Black Freedom Struggle Research Articles

Sanitizing the Struggle: Barack Obama, Selma, and Civil Rights Memory

In this article, I examine Barack Obama’s use of collective memory during his 2007 campaign speech in Selma, Alabama. Specifically, I argue that Obama appeals to collective memory to challenge the Black community’s relationship to the past. He reframed the memory of the Civil Rights Movement in a manner favorable to his political aspirations. While this frame was politically expedient, it weakened Black political agency. It robbed the Black community of crucial rhetorical resources used to challenge structural inequalities in society. This article offers insight into the complex relationship between metaphor and collective memory. Specifically, I interrogate the role of metaphor as a crucial site where public memory is formed, disrupted, and rearticulated. Furthermore, I consider the implications of his use of memory for the future of the Black freedom struggle.

Interpreting a Conversation on Culture: Conditions for Re-visitation of Black Theology’s Turn to Birmingham

ABSTRACTJonathan Walton recommends that Black theology appropriate the theoretical legacy of Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) to improve on Dwight Hopkins’s contrasting account of “conservative” and “prophetic” religious practices. However, Hopkins does affirm the theoretical value of the CCCS. Hopkins’s criticism of Black televisual popular culture follows from his account of how the divine has worked in history for the sake of poor and oppressed agents to combat the monopolization of power. Hopkins’s perspective can be construed, theoretically, to identify, analogously, with Stuart Hall’s account of cultural studies, particularly if Hall’s anti-theory supplements rather than replaces Black theology’s identification with the Black freedom struggle. By showing (1) how Hopkins can be understood to identify with the CCCS and (2) that he presupposes the agency of otherwise socially conservative Black religious practitioners, I offer three conditions for the re-visitation of Black theology with and to the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Race and Education in North Carolina: From Segregation to Desegregation by John E. Batchelor

Reviewed by: Race and Education in North Carolina: From Segregation to Desegregationby John E. Batchelor Paula C. Austin Race and Education in North Carolina: From Segregation to Desegregation. By John E. Batchelor. Making the Modern South. ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2015. Pp. xviii, 222. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6136-4.) In Race and Education in North Carolina: From Segregation to Desegregation, John E. Batchelor explores North Carolina's claim that by the 1970s, "99.5 percent of the state's black students were attending desegregated [End Page 477]schools" (p. 138). The book contends that the state achieved this level of school integration, despite its long segregationist history, while maintaining its image as moderate on race. Batchelor argues that although the state's wary political responses to the Brown v. Board of Education(1954) decision had little systemic impact on desegregation, federal court orders accelerated token black student reassignments and positioned North Carolina to achieve "more thorough school desegregation" than anywhere else in the South (p. 143). Using case law, oral histories, and archival sources, Batchelor compares state policies after Brownwith judicial mandates, finding the latter had weightier consequences. The book's first half deals with the recommendations of the governor's advisory committee, which was responsible for compliance with Brownat the local level. This committee made it difficult for a single lawsuit to force desegregation of all North Carolina schools and resulted in only a trickle of black students into white schools. The second half of the book, while continuing to examine the failures of Pearsall committee policies like the Pupil Assignment Act (1955), details federal court judgments. Judges, "in obedience to the law," yielded to the Civil Rights Act (1964) and determined local desegregation plans unconstitutional (p. 85). Earlier cases like Morrow v. Mecklenburg County Board of Education(1961) and Wheeler v. Durham City Board of Education(1961) pushed local boards to integrate even as they proposed and implemented racist freedom-of-choice plans. The Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education(1971) decision on busing motivated both the establishment of a state-funded Technical Assistance Center for desegregation and support from white business and civic leaders. In the end, North Carolina achieved through the judiciary what it could not do politically. Batchelor details the political machinations used to resist integration, including state constitutional amendments that eliminated compulsory attendance for any white child assigned to a school with black students. These received widespread public support and were later challenged by federal judges. However, in its efforts to demonstrate a peaceful movement toward "systemwide desegregation," particularly in the South, the book minimizes the impact of delegating compliance with Brownto the local level, a move that significantly stymied the NAACP legal strategy (p. 124). Additionally, in some places the book downplays the violence that happened in the state: both the rhetorical violence revealed in judges' opinions and political officials' statements that treated black inferiority as a foregone conclusion, and the physical and psychological violence experienced by students, including eggs thrown and crosses burned. Perhaps a deeper engagement with civil rights historiography, beyond William H. Chafe's Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Freedom Struggle(New York, 1980) could have helped Batchelor better situate his argument in a national context and consider the quotidian manifestations of Jim Crow violence. Still, Race and Education in North Carolinadoes not profess to be a social history. It traces and then foregrounds the impact of legal decisions in the wake of Brownin North Carolina's struggle against its own moderate obstructionism. Batchelor's device for framing each chapter with a concise introduction and critical questions to be answered by the chapter will be helpful to undergraduate readers. Pairing this book with other recent titles that examine the movement for [End Page 478]educational equity, like Sarah Caroline Thuesen's Greater Than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919-1965(Chapel Hill, 2013), will provide students with both a lesson in historiography and a variegated look at the struggle for racial justice in North Carolina. Paula C. Austin California State University, Sacramento Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association...

Education for Liberation

Education for Liberation Jill Ogline Titus (bio) Jon N. Hale. The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. xi + 300 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $60.00. Crystal R. Sanders. A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. xii + 250 pp. Figures, map, notes, bibliography, and index. $27.95. Crystal R. Sanders’ and Jon N. Hale’s excellent new books on grassroots educational projects in Mississippi during the 1960s paint a vivid picture of the centrality of education to civil rights activity in the state. Taking education for liberation and participatory democracy as central themes, both books delve deeply into the relationship between the education of African American youth and the unfolding struggle for racial justice. While both books stand alone beautifully, when read in tandem they offer a particularly rich interpretation of the connections between classroom programs and grassroots empowerment. While Hale focuses on the Freedom Schools and Sanders on Head Start, both ground their respective stories within the rich history of black Mississippians’ lengthy quest for freedom in all forms; both define “education” expansively—looking beyond the students immediately served to examine the impact of these programs on the larger community; and both explore the long-term legacy of these investments in human capital. Both authors have conducted impressive oral history work, grounding their accounts in an extensive and diverse interview base, and both tell their stories with passion and vigor. Pushing back against the short shrift that was historically provided to the Freedom Schools in accounts of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, Hale argues that this minimization of the schools’ role has obscured the extent to which “young people still in middle and high school were on the front lines of the civil rights movement” and served as catalysts for local action in communities across the state (p. 2). In fact, the book makes a compelling argument that “the schools were by far the most successful initiative of the Freedom Summer campaign,” as measured by their success in cultivating new forms of protest among attendees (p. 15). While the story of the Mississippi Freedom [End Page 348] Democratic Party’s rejection of the compromise offered at Atlantic City and the impact of the summer’s tensions on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) are well known, by emphasizing the continuing activity engendered by the Freedom Schools, Hale shifts the narrative from the costs of the summer project to its gains. The Freedom Schools carries the story beyond August 1964, highlighting ongoing activity after Atlantic City and the schools’ impact on the development of federally funded educational initiatives such as Head Start. While highlighting antecedents such as Highlander Folk School workshops, the Citizenship Schools operated by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), McComb’s Nonviolent High, and the Freedom Schools organized by Northern blacks boycotting urban school systems in protest of systemic segregation and discrimination, Hale argues that Mississippi’s Freedom Schools—originally proposed by SNCC organizer Charlie Cobb—constituted “the most significant network of schools that illustrated the extent to which the civil rights movement incorporated education into its overarching goals and organization” (p. 35). Yet he is careful not to denigrate pre-1964 activities by portraying the schools as students’ first introduction to democracy in action. Indeed, he devotes an important chapter to following seven students whose exposure to civil rights activities in their hometowns throughout the early years of the 1960s eventually led them to the Freedom Schools as a channel for expanding their involvement in the movement. Once enrolled, the students encountered “one of the most progressive curricula in American history”: an educational experience built around citizenship, creative expression, and African American history and literature (p. 93). Developed in consultation with such luminaries of the movement as Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Bob Moses, and Bayard Rustin, the schools were intended to supplement, not replace, the instruction students were receiving in the state’s public schools. Academic subjects received coverage, but instructional models were more horizontal than vertical, with teachers encouraging students to take the lead in deciding what to study, how to approach...

A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi's Black Freedom Struggle by Crystal R. Sanders

A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi's Black Freedom Struggle by Crystal R. Sanders

Beyond Integration: The Black Freedom Struggle in Escambia County, Florida, 1960–1980 by J. Michael Butler

Beyond Integration: The Black Freedom Struggle in Escambia County, Florida, 1960–1980 by J. Michael Butler

Thomas Jefferson and Us

Thomas Jefferson and Us David Sehat Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty. By John B. Boles. New York: Basic Books, 2017. 638 pages. Cloth, ebook. "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination. By Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf. New York: W. W. Norton/Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2016. 399 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. The Founding Fathers have had quite a run in the last few years. Starting in the early 1990s, books about the founding generation began to appear among the hottest publishing topics in nonfiction. Publishers rushed to bring out more and more accounts about the Founders in their various guises—as revolutionaries, as constitutional architects, as family men, and as literary participants in the wider republic of letters. Soon some historians were lamenting what H. W. Brands labeled "Founders Chic," the peculiar phenomenon in which the eighteenth-century Founders were deemed au courant gurus who supposedly provided cures for all contemporary ailments. But such complaints largely fell on deaf ears. The adulation has continued unabated.1 And yet there has been one key exception to this general celebration, one Founder who has seen his reputation plummet to an almost unimaginable depth. Thomas Jefferson used to be singularly revered as the author of the Declaration of Independence. Starting in the 1960s with the black freedom struggle, some critics began to see Jefferson as a more general symbol of the hypocrisy of the United States. Though he proclaimed that all men are created equal, he owned hundreds of slaves. An unseemly rumor held that those few he freed were his children, borne by his slave Sally Hemings. Still his reputation among many historians remained resilient. In 1974 when Fawn M. Brodie published Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, a psychobiography concluding that Hemings was in fact his concubine, most of Jefferson's latter-day scribes remained unconvinced.2 [End Page 771] But in 1997 Annette Gordon-Reed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy broke through the resistance. Employing a lawyerly sense of evidence and burden, she documented the way that many of Jefferson's biographers, so committed to a specific image of the man and so inclined toward a specific kind of written (and therefore white) historical record, had denigrated other evidence that pointed toward Jefferson's long-term sexual relationship with his slave. The following year, DNA evidence showed that someone within the Jefferson line had fathered Hemings's last child. The most likely person to do that would have been Jefferson himself. In short order, many historians concluded that Jefferson was the father of all of Hemings's children, having entered into a concubine relationship with her as a forty-year-old man while she was in her early teens, possibly as young as thirteen.3 The revelation shredded Jefferson's reputation. Although not everyone would agree with Paul Finkelman's assessment that "Jefferson is one of the most deeply creepy people in American history," after Gordon-Reed's book few historians would embrace him without caveat as the sage of Monticello, the prescient voice from the past.4 Now come two books suggesting that the widespread condemnation has gone too far. The most vigorous defense is from John B. Boles in a new biography, Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty, that seeks to present Jefferson, as the author explains, "holistically and within the rich context of his time and place" (2). When seen in that context, Boles argues, Jefferson becomes a figure easier to understand and even to admire. "Jefferson challenges us more thoroughly than any other Founder," Boles writes, "but in the end, he is the most attractive, most elusive, most complicated, most intellectual, most practical, most idealistic, most flexible, and most quintessentially American Founder of them all" (5). Unfortunately, Boles is so eager to rehabilitate Jefferson that many parts of the biography read like a brief for the defense. Regarding Jefferson's relationship with Hemings, Boles argues that their concubinage was likely characterized by "genuine affection—if not love itself" (153). He offers no evidence for this conclusion, nor for his later assertion that their entire relationship seems, retrospectively, "consensual" (265...

The Audacity of a Middle Period: An Introduction

392 CLA JOURNAL The Audacity of a Middle Period: An Introduction Michael Hill, Jessica Welburn Paige, and Deborah Whaley Ta-Nehisi Coates commands varied attention. As 2017 ended, he provoked approval from Annette Gordon Reed, a pound from Walton Muyumba, and critique from Cornel West.1 These reactions not only hint at the range of opinions about Coates but also affirm his status as an intellectual celebrity. Determining the meaning of such affirmation requires a long view of black creativity. When James Weldon Johnson wrote about “black and unknown bards” whose routes to artistic expression caused “a wide, wide wonder,” he did not have 21st century writers in mind (769-770). Still, his focus on the circumstances under which black authors could “lift” their “voice and sing” clarify as much about Ta-Nehisi Coates as they do about Lucy Terry, David Walker, and Anna Julia Cooper. Johnson recognized that black art constitutes a reaction against anonymity. If Coates did not experience slavery and Jim Crow like earlier black authors, then he did confront an America that had a hard time seeing where blackness fit into national identity. Prior black writers addressed this problem by exploring tropes like invisibility, misnaming , and marginalization. While Coates’s work dialogues with these themes, his abiding preoccupation is racial reckoning in democracy’s shadows. His probing of this topic acquires greater significance because his most celebrated efforts coincide with the election of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States. In light of 2018, how should the public understand Coates? The editors of this special issue believe that he should be analyzed as a black writer.2 Although that label sounds satisfactory, it begs the question of whether Coates is best labeled a writer of fiction or nonfiction, a deft user of tweets, blogs, and comments or a savant of journalistic essays and memoirs. He defies easy characterization, yet his centrality remains a marker of a shift in the intellectual currents of black society. From a moment when the preacher,the politician,and,more recently,the academic 1 For the pieces where Gordon-Reed, Muyumba, and West offer their perceptions, see respectively “We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates review–On White Supremacy,”“Ta-Nehisi Coates Blazes a Singular Intellectual Path in We Were Eight Years in Power,” and “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the Neoliberal Face of the Black Freedom Struggle.” These three pieces offer but a sampling of the wide attention that Coates inspired. 2 Our approach in part echoes the sentiment of Jamelle Bouie who observed that We Were Eight Years in Power (2017), Coates’s most recent book, suggested that he should be evaluated “as a writer, nothing more and nothing less.” For a fuller account, see Bouie. CLA JOURNAL 393 The Audacity of a Middle Period: An Introduction prevailed as signature figures in the arena of black public intellectual endeavor, Coates signals an extension and a customization of the ascendancy of the writer. To understand Coates and this development, we must relentlessly pursue context. After the Civil Rights era and the passage of legislation like the Voting Rights Act, the articulation of black cares and concerns increasingly migrated away from the moral milieu of the ministerial class and towards the realpolitik manipulations of mayors, city council members, and state/national legislators. This development did not occur all at once; however, gradually, the vital tasks of speaking on behalf of Black America fell to a class of individuals whose chief obligations dovetailed with governance. From the mayoral cohort that featured people like Carl B. Stokes, Maynard Jackson, and Coleman Young to the presidential candidates like Charlene Mitchell, Shirley Chisolm, and Margaret Wright, the presence of a robust black political class in the 1970s signaled the indisputable, if circumscribed, gains that greater integration delivered. If this group indicated one fairly quick harvest from civil rights activism, then the proliferation and the visibility of black academics suggest a slower, yet equally important emergence. The vital role that academics like Charles Johnson (sociology) and Charles Hamilton Houston (law) played in challenging segregation may have been obscured by the more conspicuous operation of black lawyers. While that situation may have prevailed...

Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death by Courtney R. Baker

Reviewed by: Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death by Courtney R. Baker Jovonna Jones Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death. By Courtney R. Baker. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015. xx + 118 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $45.00 cloth. Humane Insight collapses the temporalities of race and violence in American memory: to see a bloated black body in a flooded New Orleans street in 2005 is akin to the act of gazing at the strange dangle of a charred body in 1909. Such visceral scenes mold into each other, mediated through newspapers, screens, postcards, and oral retellings. Humane Insight investigates not only images of black suffering and death, but also the responses, tensions, actions, and humanistic impulses these images produce. In order to attend to the lived dynamics of images, Baker makes various theoretical moves, from discourses on representation and trauma, to humanity and the nature of evidence. Baker astutely intervenes on Susan Sontag's notion of the gaze as the mechanics of optic Othering. For Sontag, the subject who looks-at is always already enacting the power of determination over that which is being looked-upon. Our repeated looking at images of suffering only qualifies as invasive and/or voyeuristic. However, when Baker revisits key scenes of black suffering—the New Orleans LaLaurie fire, post–Civil War lynchings, Emmett Till's open-casket funeral, Civil Rights protests, and Hurricane Katrina fatalities—the experiential framework of the gaze does not hold. For example, Baker considers the visual recoding necessary for Ida B. Wells to shift photographs of lynching from the context of extralegal racist righteousness to that of anti-lynching movement and American shame. Additionally, twentieth-century galleries and exhibitions played a role in mandating new ethical practices of engagement with violent, shared memory. By "shifting the critical gaze from the body or from the image to the idea of humanity" (17), Baker allows for a more comprehensive approach to the ethics, politics, and socialites of looking. Looking-as-praxis is the historical and theoretical possibility that links Baker's case studies and anticipates what more we can do with her interventions. According to William D. Carrigan in The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916, "by the middle of the 20th century, whites were attempting to erase lynching from their historical memories. African Americans, however, were placing the memory at the center of the black freedom struggle" (114). National memory, then, bears this tension of erasure and insistence, of (dis)appearance and reemergence. If we indeed shift critical looking from the image itself to the practice of humanity, perhaps we can approach race, violence, and citizenship—including indigeneity and immigration—through new ethical sightlines. [End Page 324] Jovonna Jones Department of African and African American Studies Harvard University Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Right to Revolt: The Crusade for Racial Justice in Mississippi’s Central Piney Woods by Patricia Michelle Boyett

Reviewed by: Right to Revolt: The Crusade for Racial Justice in Mississippi’s Central Piney Woods by Patricia Michelle Boyett Rebecca Tuuri Right to Revolt: The Crusade for Racial Justice in Mississippi’s Central Piney Woods. By Patricia Michelle Boyett. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015. Pp. xii, 320. $65.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-0430-3.) Patricia Michelle Boyett’s local history Right to Revolt: The Crusade for Racial Justice in Mississippi’s Central Piney Woods examines one of the most historiographically underappreciated yet pivotal sites of the black freedom struggle in the twentieth century. Boyett focuses on the southeastern Mississippi towns of Hattiesburg and Laurel and their respective Forrest and Jones Counties, whose “violent trajectories . . . routinely paralleled each other and often intersected in brutal paths toward wretched ends” (p. 4). Lynchings in this region in the early twentieth century attracted larger mobs than any others in the state and were so brutal that they often gained widespread national attention. Laurel became the headquarters of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers in the 1960s, while white supremacists studied Hattiesburg for its success in derailing black protest through both violent and nonviolent means. In response, local African Americans framed their struggle for equality as a morality play of martyrdom in hopes of attracting national support for and intervention on behalf of their struggle. Boyett shows how their activism, the product of great sacrifice, eventually led to significant social and political gains in the region, though much work remains to be done. Boyett’s research is exhaustive. She mines over eighty archival collections, including the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission files, FBI files, court records, and local and national newspapers. She has also conducted interviews with nearly fifty black and white residents of the Central Piney Woods, many of whom had never before been interviewed. These oral histories, which Boyett has deposited at the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage (COHCH) at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), add a significant amount of material to an already rich collection. She also draws on forty-one other interviews, mostly housed at the COHCH. [End Page 230] This tremendous attention to the voices of the people on the ground is admirable and even more impressive considering that she has condensed this information into highly readable and engaging narrative. Boyett organizes her book chronologically, starting with the creation of a vanguard of local black civil rights leaders who were politicized by World War II; by the brutal wartime lynchings of Howard Wash, Ernest Green, and Charlie Lang; and by the execution of Willie McGee. She shows how this vanguard inspired a revolutionary period of black protest directly before, during, and after Freedom Summer, and she ends with an exploration of a “post–civil rights” fight for black political representation and protection from police brutality (p. 4). Boyett shows that there were repercussions for political activism, highlighting how Mississippi’s white leadership framed, imprisoned, and fatally neglected Clyde Kennard, a decorated army veteran and former University of Chicago student, who tried to enroll in Mississippi Southern College (now USM). The Klan assassinated Forrest County NAACP president Vernon Dahmer in early 1966. The subsequent FBI investigation and trials of Dahmer’s accused killers served as a major turning point in the freedom struggle as the federal response helped deflate the Klan’s power. One of Boyett’s major contributions is her detailed attention to the inner workings of the Klan; corrupt police forces; and crooked prosecutors, judges, and jurors who committed, facilitated, and enabled violence against black activists. Yet violent intimidation did not snuff out the indomitable spirit of black citizens in the Central Piney Woods. Instead they engaged in some of the nation’s most important challenges to white supremacy as they filed suit against Hattiesburg registrar Theron Lynd, the first to be convicted for voter discrimination under the 1960 Civil Rights Act; led the highly publicized Freedom Day march in January 1964; organized one of the largest and most successful Freedom Summer sites in the state; and fought for greater political representation. In Right to Revolt, Patricia Boyett has written the definitive regional history of their struggle. Rebecca...

"What My Generation Makes of America": American Youth Citizenship, Civil Rights Allies, and 1960s Black Freedom Struggle

This article engages questions about the relationship between charismatic leadership and youth action, conceptions of age and competence, childhood pastimes and adult concerns, and private acts and public correspondence. An analysis of children's typed and handwritten letters, notes, poetry, and school pamphlets mailed to public leaders offers a new understanding of 1960s youth protests, rights discourses, and grassroots action. Building on Lori Rotskoff's concept of postage power, this article understands child and teenager letter correspondence with 1960s public leaders as a citizenship practice. By focusing on the world of predominantly, but not exclusively, white, middle-class girls and boys, I argue that such written communication not only acted as a key strategy for children's political participation, but also allowed young people to define such action using lenses uniquely relevant to them as children and teenagers. Bake sales and monetary charity made their citizenship practices visible. School assignments and creative productions provided minors with a medium to assert their moral competence. Markers of childhood, such as jelly beans and The Wizard of Oz, allowed young people to articulate their critical understanding of Jim Crow practices and the violation of constitutional statutes without relinquishing childhood innocence or abandoning youth-based customs.

The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and the Rise of Black Politics in the 1970s by Kenneth Robert Janken

Reviewed by: The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and the Rise of Black Politics in the 1970s by Kenneth Robert Janken Robert W. Widell Jr. The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and the Rise of Black Politics in the 1970s. By Kenneth Robert Janken. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. [x], 264. $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-2483-9.) In March 1972, law enforcement officials arrested seventeen people who they claimed were responsible for setting fire to Mike’s Grocery in Wilmington, North Carolina, and for preventing emergency personnel from responding. Eventually, ten of those people were convicted on some combination of charges related to the incident and sentenced to prison terms that totaled 282 years. Efforts to free the Wilmington Ten coalesced into a movement that reached far beyond the Port City and demanded the attention of the Justice Department, Amnesty International, the Soviet Union, and President Jimmy Carter. Kenneth Robert Janken’s The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and the Rise of Black Politics in the 1970s skillfully traces the emergence and evolution of this movement and provides the definitive account of a major development in the evolution of black politics and protest in the late twentieth century. The story of the Wilmington Ten has its origins in student-led protests over racial discrimination in Wilmington’s newly desegregated schools, and it is there that Janken begins his narrative. An escalating succession of conflicts at the city’s two high schools culminated in a February 1971 school boycott by black students. In the midst of the boycott, a series of fire-bombings, shootings, and other clashes erupted around the city, and several local businesses, including Mike’s Grocery, were burned. A crackdown in the wake of the violence ended the boycott, but activists continued to organize in Wilmington around many of the issues that the boycott had sought to address. This persistent activism drew the ire of state and local officials and is critical, Janken argues, to understanding the motivation behind the prosecution of the Wilmington Ten. Having established the essential state and local context, Janken then convincingly details the myriad ways in which prosecutors, state officials, and judges colluded to deny the Wilmington Ten a fair trial and keep them in prison. Central to these efforts was the use of a key witness [End Page 236] coached by prosecutors through false testimony, a failure to disclose exculpatory evidence to defense attorneys, and elaborate maneuvers to ensure the selection of a jury predisposed to render a guilty verdict. Further, as the case made its way through the appeals process, both state and federal judges proved willing to dismiss or ignore overwhelming evidence of such misconduct. In light of such circumstances, efforts to secure justice for the Wilmington Ten could not be confined to the courts, and Janken describes how a “vital radical Left” mobilized a vast network of supporters into a united front able to bring national and international pressure to bear (p. 1). Drawing on a wealth of sources, including an impressive array of interviews and oral histories, Janken’s chronicle of this movement is convincing and comprehensive. The Wilmington Ten reads as a well-paced narrative of the case, but it does not lack for important insights into the trajectory of the black freedom struggle. Janken demonstrates how a new generation of activists in the 1970s continued to organize around persistent concerns such as unequal education and police brutality while simultaneously drawing upon networks and institutions established by earlier generations. Crucially, Janken also documents how intensified repression by local, state, and federal officials undermined such efforts, deliberately forcing activists to shift energy and resources toward dealing with the consequences of that repression. Tragically, as Janken notes in the conclusion, the coalition that eventually secured the release of the Wilmington Ten was not able to repair fully the lives of the nine men and one woman at the center of the case. Nor was such a coalition accessible to countless others across the country who found themselves caught in an expanding carceral state that officials increasingly relied on to criminalize dissent. Simultaneously thorough and concise, deeply researched, and insightful, The Wilmington Ten deserves a wide readership...

James and Esther Cooper Jackson: Love and Courage in the Black Freedom Movement by Sara Rzeszutek Haviland

Reviewed by: James and Esther Cooper Jackson: Love and Courage in the Black Freedom Movement by Sara Rzeszutek Haviland Carolyn Dupont (bio) James and Esther Cooper Jackson: Love and Courage in the Black Freedom Movement. Sara Rzeszutek Haviland. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. Pp. 359. $45.00. cloth) James and Esther Cooper Jackson remain largely unknown in [End Page 118] popular narratives of the civil rights movement. Even in the scholarly literature, their stature as central civil rights figures has failed to garner them adequate attention. This accessible dual biography of the activist couple offers an opportunity for their story to reach the wider audience it deserves. James and Esther Cooper Jackson: Love and Courage in the Black Freedom Movement chronicles the relationship and parallel careers of two lives utterly intertwined in the quest for black Americans’ full humanity. In an engrossing narrative spanning nine decades, Sara Rzeszutek Haviland weaves romance, war, separation, and struggle in a story that speaks to central themes in civil rights, gender, and family history. The Jacksons lived the long civil rights movement, beginning as activists in the 1930s and continuing as key leaders throughout their sixty-three-year marriage. Their story demonstrates the fluidity of ideology within the movement, the national—not merely southern—scope of the struggle, the movement’s international context, its roots in radical labor struggles, and the central role of women, among other important themes. Haviland’s narrative highlights the fluidity and variety of activist efforts in the twentieth century. Although James, who was usually referred to as Jack, joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) in 1931 and remained a lifelong member, he never insisted that others in the freedom struggle, including his wife, adopt his philosophy. His particular brand of communism privileged the struggle for racial equality as its top priority. Although Esther did join the party and communism informed her commitments to the black freedom struggle, she displayed little commitment to CPUSA organization and allowed her membership to lapse. The book focuses on a relationship as much as it narrates two intertwined lives. The Jacksons found their way to each other through their shared commitment to black equality. Also fierce advocates of gender equality, the couple forged a relationship in which Esther’s career and activist endeavors were equal to—and occasionally even greater than—Jack’s. In spite of their deep love for one another—abundantly documented in an immense cache of letters from the World War II [End Page 119] years—the Jackson’s relationship suffered intense trials. Shortly after their 1941 marriage, Jack was drafted into the army, and they spent the next three years apart while he worked on an unstimulating assignment in Burma. For her part, Esther remained highly active with the Southern Negro Youth Congress and even missed Jack’s postwar homecoming because of a trip to London as a delegate to the first World Youth Conference. The Jacksons’ relationship suffered further in the Cold War climate that stigmatized communism and effectively made CPUSA membership illegal. Indicted under the Smith Act (1951), Jack went underground for five years to escape prosecution. The couple had no contact during this period. While Esther worried about her husband and endured the difficulties of life as a single parent, intense FBI scrutiny and harassment magnified these problems. The FBI put all family members under surveillance, made threatening phone calls, and arranged the expulsion of the Jacksons’ daughter Kathy from a nursery school program. Esther used the ordeal to write a pamphlet about the family’s plight, exposing the hypocrisy of the FBI’s intense anticommunist efforts as juxtaposed against its tepid endeavors to find and prosecute white perpetrators of crimes against blacks. Esther’s career ultimately eclipsed her husband’s. Both served as journal editors—he for the CPUSA paper The Worker and she for Freedomways, which she helped to found with W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois. The Communist Party declined so precipitously under Cold War repression that Jack’s audience dwindled. Esther, however, sat at the center of unfolding, ongoing, and pivotal conversations about the freedom struggle. She valued dialogue and exchange over ideological commitments to particular philosophies...

“Character Assassins”: How the FBI Used the Issue of Homosexuality against the Black Freedom Struggle

Abstract This article examines Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) inquiries into and counterintelligence actions against gay and lesbian activists in the Black freedom struggle. Drawing on dozens of individual Freedom of Information Act requests and the files of the counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), this article argues that the FBI’s investigation and exposure of gay and lesbian activists in the Black freedom struggle served as a tactic typical of the FBI’s attempts to discredit and sow division within and among civil rights and Black Power groups. Prior to creating a formal counterintelligence program against the movement, the bureau focused its efforts on often ineffective attempts at outing individual activists. With the creation in 1967 of a formal COINTELPRO against so-called “Black Nationalist–Hate Groups” and “Black Extremists,” however, the bureau drew on this tactic to even greater effect. While other scholars have highlighted extreme tactics employed in COINTELPRO, like fomenting outright violence, this article finds little evidence of that. Instead, a more typical technique of the FBI was the use of poison-pen letters or leaflets that outed gays in the movement to fellow activists or reporters or raised the issue of homosexuality to sow division within the movement and between organizations. In the end, this article draws attention to a rarely discussed issue in Black freedom struggle historiography—the role of gay and lesbian activists and the added burdens they faced from opposition forces—while reexamining COINTELPRO to gain a better understanding of the actions that typified its efforts to discredit and divide the movement.

The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 1896–1968 by Chanelle N. Rose

<i>The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 1896–1968</i> by Chanelle N. Rose

“To Stand upon My Constitutional Rights”: The NAACP and World War II—Era Sexual Exclusion

Abstract This article analyzes the manner in which the Veterans’ Affairs Bureau of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) facilitated the discharge challenges of Black military veterans removed for same-sex intimacies, from 1944 to 1950. It argues that the Veterans’ Affairs Bureau’s general campaign to combat racism within the military and related bureaucracies created opportunities for Black veterans discharged for same-sex intimacies to challenge homophobia within these same entities. This particular moment of advocacy suggests that, far from exhibiting unyielding homophobia, the NAACP during the immediate postwar period engaged with Black queer individuals/communities in ways that were determined, in large measure, by the pursuit of racial equality and advancement. Relying primarily on the extant records of the NAACP, this essay makes three contributions to the existing historical studies about mid-twentieth-century Black freedom struggles. First, this article broadens the sexual politics associated with midcentury civil rights mobilizations to include emerging narratives of same-sex intimacies alongside long-standing assumptions of Black hyper(hetero)sexuality. Second, this essay demonstrates that the NAACP’s response to the removal of Black veterans using “blue discharges” was informed by a desire to facilitate equitable access to benefits associated with the GI Bill, as well as the disproportionate prosecution of Black men for sex-related statutes against rape and miscegenation. Third, this article contributes to the growing historical scholarship on the experiences of and communal attitudes toward Black queer communities.

The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship; Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice

This thoroughly engaging book brings welcome attention to Pauli Murray, an activist, writer, and legal scholar who, as an African American, a woman, a socialist, and a lesbian, was often marginalized and who merits greater attention in accounts of the black freedom struggle and feminist movements. Centered in the correspondence of more than twenty years and three hundred items with Eleanor Roosevelt, but covering the entire range of her life, The Firebrand and the First Lady is the closest work we have to a scholarly biography of Murray. Like Roosevelt, Murray lost both parents as a child; relatives sheltered her and encouraged her educational ambitions. Graduating from Hunter College in 1933, she eked out a living with short-lived, underpaid jobs and employment with the Works Progress Administration. Her relationship with Roosevelt began in 1938 when she wrote the president—and sent a copy to the First Lady—that she was denied admission to graduate school at the University of North Carolina because of her race. Eleanor Roosevelt's cautionary response urging patience and “conciliatory methods” clashed with Murray's profound sense of injustice and lack of hesitance to point out where she felt the president was wrong (p. 30). Repeatedly, Murray beseeched Roosevelt to intercede with the president (for whom Murray never voted) to take positions on racial issues that he deemed politically impossible. If this pressure and Murray's occasional criticism of Roosevelt herself made the First Lady uncomfortable, she nonetheless continued to welcome Murray's thoughts, invited her to her homes, sent flowers on special occasions, and drew on Murray's experiences and ideas in her column, “My Day.”

The Diasporic Journeys of Louise Little: Grassroots Garveyism, the Midwest, and Community Feminism

Abstract This article demonstrates the importance of women in leading Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) at the grassroots level, the ways Garveyite women forged “community feminism,” and the understudied importance of the U.S. Midwest and Canada as key sites of diasporic protest through the life, activism, and legacy of Malcolm X’s mother, Louise Langdon Norton Little. Born in Grenada in 1900, Little stands as a major figure in twentieth-century black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and the African Diaspora. Passionately committed to black self-determination and fiercely proud of African-descended people, she emerged as an important grassroots leader in the UNIA, which claimed six million members in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, Central America, Africa, and Europe during the 1920s. She joined the UNIA in Montreal, Canada, after she emigrated there after World War I in search of a better life. In the coming years, Little served as an officer in the UNIA division in Omaha, Nebraska, and avidly discussed politics with Garvey when he visited the Littles’ home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1922. However, The Autobiography of Malcolm X portrays Louise Little one-dimensionally as a wretched figure, while historian Manning Marable’s biography on Malcolm X minimizes her active role in developing his political consciousness and in leading broader black freedom struggles. These prevailing narratives affirm literary scholar Carole Boyce Davies’s observation about the ways black women have been erased from scholarly analysis of the black radical tradition. Tracing the history of Louise Little provides a lens for appreciating the importance of women in leading Pan-Africanist movements, the making of community feminism at the grassroots level, and the importance of the U.S. Midwest and Canada as sites of diasporic protest.

Charisma and the Fictions of Black LeadershipExodus Politics: Civil Rights and Leadership in African American Literature and CultureMartin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature

Charisma and the Fictions of Black LeadershipExodus Politics: Civil Rights and Leadership in African American Literature and CultureMartin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature

Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi

Tiyi M. Morris's account of the work of Womanpower Unlimited (wu), a small Mississippi-based women's organization with a predominately African American membership, begins with an explanation of the invisibility of such groups in historical memory. For many black women, Morris asserts, taking care of their communities was simply “what Black women did; without fanfare or expecting praise” (p. 13). Morris's account of wu uncovers this vital communal work and provides important evidence of black women's activism, not only in Mississippi but also on a global stage. wu sprang up in Jackson in May 1961, when the formidable Claire Collins Harvey, local business owner and activist, joined a delegation of prominent black citizens determined to observe the trial of the young freedom riders who had been arrested in their city. Harvey was shocked by the physical vulnerability of the freedom riders she observed and rallied her allies to provide clothing and other personal items for them. From this small effort to demonstrate community support and maternal protection emerged wu, determined to wield the values of black women in support of the civil rights movement. While wu was a relatively short-lived group, emerging in 1961 and disbanding in 1968, it was involved in a number of campaigns, including consumer boycotts, educational projects, efforts to increase black voter registration in Mississippi, and work with the Wednesdays in Mississippi project to bring influential northern white women on brief visits of support during Freedom Summer in 1964.