born segregated. …

Nord et Sud dans la construction de l’identité noire américaine : réflexions sur le Mouvement pour les Droits Civiques

The present article examines the role played by the southern Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in the construction of a national African American identity. Through the example of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, it analyzes the Freedom Movement from a North/South perspective, showing that the Movement allowed the convergence and interaction of two specific black identities which had developed in the North and in the South in the wake of the Great Migration. After exposing the main characteristics of these two identities at mid-20th century, the article focuses on the evolution of SNCC and of a selection of its key members to demonstrate how the Movement absorbed and transformed distinctive features of black northern and southern cultures, giving birth, ultimately, to a new black identity in which North and South became united after an era of separate development.

Authentic Doing: Student-Produced Web-Based Digital Video Oral Histories

This paper describes a case study oral history project involving high school students who interview elders and publish in full text and full digital video on a public Web site, www.tellingstories.org. Telling Their Stories: Oral History Archives Project (OHAP) is a combination of a high school elective history course at The Urban School of San Francisco, a digital video oral history production protocol, a public Web site, and a growing collaboration with other educational institutions from around the country. Students learn oral history technique, conduct two-hour long video-recorded interviews, complete the transcription, edit movies, and publish to the OHAP Web site. Most OHAP interviews deal with witnesses of key twentieth century events involving acts of discrimination, including survivors, witnesses and liberators of the Nazi Holocaust, Japanese American internees, and elders involved in the southern Civil Rights Movement. The paper also examines the preparation and efficacy of student-conducted oral histories via the OHAP model.

The silencing of radical democracy in American community development: the struggle of identities, discourses and practices

This paper attempts to understand how 1968 as a transformative historical moment has influenced the discourses and identity constructions of community development in the United States. Using a post-structuralist discursive analytical framework, the paper examines the nature and structure of community development discourses as reproduced in the language and social practices of the militant wing of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, the early Black Power movement, Alinskyism and the Johnson Administration's War on Poverty. Rather than community development being constituted by radical democracy, this paper argues that community development is dominated by hierarchical and unequal ideas and practices which invest the professional subject with agency and construct local people as passive objects. The paper explores how the radical democratic practices have been silenced from 1968 onwards and as a result how contemporary community development discourses may be reproducing highly problematic ideas and practices which undermine rather than support community development's goal of achieving equality and social justice for marginalized groups.

Toward a New Abolitionism: Race, Ethnicity, and Social Transformation

In December 1861, abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips (1864) declared to audiences in Boston and New York: “[I]n the quarter of the century that has passed, I could find no place where an American could stand with decent self-respect, except in constant, uncontrollable, and loud protest against the sin of his native land” (p. 417). If we may forgive his use of a male pronoun, Phillips was referring, of course, to the anti-slavery movement that preceded the Civil War, and emphasizing the need to have used sustained political dissent to end slavery. Although social movement scholars have neglected it, abolitionism was one of the most important social movements in American history, for it called attention again and again to the evil of slavery, placed this “peculiar institution” on the national agenda, and, depending on which historians one reads, precipitated the Civil War. The history of abolitionism and other American social movements illustrates the importance of protest as recognized by Phillips. The women’s suffrage movement that began at Seneca Falls used marches, sit-ins, and other forms of protest before it finally won the right to vote some 70 years later. The labor movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries engaged in strikes and other actions to boost substandard wages and end inhumane working conditions. The 1960s ushered in a new era of activism, and the two major social movements of that decade again illustrated the value and necessity of mass political activity. Through constant, uncontrollable, and loud protest, the Southern civil rights movement ended legal segregation, while the Vietnam anti-war movement opposed a war in a faraway land that some likened to genocide. Many of us old enough to remember these two movements grew up during the 1950s, when one of the worst problems the star of the popular Leave it to Beaver TV show faced was that his mother wanted him to eat Brussels sprouts, and when racial and ethnic inequality and other social problems were far removed from our newspapers and TV screens. As children, we made the mistake of believing what we recited in secondary school, that America was “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” When the 1960s began and we grew old enough to know better, our new knowledge led some of us to become active in the civil rights and anti-war movements and others to sink into despair. It led some of us to rely on our religious faith for strength as we worked to change society, and it led others of us, at least people like me who were active in the anti-war movement, to abandon a God who could let something like Vietnam happen.

“Sowing the Seeds of Discontent”

Based on archival research and in-depth interviews conducted from 1999 through 2007, this article examines the role of Tougaloo College's Social Science Forums as a prefigurative collective free space in Mississippi's civil rights struggles. These Forums offered White and Black integrationists a unique opportunity to come together to hear lectures and discuss provocative ideas, some of which informed and inspired challenges to the state's system of White supremacy. By providing a location where integrationist networks and ideas were established and developed, the Forums helped to sow the seeds of discontent for challenges off campus and offered an interracial microcosm of the world that the Southern civil rights movement was trying to achieve. The article sheds light on specific ways an on-campus free space at a private Black Southern college fostered and mobilized oppositional ideas, interracial networks, and practices prior to and during the development of the Mississippi civil rights movement.

Brief Amici Curiae of Veterans of the Southern Civil Rights Movement and Family Members of Murdered Civil Rights Activists

Brief Amici Curiae of Veterans of the Southern Civil Rights Movement and Family Members of Murdered Civil Rights Activists

Black fighting formations: Their strengths, weaknesses and potentialities

Clausewitz observed that “war is an extension of politics.” This paper argues that a fatal flaw among Black political organizations‐with certain exceptions‐has been their failure to adequately prepare for warfare in the service of self‐defense and revolutionary struggles. The failure of the non‐violent credo of the Southern Civil Rights Movement is examined as are exceptions to that credo, Robert F. Williams and also the Deacons of Defense. The Black Panther Party is analyzed as a political force unprepared for the violent confrontations it faced, and the Black Liberation Army is found to be militarily relatively sophisticated but lacking a necessary popular base. As a result of the above history, today no “fighting formation” remains to lead and organize the young African men and women prepared to fight for their survival.

Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement , and: Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama (review)

262Southern Cultures tention is extensive, I can't help but notice that most of his interviews on this question are with the organizers and staff of the association, not with the retired and disabled mill workers. But even these interviews reveal important aspects of the members' knowledge that may have played a greater role than the author concedes. As one of the original organizers later recalled, "the members understood the power structure in the community much better than did the staff." Although somewhat of an oversimplification, the basic issue is the highly political question of whether this was a movement organization run by its members—the retired and disabled textile workers—or orchestrated by a group of outsiders, a charge not unfamiliar to many grassroots efforts at social change in the South. As Botsch accurately points out, "When the staff left, the driving energy of the organization was gone." But we don't know what might have happened if the entire membership could no longer participate. Although many individual members did leave because of ill health, death, or compensation , there were others to replace them. Organizing the Breathless is a compelling treatise on the history and politics of the Brown Lung Association. It is also an important case study of a crucial segment of the broader occupational health movement in this country. It not only raises perennial moral questions of right and wrong but also suggests many avenues for research on social movements and grassroots activism. Finally, it tells us a lot about the modern South and what price we place on the value of human life, especially as we continue into industrialization. Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. By Danny Lyon. University of North Carolina Press, 1992. 192 pp. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $19.95; and Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama. By Charles W. Eagles. University of North Carolina Press, 1993. 323 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $19.95. Reviewed by Steven F. Lawson, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The struggles of black southerners during the early 1960s aroused concerned people across America to leave the relative comfort and safety of their homes and risk their lives in the struggle for freedom. Northerners Danny Lyon and Jon Daniels ventured southward in the early 1960s as outsiders, not as agitators. They joined a movement originated and led by African Americans seeking their own emancipation. Lyon survived, Daniels perished. Both were transformed. These two books document their stories. Twenty-year-old Lyon arrived first. A New Yorker attending the University of Chicago, he combined an interest in history with photography. Like one of his heroes a century before, Mathew Brady, he set out in 1962 to photograph a second war for black liberation . For nearly three years Lyon took photographs for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Because SNCC organized communities in some of the most remote and inhospitable areas of the South, it was crucial that the group's efforts receive attention and generate financial and legal support from the rest of the nation. Lyon's photographs of SNCC workers and local activists demonstrating, praying, and getting arrested were printed in newspapers and magazines throughout the country and the world and Reviews263 Five Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) workers at the funeral of four girls murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963. From Memories ofthe Southern Civil Rights Movement, by Danny Lyon. Courtesy of Magnum Photos, Inc. Reprinted with permission from the University of North Carolina Press. became powerful images on posters to rally people behind SNCC. Thirty years later he gathered the snapshots and wrote the accompanying narrative to produce Memories ofthe Southern Civil Rights Movement. This is not a volume filled with prints of Martin Luther King Jr. though some do appear. SNCCs path did cross with King's, most notably in Albany, Georgia, and Selma, Alabama. But for the most part SNCC encouraged local communities to determine their own leaders and rejected the kind of charismatic leadership that Dr. King practiced so well. Accordingly, Lyon shows us the 1963 march on Washington addressed not by King but by SNCCs...

Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Interorganizational Conflict in the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Moderate social movement organizations (SMOs) often denounce radical SMOs for statements and actions that threaten to alienate potential sources of external support. This paper analyzes the development of such interorganizational hostility in the Southern civil rights movement over the issues of Communist participation, the Vietnam War, and black power. In demonstrating how the moderate SMOs' perceived need for external support aggravated divisions over these issues, this paper calls attention to a major source of interorganizational hostility in the movement that previous work has overlooked.

Legal Control of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Legal Control of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Organizing the poor

Piven and Cloward aimed to be provocative, but they did so by badly overstating their argument. They are too fair-minded to ignore completely the contribution and courage of organizers in these movements. In spite of their thesis, they pay occasional obeisance to movement organizers and exemplars. “There were nevertheless organizers in these [labor] struggles,” they acknowledge. “Some of these organizers were insurgents from the rank and file; others were radicals whose vision of an alternative future helped to account for their exemplary courage. Wherever these organizers came from, their vision helped goad workers into protest, and their courage gave workers heart and determination” (148). Nor can they ignore the role of organizational activists in the civil-rights movement. They seek exemption from the implications of this activity by noting that these organizations were not much concerned with building formal membership and were “cadre organizations.” But the idea of cadre organizations doesn't appear in the index, is introduced in an ad hoc manner to preserve their argument, and is never developed. In their account of the National Welfare Rights Organization, Piven and Cloward advocate a cadre organization, modelled on the successes of the civil-rights movement and of SCLC in particular (, 282–85). When Poor People's Movements goes from general thesis to specific case analysis, the argument becomes less provocative but more reasonable. Apparently, it is not every organization that discourages insurgency, aspires to create a mass membership and hierarchical bureaucracy, and is willing to sell its birthright for a mess of elite pottage. Some movement organizations' stimulate anger and defiance, and escalate the momentum of the people's protests. Some use their communication networks to spread disruptive forms of collective action and their organizational planning to chart strategy and timing, and to increase the effectiveness of collective action. Some institutionalize their dependence on their own constituency rather than come to rely on elite resources for survival. If some militant organizations later become tame and abandon their oppositional politics, other formerly docile organizations sometimes become centers of militancy - as the black churches and colleges did in the Southern civil rights movement. The intellectual task becomes the more exacting one of figuring out what types of organization are likely to facilitate insurgency or abandon their oppositional politics under different historical conditions. Poor People's Movements might be interpreted as providing one kind of answer to this question, an argument against mass-membership organizations. This is certainly a much less dramatic and provocative thesis. But in the end, an analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of organization is a great deal more useful to students of social movements than the anti-organizational phillipic that the authors offer us.

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail

Have the poor fared best by participating in conventional electoral politics or by engaging in mass defiance and disruption? The authors of the classic Regulating The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class groups in 20th century America: -- The mobilization of the unemployed during the Great Depression that gave rise to the Workers' Alliance of America -- The industrial strikes that resulted in the formation of the CIO -- The Southern Civil Rights Movement -- The movement of welfare recipients led by the National Welfare Rights Organization.

Leadership and Change in an Evolutionary Movement: An Analysis of Change in the Leadership Structure of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

An evolutionary change in the objectives of the southern civil rights movement has produced a consequent change in the leadership structure of its component movement organizations. Forces encouraging this change operate both within and outside these organizations. The net effect has been to reduce the importance of the general charismatic leader in favor of a cadre of specialized leaders. The transformation of movement organizations has transformed the charismatic leader into a specialized leader in organizations which, upon accomplishing short-range goals, have changed to meet the challenge of new and long-range objectives.