Southern Civil Rights 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.

Patience on a Monument

June 01 2017 Patience on a Monument Patience on a Monument The New GalleryThe University of Texas at Austin February 11–April 16, 2016 Author and Article Information Online Issn: 1937-2108 Print Issn: 0001-9933 © 2017 by the Regents of the University of California.2017 African Arts (2017) 50 (2): 87–89. https://doi.org/10.1162/AFAR_r_00347 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Patience on a Monument. African Arts 2017; 50 (2): 87–89. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/AFAR_r_00347 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsAfrican Arts Search Advanced Search In March of 2015, polymedia artist Eto Otitigbe participated in a performance conceived by Wideman/Davis Dance (a dance duo of principal dancers Tanya Wideman-Davis and Thaddeus Davis). That performance—which grew out of Otitigbe's solo exhibition “Ruptured Silence” presented by 701 CCA (Center for Contemporary Arts) in Columbia, South Carolina, that same month—examined contemporary reactions to racist signs and symbols in public spaces. The exhibition featured a series of sculptures and experimental drawings that were substitutive representations of familiar themes and objects. While in residence at 701 CCA, Otitigbe collaborated with Wideman/Davis to develop the first iteration of “Ruptured Silence: Racist Symbols and Signs,” a media performance installation that explored the deconstruction of the Southern civil rights memento, the Confederate flag. From his work with Wideman/Davis and on the merit of his exhibition at 701 CCA, Otitigbe was chosen as the Elizabeth M. Marion Visiting Artist at the University of South... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937–1955

Book Review| July 01 2016 The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937–1955 The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937–1955. Lindsey R. Swindall. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014; 256 pages. $61.25 (paperback), ISBN 978-0813049922. Jessica E. Birch Jessica E. Birch Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal for the Study of Radicalism (2016) 10 (2): 156–158. https://doi.org/10.14321/jstudradi.10.2.0156 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jessica E. Birch; The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937–1955. Journal for the Study of Radicalism 1 July 2016; 10 (2): 156–158. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/jstudradi.10.2.0156 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressJournal for the Study of Radicalism Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937–1955 by Lindsey R. Swindall (review)

The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937–1955 by Lindsey R. Swindall (review)

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.

The D.C. School Hearings of 1956 and the National Vision of Massive Resistance

Abstract In September 1956, southern congressmen launched a hostile investigation of the District of Columbia’s recently desegregated public school system. Organized by segregationists on the House District of Columbia Committee, the school hearings and subsequent report represented a provocative attempt to stymie racial reform in the nation’s capital and beyond. By discrediting school desegregation in Washington, Deep South diehards hoped to legitimize their cause and expose white resistance north of the Mason-Dixon Line. By taking the fight to a metropolitan setting, segregationists pushed against the limits of Deep South racial politics and discovered white allies in the nation’s capital. As civil rights advocates and school officials struggled to debunk the propaganda attack, segregationists invoked Washington as a “showcase” for the folly of integration. Years before the nation’s attention drifted from southern civil rights struggles to northern racial turmoil, segregationists had anticipated and encouraged this shift by stressing common cause with the embattled whites of the metropolitan North. While their vision of a national segregationist movement never materialized, the controversy over segregation in the nation’s capital complicated notions of race and region in the civil rights era.

The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937-1955

The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937-1955

Lindsey R. Swindall. The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937–1955.

Lindsey R. Swindall. The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937–1955.

The path to the greater, freer, truer world: southern civil rights and anticolonialism, 1937-1955

By examining the development of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and the Council on African Affairs two early civil rights organisations that have been overlooked and marginalised by the historiography of the period Lindsey Swindall reveals how the discourse on civil rights in the southern United States also employed an internationalist, anticolonial agenda during the mid-twentieth century. The escalating spread of fascism before World War II coupled with the economic crisis of the Great Depression and the mobilization of the Communist Party against segregation and colo--nialism helped expand the international awareness of many African American activists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B.Du Bois. The SNYC and the Council on African Affairs were part of the efforts to address race and labour issues within a leftist framework, employing a global, Pan-African perspective to fight against dis--enfranchisement, segregation, labour exploitation, and colonialism. Swindall highlights the cooperation that occurred between progres-sive activists involved in coalition-building during the Popular Front and also adds to our understanding of the intergenerational nature of civil rights and labour organising. Furthermore, she shows the ways in which pockets of resistance survived McCarthyism and recon--nected later with activists in the 1960s.

Walter Bresette: “All Struggles Are Related”

“In organizing, one can travel a narrow road and come to view one’s issue as preeminent. But one overriding conclusion in my work is that all struggles are related and many methods are transferable between issues. Our current witnessfor-nonviolence training material and many of our strategies come out of the Southern civil rights struggle and other nonviolence campaigns. Building alliances is about understanding oneself, believing in our own self-interest and cause, and then recognizing the common interests that exist between disparate groups. We ally not because we are ‘alike’ nor to remake each other or to force compromise or correct tactics. We ally to affirm each other’s strengths and to call upon that which we need but don’t have ourselves. If we are to build even stronger alliances for our common goals, we must accommodate and encourage our personal and cultural differences, while tolerating our natural weaknesses, and thereby solidify our political partnerships.”1

“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.

A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America

Peter Richardson's highly engaging story of the life and influence of Ramparts magazine fleshes out an important chapter in the story of the 1960s and the life of the critical independent media in the United States. Enlivened by a generous sampling from the magazine as well as the reflections of a wide range of editors, writers, and 1960s folk, the book traces the magazine's trajectory from its 1962 birth as a “forum for the mature American Catholic” through its turbulent peak years (1967–1968) to its financially strapped demise in 1975 (p. 1). Along the way, Richardson pays ample attention to the crucial roles and distinct approaches of key figures in the magazine's evolution—most notably Edward Keating, Warren Hinckle, Robert Scheer, Dugald Stermer, Peter Collier, and David Horowitz. In addition, the pages of A Bomb in Every Issue bristle with the important political exposés, heated debate, and often-inflammatory rhetoric that graced the pages of Ramparts in its heyday. Indeed, the book provides a rich sampling of the evolving conversations that occurred on the Left during what right-wing critics like to call the “bad 1960s” (that is, post–John F. Kennedy and post–southern civil rights).

The Bogalusa Movement: Self-Defense and Black Power in the Civil Rights Struggle

THE FIRST recorded attempt by black people in Bogalusa, Louisiana to register to vote occurred in 1950. However, an organized civil rights movement did not begin there until 1965, when the all-black Bogalusa Civic and Voters League (the League) sought to test Bogalusa’s compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. From the beginning, the efforts to organize protests and demonstrations against racial segregation and public exclusion were met with white violence. The first national civil rights organization to come to the assistance of the League was the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). As protests and demonstrations expanded to include the fight to secure voting rights following the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) joined the League and CORE to organize and support a broad based civil rights movement. However, the Bogalusa movement was an authentically organic movement, organized and led by local people. The Bogalusa movement was a dual movement. First, typical of the Southern civil rights struggles, it mobilized and organized black people against racial segregation, voter disenfranchisement, and for inclusion into the city’s body politic. Second, the movement organized against racial segregation at the Crown Zellerbach Corporation; the largest employer and taxpayer in Bogalusa and Washington Parish. In 1965, Crown Zellerbach was one of the largest paper manufacturers in the US. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Crown Zellerbach’s Bogalusa plant practiced job discrimination against black people and maintained segregated labor unions among its black and white workers. The most progressive leadership the Bogalusa Civic and Voters League enjoyed during its existence emerged in 1965 from among black laborers at Crown Zellerbach, who were the organizers and leaders of the black local of the Pulp, Sulphite and Paper Workers union. In 1965, a dietician at a local medical clinic and two workers and union leaders at Crown Zellerbach came to lead the Bogalusa Civic and Voters League and organize the Bogalusa movement. Unlike traditional civil rights organizations of the time, the League organized a self-defense unit. It formed a chapter of the Deacons for Defense and Justice to serve as its armed defense entity to protect the black community and civil rights workers from the vigilante violence of the area Ku Klux Klan and Bogalusa’s rabid, allwhite police force. The leadership of the League personified a longstanding fervor among black working people to demand and organize for change in the racial order. The formation of the Deacons represented the League’s strategic and tactical defense of the lives of black people. In 1966, the Bogalusa Deacons would become one of the organizational models employed by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in the founding of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.

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.