Black Freedom Struggle Research Articles

Barbara Johns and Beyond: Black Male Youth Activists, School Desegregation, and the Black Freedom Struggle in Virginia, 1951–1970

Barbara Johns and Beyond: Black Male Youth Activists, School Desegregation, and the Black Freedom Struggle in Virginia, 1951–1970

T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E.: Tupac Shakur as a Symbol of Black Rebellion for the “Pac Babies” of Black Lives Matter! 1

The late Bay Area Hip Hop legend Shock G stated that Tupac Shakur “rhymed from this pit of his stomach,” asserting that Tupac’s greatness was in the potency and relevance of his message more than the technical skill of his lyricism. Tattooed across the stomach that Tupac rhymed from was the acronym “T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E.” Tupac proclaimed that it stood for “The Hate You Gave Little Infants, Fucks Everyone,” a statement that reflected his worldview and echoed sentiments of those like Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin and Huey P. Newton who viewed youth as the centerpiece of the struggle for Black Liberation. Though Tupac was murdered in 1996, his lyrics and interviews resurfaced in the aftermath of the police killing of Oscar Grant in 2009 and introduced a generation born after his death to his thug persona and T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E. ideology as relavent, and accessible symbols of Black Rebellion. This article explores how Pac Babies, Black youth born after Tupac’s death, have adopted his Persona and Ideology to inform their entry into the Post Racial, social media era of the Black Freedom Struggle. I offer that, by providing T.H.U.G.L.I.F.E. as an alternative to the politics of respectability of the Civil Rights Movement and being resurrected as mythical super hero battling police violence, Tupac influenced both the street protests and social media engagement during the protest phase of "Black Lives Matter!".

Lifting the Chains: The Black Freedom Struggle Since Reconstruction by William H. Chafe (review)

Lifting the Chains: The Black Freedom Struggle Since Reconstruction by William H. Chafe (review)

“How Many Black Hippies Do You See?” The Counterculture in Black and White

Historians have treated the counterculture largely as a white phenomenon and drawn sharp boundaries between its escapism and the political engagement of the Black freedom struggle. A look at the counterculture's origins and growth in the late 1950s and the 1960s reveals that the counterculture intersected with Black culture in many ways. White beats, hipsters, and hippies generally admired the civil rights movement's support for equality and nonviolence, but sometimes scoffed at its effort to gain integration into American society. Hippies considered themselves outsiders from society and imagined that they shared affinity with Black Americans. Blacks’ responses to the counterculture ranged from contempt to curiosity to embrace. Some Blacks despised the hippies’ lifestyle and political apathy, but others considered the counterculture an important challenge to “the System.” American culture, style, literature, and music were all affected by the counterculture's experimentalism. The counterculture changed white culture, Black culture, and American culture. Drawing boundaries between cultural forms proves less instructive than focussing on the connections between them.

Humanity Defined, Hypocrisy Defied: Sacralizing the Black Freedom Struggle, 1930–60

The white ecclesia in the United States either opposed or equivocated on the matter of the humanity of African Americans. The 1939 unification of majority white Methodist bodies, for example, structurally segregated black members into a separate Central Jurisdiction. This action mimicked practices in the broader body politic that crystallized in American society both de jure and de facto systems of second-class citizenship for African Americans. This hypocrisy mobilized adherents of Gandhian non-violence and elicited from them tenets and tactics which energized moral methodologies that defeated a church and civic collusion that perpetrated black subordination. Interracial alliances derived from the ecclesia and parachurch organizations articulated non-violence as a moral precept that sacralized a grassroots civil rights movement. This initiative morally discredited the racial hypocrisy aimed at America's formerly enslaved and segregated population.

The Educational Radicalism of Bob Moses

Those who come in contact with the Algebra Project, founded 40 years ago by Bob Moses, tend to underestimate the extraordinary radicalism of Dr. Moses’s strategy for using math literacy as an organizing tool. The Algebra Project uses hard-earned insights from the Black freedom struggle to create space for young people to fashion their own insurgency. The goal of the Project is the destruction of caste in the United States, approached through the counter-intuitive vehicle of math classrooms.

Before Busing: A History of Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle

Before Busing: A History of Boston's Long Black Freedom Struggle

Fugitive Figurations of Chronic Disability: Reconstructing Black Disability Politics in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy

Abstract “Fugitive Figurations of Chronic Disability: Re-Constructing the Black Disability Politics in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy” fills a gap in nineteenth-century Black disability histories that have overlooked questions of chronic disabilities. In Iola Leroy, Harper writes from the perspective of the chronically disabled and offers fugitive figurations that exceed, resist, and stand apart from nineteenth-century representations of white true women’s invalidism and racial pathologizations. Harper uses Iola’s and other characters’ chronic debilities as a social location for imagining an alternative Black epistemology of the chronic with its own “phraseology” to testify to the inseparability of racial and disability justice as a part of Black freedom struggles. As part of its fugitive figurations of chronic disabilities, Iola Leroy also unbinds Black bodies and minds from a disciplinary individualistic productive capitalist time; and it centers an inclusive postbellum Black community of collective mutual care that exposes the limitations of a liberal (white) sentimental politics of sympathy. Harper’s fugitive figurations of chronic disability in Iola Leroy raise important questions about the methods critics use to recover Black disability in nineteenth-century US literature, methods which too often mine for present-day models of disabled medical verisimilitude and visibility rather than excavating the alternative figurations that Black writers such as Harper employed as part of twinned anti-ableist and anti-racist liberation and care practice.

The Making, Unmaking, and Remaking of Historical Memory, Radical King, and the Black Freedom Struggle

The Making, Unmaking, and Remaking of Historical Memory, Radical King, and the Black Freedom Struggle

Black Women’s Revolt in the Struggle for Freedom: An Exploration of Toni Morrison’s Selected Novels

This research work is about black women’s contribution in the struggle for black freedom in America as dramatized in Toni Morrison’s works. Drawing from the New Historicism, the psychological and sociological approaches which allow to enlighten a literary text within its socio-historical dimension, it purports to highlight strategies of revolt settled by black female characters against social injustices and discrimination in order to integrate the American society. The exploration of the selected narratives evidences the manifestations of black women’s struggle for black freedom; a revolt related to the history of America with abolitionists like Harriet Tubman called by ‘black Moses,’ Harriet Jacobs, Rosa Park to quote only some. Being the most vulnerable for ages in the practice of slavery, black women revolted and involved themselves into concrete actions to claim not only their identity as black people but also the right to be considered human beings as white people in the American soil. To get rid of the white system of slavery, black women inner motivation of revolt has been expressed by the psychological awake allowing them to act for their identity and freedom. This study finally shows not only the involvement of black women in the struggle for black freedom, but also the black women power in conflict regulation testimonies of which are substantial in the history of America.

Heroes of the Memphis Civil Rights Movement: Maxine A. Smith and Russell B. Sugarmon, Jr.

Two intertwined leaders of the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in Memphis, Tennessee, were Maxine Atkins Smith and Russell B. Sugarmon, Jr., both of whom were African American. Both were born in Memphis in 1929, and they shared commonalities in their personal histories and rose to become key leaders of the Memphis movement. Along with displaying courage and persistence, they were true pioneers in the Black freedom struggle in Memphis and Shelby County who employed organizational skills and community involvement as key to their social activism. This article examines their early activism from the mid-1950s until 1964.

Civil Rights—Human Rights—Social Justice: Legacies of Black Freedom Struggles in the Transatlantic World

Civil Rights—Human Rights—Social Justice: Legacies of Black Freedom Struggles in the Transatlantic World

Black Women and the Black Freedom Struggle

Black Women and the Black Freedom Struggle

Fugitive Ecologies

This paper seeks to refine scholarly thinking regarding invasive species and decolonial politics in plantation ecologies by following bamboo’s contradictory relationships to various parties on the island of Jamaica. Planters imported bamboo to Jamaica for its remarkable propensity to grow, a quality that soon let it loose on the island’s hinterlands. There, bamboo allied with a people whose flight mirrored its own: Maroons, or fugitive African and Indigenous Taino people who built autonomous communities in the island’s interior. Lately, bamboo is on the move again, precipitating an ecological “invasion” in the eyes of the island’s conservationists and an opportunity for green growth from the perspective of its business interests. These parties, though differing in many ways, both approach bamboo through an idiom of mastery with roots in the plantation and colonial forestry. Maroons, on the other hand, model a creative openness to more-than-human encounters, building relationships to bamboo that are both quotidian and sacred, salutary and trying, but which point toward Maroon autonomy. I offer the concept of fugitive ecologies to attune scholars to these patchy geographies of partial freedom Maroons build with this “invasive” collaborator at the plantation’s edges. Whereas existing paradigms within the environmental humanities tend to focus on species-level classification, fugitive ecologies allow us to see how plants and animals—native, invasive, or otherwise—can “become with” Black freedom struggles.

Anti-apartheid transatlantic networks in the age of the civil rights struggle: Bloke Modisane in the United States

In the Spring of 1963, London-based South African exiled artist and intellectual Bloke Modisane traveled to the United States on a co-sponsored visiting lecture tour of ten historically black colleges and universities in the South. A guest of the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) and the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), Modisane’s lectures were a combination of intellectual, political, and performative registers which provided treatments on topics such as African rhythms in music and dance, South African literature, race and identity, and the anti-apartheid struggle. The institutions that he lectured in were actively involved in the struggle for civil rights in the early 1960s, positioning his visit at the center of the ongoing black freedom struggle in America. This article argues that Modisane was an active participant in anti-apartheid transatlantic networks and made a small but significant contribution to the cultural dimension of the anti-apartheid and civil rights struggles as a public intellectual and artist. It focusses on the Southern college circuit of civil rights activism and aims to enrich our understanding of mid-century transatlantic pan-Africanism, cultural solidarity, and transnational linkages between black South African and African American intellectuals, especially realized in the literary rather than political-organizational locus of black transnationalism.

Traces of 'Woke' in 20th-Century U.S. History

In recent years, attacks on wokeness have undermined the scope and methods of history education in U.S. American schools and colleges. Current critiques by conservatives that wokeness curtails American freedom ignores the significance of wokeness in the struggle for Black freedom. This article historicizes ‘woke,’ puts the term into context and elucidates its meaning and significance for the fight against inequality and discrimination in the United States. The article does not offer a comprehensive history of ‘woke,’ but follows individual traces of the term’s use, from references in 1930s folk music to the racism of the Southern criminal justice system, to labour movement rhetoric and policies in West Virginia in the 1940s, and Martin Luther King’s speech at Oberlin College at the height of the civil rights movement in 1965.

Traces of 'Woke' in 20th-Century U.S. History

In recent years, attacks on wokeness have undermined the scope and methods of history education in U.S. American schools and colleges. Current critiques by conservatives that wokeness curtails American freedom ignores the significance of wokeness in the struggle for Black freedom. This article historicizes ‘woke,’ puts the term into context and elucidates its meaning and significance for the fight against inequality and discrimination in the United States. The article does not offer a comprehensive history of ‘woke,’ but follows individual traces of the term’s use, from references in 1930s folk music to the racism of the Southern criminal justice system, to labour movement rhetoric and policies in West Virginia in the 1940s, and Martin Luther King’s speech at Oberlin College at the height of the civil rights movement in 1965.

Psychiatry, Mental Health Care, and the Black Freedom Struggle: Chicago's Woodlawn Mental Health Center

Psychiatry, Mental Health Care, and the Black Freedom Struggle: Chicago's Woodlawn Mental Health Center

“Stamping Out Segregation in Kansas”: Jim Crow Practices and the Postwar Black Freedom Struggle

Abstract: This study examines Jim Crow practices and the Black Freedom Struggle in Kansas between 1945 and 1960, focusing at the state level. It proceeds in three sections. First, it examines Jim Crow in housing, employment, schools, public accommodations, and sundown towns. Second, it addresses the enforcement of these practices through mob violence and, to a greater degree, police violence. Third, it investigates the activism of Black Kansans who were, irrespective of age, gender, or class, determined to destroy Jim Crow through public protests, legal strategies, and physical self-defense, even if they represented considerable ideological, methodological, and strategic diversity. The study is based primarily on extensive research in regional and local newspapers, in public and university archives, and in oral histories with contemporary Black activists. Because of the limited time period involved, it utilizes a topical approach overall but, within this framework, addresses change over time. Before proceeding, the study briefly examines the long history of racism against Blacks and Black resistance to it in Kansas before 1945.

“Solidarity with the Most Oppressed Peoples of the Earth”: The Boston Chronicle and Black Internationalist Print Culture, 1945–60

Abstract This article explores transformations in the Black press during some of the most repressive years of United States and global anticommunism in the 1940s and 1950s. Centering on an examination of the editorial politics of the Boston Chronicle, a daily newspaper founded by Caribbean immigrants in the early twentieth century, it argues that Black leftist internationalism continued to be visible in print despite a repressive political climate shaping the experiences of Black journalists and activists. The Chronicle, a relatively understudied Black newspaper, offers a somewhat different perspective on the evolution of a vibrant, transnational print culture that linked Black freedom struggles in the United States with anticolonial movements in the British Caribbean, Africa, and Latin America. An examination of the Chronicle’s coverage and journalists in a period of deepening anticommunist repression reveals ongoing links between Black activists, anticolonial movements, and the organized left before the 1960s.