Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Research Articles

Creating Community through Struggle and Song | Freedom in the Air: A Documentary on Albany, Georgia, 1961–1962

This commentary introduces readers to the documentary record of the Albany Movement produced by Guy Carawan and Alan Lomax and released on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) own record label. Mixing registers and genres, the record illustrates how the civil rights struggle in Albany infused old things with new meanings, creating a new community in the process.

Taking a longer historical view of America’s renaming moment: The role of Black onomastic activism within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Renaming practices are increasingly deployed as a political technology in USA campaigns to do greater justice to the rights, histories, and identities of historically marginalized groups. African American social actors and groups have been especially active in this onomastic or naming activism. To fully make sense of this renaming moment, which is often popularly misrepresented as brand new, we outline an approach that takes a longer view of the history of Black naming by drawing together ideas from the field of Black geographies, specifically Katherine McKittrick’s ideas about Black livingness, and our work in critical place naming studies. As an illustration, we conduct a study of SNCC and the way civil rights workers and mobilized communities valued names and deployed onomastic tactics—the (re)naming of people, places, and institutions as part of their creative and grass-roots activism. These onomastic tactics facilitated and accompanied SNCC’s gathering of antiracist intelligence, constructing a subaltern transportation system, and carrying out a revolutionary remaking of place and affective atmosphere in the face of oppression. We not only seek to add a needed racial genealogy of ongoing naming struggles in America, but also use SNCC’s onomastic tactics to tell a story of the Civil Rights Movement generally not well understood and to expand what counts as activism and who counts as activists beyond canonized celebrations of the Movement in popular media and education. As an important guide to current naming struggles, the SNCC experience is instructive of the fact that renaming alone cannot count as liberation. Rather, the efficacy of naming as a civil rights practice comes from the assembling and mobilizing of names with the broader capacities of people, material places, and political practices and discourses.

The Rhetoric and the Reality of the New Southern Strategy: Courtland Cox, Nsé Ufot, and Charles V. Taylor Jr. in Conversation

Abstract: This article is an edited intergenerational conversation among Courtland Cox, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s; Nsé Ufot, former executive director of the New Georgia Project; and Charles V. Taylor Jr., executive director of the Mississippi State NAACP, on April 7, 2023. This discussion explores key issues in today's national politics, especially the role of southern Black and Brown voters and strategists, and calls for the emergence of a New Southern Strategy. Cox drew on his work with SNCC in Lowndes County, Alabama, in the 1960s, which focused on voter registration and the development of the Lowndes County Freedom Party, while Ufot discussed her work leading the New Georgia Project as they transformed Georgia's electorate, and Taylor highlighted his work on the 2015 Better Schools, Better Jobs Ballot Initiative 42 in Mississippi.

The Voting Rights Act beyond the Headlines

Abstract: This article introduces readers to the ongoing African American struggle for full voting rights from Reconstruction to the present. It explains some of the significant ways white supremacists (mis)used the legal and political system, along with violence and economic terrorism, to suppress the Black vote. The essay gives particular attention to the collective work of African Americans to secure voting rights during the modern Civil Rights Movement, with a focus on the organizing work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), mentored by Ella Baker. While many people give well-known leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson credit for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, SNCC workers immersed themselves in communities for bottom-up organizing to demand the vote and make it impossible for the country to continue to ignore the violent suppression of Black rights. The article concludes with contemporary voting rights challenges.

“Each One, Teach One”

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

The Making of Triple Jeopardy

The Making of Triple Jeopardy Tiana U. Wilson (bio) Over fifty years ago, Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) members made their debut with the first women-of-color-focused newspaper of the New Left movement in the United States. The name of their newspaper, Triple Jeopardy, also reflected these activists' political standpoint and theorization of power—how it is constructed, maintained, and eradicated. In a telephone interview, cofounder and leading Triple Jeopardy editor Frances Beal reflected on the group's ideological contributions, explaining, "A lot of the academic people just talk about it in terms of identity, racism, sexism, and classism, and the intersection of those things. Well, we talked about it in terms of the struggles against racism, against sexism, and against imperialism, and the intersection of those struggles "(Frances Beal, pers. comm., October 3, 2022). The idea of triple jeopardy operated as a framework, a lens for understanding structural oppression on a national and international scale. Members also utilized it as a tool to connect Black, Latina, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Native American women's domestic issues to a larger movement against colonialism and global capitalism. Their newspaper thus served as a political education platform for members to map these intellectual and material linkages. As articulated from the very first Triple Jeopardy issue published in 1971, studying "revolutionary theory and tactics" was the primary avenue to changing women of color's socioeconomic conditions in the United States and abroad (TWWA 1971, 16). More recently, scholars have begun to critically engage with the content of Triple Jeopardy, its internationalist, feminist, and revolutionary components. However, few explore the creation story of the newspaper and how members produced and disseminated copies. Examining the "behind the scenes" activities of the TWWA's newspaper launch contextualizes the [End Page 201] group's pioneering efforts to envision a socialist society with women of color struggles at the forefront. In my telephone interview with Fran Beal, she graciously shared her early memories of the newspaper and recalled names, events, locations, and dates of important and influential forces that shaped the TWWA's decision to develop Triple Jeopardy. Recovering the process of making the newspaper, especially its first issue, offers insight into the ways Black, Asian, and Latina women worked together under one collective to empower themselves and voice their concerns in national and international discourses of revolution and liberation. Beal accredited two previous activist experiences with equipping her with the necessary skills to lead Triple Jeopardy's editorial team. First, she learned the art of journalism from leftist French teachers while studying abroad in Paris between 1960 and 1966. Beal remembered, "I had a whole class on how to write an essay. I learned about the who, what, when, where, how, and why approach to journalism. [. . .] And we recruited stories from some people. We didn't have that much luck with that. But we essentially taught ourselves to write stories" (pers. comm., 2022). When Beal arrived in Paris, she was planted in the strong African American expatriate community that had been well established since the interwar period, and she met Caribbean and African students from formerly French colonies. Beal advanced her journalism skills in an African diasporic environment, where students engaged in radical internationalist politics and debated strategies and tactics for the larger anti-colonial movement. Her time abroad sowed the seeds of her founding work with the TWWA's newspaper, which included a feminist and anti-imperialist analysis of international events relevant to Third World communities. Organizing with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) also prepared Beal to spearhead Triple Jeopardy. During her years abroad, Beal spent the summers in the United States, visiting family and working with SNCC. When she permanently relocated to New York in 1966 and took a research position with the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), she also continued her activism with the local SNCC chapter. Beal joined the International Affairs Commission under the leadership of James Forman. By that time, SNCC's California branch was regularly publishing the organization's newspaper, The Movement, which covered domestic civil rights efforts and global liberation struggles. Beal drew inspiration from Forman, whom she recalled as the "one who said, we...

Jeans and their Fashionable Meanings: Revisiting Beverly Gordon's Cultural Conceptual Framework

Jeans and their Fashionable Meanings: Revisiting Beverly Gordon's Cultural Conceptual Framework

Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson

Reviewed by: Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson Leigh Ann Wheeler Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer. By Kate Clifford Larson. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. viii, 322. $27.95, ISBN 978-0-19-009684-7.) More than forty years after it ended, Fannie Lou Hamer’s remarkable life is being rediscovered by scholars and filmmakers. Kate Clifford Larson’s Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer joins this wave of recent biographical attention to the inimitable civil rights leader, songstress, and maker of what fellow activist John Lewis called “good trouble.” The book [End Page 185] opens with Hamer’s inauspicious beginnings as the twentieth child of tenant farmers in order to highlight the unlikelihood of her later rise to local and national prominence. But even as Larson chronicles Hamer’s improbable trajectory, she emphasizes Hamer’s ordinariness as one of countless women whose grassroots organizing and everyday leadership made the civil rights movement in Mississippi. Hamer’s mother, Ella Townsend, set an example for her daughter that prioritized faith in God, pride and self-respect, storytelling and education, and protection of her family—by gun if necessary. But like so many Black children in the rural South, Hamer came up poor and left elementary school for field work. And like so many Black women in the rural South, Hamer found that she had been sterilized without her consent after seeking gyneco-logical care. It was to this experience—her “Mississippi appendectomy”—that Larson traces Hamer’s enraged political awakening, which Hamer enacted first through working with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in the 1950s, and later with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Council of Federated Organizations (p. 48). Threats of violence, acts of actual violence, and injuries resulting from violence shadowed the rest of Hamer’s life. The brutal beatings she endured after being arrested for attempting to integrate a segregated bus depot in Winona, Mississippi, left her emotionally scarred and physically maimed but more determined than ever. Over and over again, she told her story, sharing excruciating details with the world when she testified on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in 1964. Larson skillfully explains the complex political maneuverings that under-cut the MFDP in 1964 but shows how early failure laid a foundation for greater success in 1968, ultimately feeding into a major party realignment that she alternately celebrates and laments. Even as the Democratic Party transformed from a “status-quo-oriented political machine into a multiracial and progressive voter movement”—a development that led to the election of a Black president and vice president in the twenty-first century—the Republican Party adopted a surprisingly durable “southern strategy” rooted in white fear of civil rights and Black voters that continues to shape conservative politics today (pp. 4, 223). Feminism and concerns about gender as it intersected with race also inspired Hamer’s activism. Aware that Black men faced greater and more certain violence, Hamer and other Black women often assumed positions of leadership in order to protect their men. Hamer also argued for gender equality at the DNC and extended that effort by joining with other women’s rights advocates to found the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. Hamer did not embrace all aspects of the day’s feminist agenda, however, and she made no secret of her opposition to birth control and abortion. Larson’s is not simply a cradle-to-grave treatment of Hamer’s life; it situates Hamer’s story in context, providing the reader with a rich understanding of relevant local and national events—including the impact of New Deal policies on Black tenant farmers in Mississippi and the effects of World War II [End Page 186] service on returning veterans—as well as events more directly related to civil rights. Walk with Me concludes on notes of despair but also hope. Hamer “waged a battle that cost her almost everything,” Larson admits, including “her health and personal relationships” (p. 4). On the upside, Hamer’s life shows us that...

SNCC's Stories: The African American Freedom Movement in the Civil Rights South

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was an instrumental wing of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. This grassroots organization was organized by young college and university students that were committed to manifesting political change. Monteith's SNCC's Stories represents a meaningful extension to the robust scholarship already chronicling the important history and the freedom fighters who participated in the movement. SNCC's former executive director, James Forman, states that “all of us are a book” in his description of SNCC members (1). In his estimation, the membership of SNCC do not tell a singular story, instead their perspectives reflect a complex narrative and should be understood in this way. Monteith interrogates this claim in her book by affording critical attention to creative works that discuss the organization. Monteith argues that SNCC's membership's skills extend beyond politicizing the problems of the South through hands-on tactics such as boycotts, sit-ins, and voting registration drives. Their collective strength is revealed in the writing they produced. However, Monteith suggests there is a gap in the publishing history surrounding SNCC. In particular, she asserts the creative writing contributions of SNCC's members is often overlooked in scholarship about the organization. She contends that the memoirs and political essays from the activists receive wide critical attention, whereas other creative works such as fiction and poetry fail to garner analysis. She seeks to fill this gap in the critical conversation through her book project.Her book is organized into nine chapters including a preface, introduction, and epilogue. Her introduction includes a comprehensive historiography of texts about the movement, figureheads, and the organization. This chapter represents a helpful resource for any scholar interested in expanding their knowledge of the history of SNCC. Chapter 1 connects James Forman's unpublished novel Thin White Line with Michael Thelwell's short story “Direct Action” and Peter de Lissovoy's autobiographical novel Feelgood. She contends that the writers used their personal experiences on the ground to craft dynamic works that show the complex reality of freedom fighters. Chapter 2 investigates the use of folklore in the characterization of figures Supersnick and Junebug Jabbo Jones whereas chapter 3 explores the syntax used in field reports as an inventive style that eventually makes its way into the personal writing of the reporters. Chapter 4 represents a departure from Monteith's stated aim. She explores figures closely associated with SNCC such as Howard Zinn, who taught students in the organization. This chapter examines professional writers affiliated with the organization but who were not members of SNCC. Chapter 5 focuses on writers who composed during the movement and their continued creative writing exploits. Chapter 6 examines SNCC's connection to the Black Arts Movement and Black popular writers and presses of the era whereas chapter 7 connects SNCC to Pan-Africanism and the stylistic connections to BAM writers. Chapters 8 and 9 consider novelists’ fictionalization of the movement in texts like Julius Lester's All our Wounds Forgiven, William Mahoney's Black Jacob, and Long George Alley by Richard Hall.Monteith's text is ambitious in its aim to extend the critical conversation surrounding SNCC to published and unpublished creative writing texts from writers of the era. What is lacking is a clear focus on the members of SNCC and a collective critical literary framework to understand the historical and political agenda of the literature. Although the writing is connected to a specific moment in history, it is also a part of a cannon of African American writers committed to creating social criticism both didactic and compelling. Nevertheless, Monteith's contribution is her ability to expose readers to lesser-known texts and writers from the Civil Rights Movement.

On (Not)Waiting for Godot: Absurdity and Action in Mississippi

AbstractThis article traces the reinvention and circulation of existential thought and action through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the first half of the 1960s, especially in Mississippi. Here, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bob Moses, and the founders of the Free Southern Theater, among others, immersed themselves in the existential questions of freedom and responsibility, pointing the way toward ethical action at a time when there was, as the characters of the FST’s production of Waiting for Godot put it, “nothing to be done.”

Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez: A Tribute

Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez:A Tribute Sarah M. Quesada (bio) and Maylei Blackwell (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Portrait of a young Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez, by Melanie Cervantes, Dignidad Rebelde. [End Page 996] Long before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turned red lipstick into a political statement, Elizabeth "Betita" Sutherland Martínez donned it as a badge of audacity. After all, Martínez epitomized the unapologetic scholar-activist for Chicano studies and the world. A legendary advocate and Chicana journalist, she often appeared on the front lines battling on behalf of numerous causes, from access to reproductive health care to racial justice, to equal rights in an early antiglobalization movement. From the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to supporting African decolonization at the UN, to fighting for Latinx workers' rights during the global shift to neoliberalism, hers was a legacy of multiracial, feminist, and internationalist solidarity. Ninety-five years after her birth, Martínez succumbed to vascular dementia and passed away on June 29, 2021, in San Francisco, California. While her physical presence has vanished, her legacy could not be more enduring. Martínez's lifetime of writing, organizing, teaching, and inclusive militancy creates a framework for American studies that this tribute seeks to highlight. In particular, her additional roles as a social movement knowledge holder and historian, a committed mentor and a bridge to youth activists, a women of color feminist, and a prolific documentarian underscore lessons learned from her lifetime that serve as an antidote to and an inspiration for a troubling present era. Reeling from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the twenty-first century has seen the rise of totalitarianism in Russia, China, and the United States, the latter via the growth of Trumpism. The related proliferation of white supremacist movements and a virulent anti-immigrant hatred have fueled an unbridled epidemic of racially motivated gun violence and threats to women's rights. But Martínez's legacy provides a framework for scholar-activists to address these challenges with an inclusive platform modeled after her commitments to social justice and her radical democratic thinking in the face of despair and uncertainty. One of the Chicano Movement's most powerful thinkers and prolific writers, Martínez understood well the legacies of coloniality. In a truly Fanonian fashion, she perceived the legacies of colonial [End Page 997] power as equally affecting both domestic and international communities of color. Likewise, she heeded the urgency of organizing against patriarchal and white-dominated organizations to effect equality for women, especially those of color. Finally, she believed in the need to write resistance into the archive, passionately documenting the plight of others so that we might all follow in the activists' footsteps. This tribute provides insight into Martínez's exemplary written legacy and untiring resistance. After all, those who knew her can still hear her chanting against foreign intervention in "Raza Sí, Guerra No!" For those who did not know her, this tribute provides an access point to that legacy. The contributions in this forum feature the intricacies of Martínez's internationalism, her multigenerational activism and multiracial feminism, as well as the foundational role of her memory work for social change. We examine these three pillars of her life's work mainly chronologically and thus start from the beginning years of Martínez's life. Racial and Internationalist Solidarities Elizabeth "Betita" Sutherland Martínez was born in 1925 in Washington, DC, to a Mexican immigrant father who was a diplomat and later a Georgetown literature professor, and an Anglo mother who was a high school Spanish teacher. Raised bicultural and bilingual, her dual identity is reflective of a painful in-betweenness that marked her identity. The forms of exclusion and relative privileges of being biracial while growing up in a segregated, whites-only Maryland suburb can be seen in her nom de plume. She first used her mother's maiden name, "Liz Sutherland," as she came of age as a writer and journalist in the Jim Crow era, later adopting "Betita Martínez," as part of the Civil Rights Movement and her lifelong commitment to racial, economic, and gender justice.1 While her life journey...

#Betita TaughtMe: Risk-Taking as a Coalitional Gesture

#Betita TaughtMe:Risk-Taking as a Coalitional Gesture Rafael R. Solórzano (bio) Betita's History of Risk-Taking Movidas One cannot discuss the waves of youth activism in 1990s California without talking about the indispensable femtorship of Elizabeth "Betita" Martínez.1 As a freedom fighter and icon of the civil rights, Chicana/o, and women's movements, Betita's accessibility and popular education tools shaped youth of color's political activism and "understanding of their roles in social change" over many generations.2 For these youth, "to fight for justice alongside" Betita "was to connect to a lineage of nearly a century of revolutionary struggle."3 As a writer and organizer, Martínez documented and contributed to multiple freedom movements—from San Francisco, California, to Washington, DC. Her commitment to revolutionary politics and the fight against white supremacy led her to become director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) New York office in her forties. She continuously was part of young militant activist efforts to confront "southern strongholds of racism" despite its risks.4 Not only was "the work … grueling, especially for a single parent," as Tony Platt documented, Betita also carried out her activism in areas considered too dangerous to organize, such as rural Mississippi. In 1964, SNCC launched the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project (MFSP) to draw attention to the ways Mississippi Black people and civil rights workers experienced intimidation and violent oppression.5 As part of SNCC's increasing militancy in the region, Betita's stouthearted participation in this project helped document and build a homegrown freedom movement that consisted of traveling across the South to interview civil rights leaders and collect letters from volunteers. She later published this material in Letters from Mississippi (1965). But the act was particularly perilous, and in fact, scholars and organizers have acknowledged that the MFSP movement took "tremendous risks to combat the evil of racism."6 I open this piece with Betita's contributions to SNCC and MFSP to [End Page 1031] situate her activist past and how her many years of activism offered Bay Area youth of color activists in the nineties an understanding of the transformative potential that risk-taking and coalition building can facilitate. As the movement scholar Karma Chavez writes, Betita provides a "helpful model for how to think about such coalitional orientations."7 In a conversation with Angela Davis on May 12, 1993, at UC San Diego, Betita emphasized how building coalitions in a "me-first" generation after the Reagan-Bush administration requires experimentation, risk, and self-sacrifice, similar to the seven Black youth who sat down at the Woolworth's lunch counter at the first sit-in on April 1, 1960.8 She shared: "I want to emphasize the point about risk. There's not a climate of taking risks today. …There has to be some of that spirit today. Let's experiment, we don't have all the answers; we certainly don't have to have the ideology down, you know the whole package. But let's see some things that are wrong and try to change them, and take risks."9 So much of Martínez's writings and activism teaches us to reconsider the possibilities of risk-taking practices, or what I like to call "risk-taking movidas," on behalf of Black, Indigenous, queer, and youth of color activists. Risk-taking movidas not only are high-risk actions linked to activists' personal costs of time and energy and anticipated dangers but are resourceful undertakings meant to inspire mobilizations that center a new vision of racial solidarity among youth of color, queer youth, and women of color.10 At times, these new communityorganizing practices involve discomfort, fear, and sacrifice, such as the sit-ins at bus terminals and lunch counters led by Black leaders in the 1950s and 1960s. It is this teaching that remains most prominent and, I believe, inspired many of us youth of color in California to shift from our comfort zones in order to challenge the intensification of nativism and the state's youth abandonment by building a massive coalition in the 1990s. Drawing on my experience as a queer Chicano youth organizer in academic...

And the Mural Came Down: Race, Removal, and Reckoning in the Sunshine City

In 1966 Joseph Waller and other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee removed George Snow Hill’s Picnicking at Pass-a-Grille (1945) from St. Petersburg, Florida’s, City Hall. For more than two decades, the mural had hung alongside its pendant, Hill’s Fishing on the Pier (1945). Together, the paintings offered a vision of civic progress that denied Black audiences full participation in public life. Yet even in its absence, Picnicking at Pass-a-Grille troubles the present. The Sunshine City’s deferred reckoning with its public artworks and urban projects of racial oppression is a local history with national resonances.

Soyica Diggs Colbert, Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry

Soyica Diggs Colbert reveals how Lorraine Hansberry’s theatre-making practices were deeply tied to the politics of the Civil Rights era. Colbert pays special attention to how Hansberry interpreted Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialism through the lens of Black liberation and the politics of W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

The Language of Liberation: A Conversation with Ruby Sales

The Language of Liberation: A Conversation with Ruby Sales Kim Pearson (bio) and Angelle Richardson (bio) Introduction When Ruby Sales was a graduate student in history at Princeton University in the 1970s, she said she “stayed in trouble.” “I was not going to debate whether or not Black people were human beings,” Sales recalled. She clashed with professors who expected her to refer to enslavers as “masters” and “planters” (“As if they planted anything!” she said). When her professors referred to plantations, she insisted on referring to “sites of terror.” “The minute I say ‘Master,’ I’m aggrandizing what they did,” she said, adding, “The language itself causes Black people to commit existential suicide.” Ruby Sales has been thinking about the language of liberation for many years now. If you look up her name, you will likely come across this episode: In August 1965, as a seventeen-year-old first-semester college student, along with other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), she was jailed for six days for helping Black sharecroppers in Lowndes County, Alabama, protest exploitation by local landowners. After being released from jail, she and three other volunteers went to a store in Hayneville to buy sodas. A white man stood on the steps, raised a shotgun, and shot at Ruby. Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a twenty-six-year-old seminarian, pushed Ruby aside and took the fatal bullet instead.1 Another member of the group was badly wounded. The murderer, a part-time sheriff, was acquitted of manslaughter.2 From that time until today, Ruby Sales has honored Daniels’s memory. She spoke about him in her 2018 TED talk, “How We Can Start to Heal the Pain of Racial Division.” However, her life has been much more than one horrific moment. As she told me and my co-interviewer Angelle Richardson, when we think about our individual and collective trauma, we should simultaneously think about “the ways in which [we] have navigated the trauma, so that we don’t become the trauma that we have experienced.” In our interview, Sales explains how the parents and teachers of her Jim Crow childhood instilled a “pedagogy of somebodyness” that propelled her life’s work and her ability to persevere in the face of white supremacist terror. She complemented that early education with a history degree from Manhattanville College and a MDiv from Episcopal Seminary. Through her nonprofit organization, the Spirit House Project, Sales has been convening conversations and collaborations aimed at bringing the practical wisdom of the Southern Freedom movement to bear upon the current challenges of what the World Economic Forum calls “the fourth industrial revolution,” characterized by the blending of the “physical, digital and biological worlds in ways that create huge promise and potential peril.”3 She wants to see more focus on how we confront the real and potential perils of this transformation for Black people. [End Page 19] We spoke to Ms. Sales in February 2022. What follows are a few excerpts of that conversation, along with resources for further exploration of the topics broached in our discussion. Kim Pearson: A few days ago, you published a post on Facebook paying tribute to Mrs. Catherine Shores, whom you described as one of your beloved high school teachers. You called the roll of several teachers, along with your parents, and you credited them with creating “a community filled with love and generosity, coupled with a spirit and pedagogy of somebodyness.” Tell us about what Mrs. Shores and her colleagues did for you. Ruby Sales: Mrs. Shores and the other teachers who I named in that post are part of a community project that went all the way back to about 1866, when Black men who were the first generation from the community of enslaved Africans met in Selma, Alabama, where they endeavored to educate the youth for the advancement of the race, and preservation of our rights and liberties. And that became the community project throughout the South. Education was seen as a springboard to liberation. They were race men and women. The advancement of the race was inextricably tied into their own personal ambitions, or how they saw themselves. So we grew...

“The Trickbag [of] the Press”

Abstract Throughout the heady year of 1966, a clash over Black Power's meaning took place that would come to profoundly shape public perceptions of the movement. On one side of the battle stood Black Power's proponents, especially the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which endeavored to explain that the strategy centered on Black self-determination and prioritized intraracial organizing. On the other side, movement moderates were joined by establishment liberals and the national white press; they insisted Black Power was a violent turn in the movement that disavowed integration and aimed to kick white people out of the struggle. As the fight wore on, it became clear that various news media were misappropriating SNCC to shape public perceptions of Black Power as “antiwhite.” This article deconstructs the antiwhite frame that the nation's print media built around Black Power during that pivotal year. It does so by delineating faulty reporting practices—from encouraging and then ventriloquizing Black leaders’ criticisms, to simplistically equating Black Power with Black nationalism, to alleging the discovery of a smoking gun that revealed Black Power's “true,” diabolical meaning. In doing so, this paper shows that interrogating print coverage of the movement complicates the longstanding and romantic idea that news reporters proved one of the Black freedom movement's greatest assets. Indeed, in examining print rather than broadcast coverage of SNCC and Black Power in 1966, it becomes clear that print media did more than construct an antiwhite frame that villainized SNCC. It also made Black Power about white people and legitimized a backlash.

Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio

Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio

Moral Faith and the Legacy of John Lewis's Political Vision of “Good Trouble”

AbstractThe late congressman John Lewis spent most of his political life engaging Black Power's commitment to economic and political freedom through a political vocabulary that aligned with his deeply held beliefs in nonviolence, human rights activism, and moral faith. The tension between the Black radical left and establishment Black politics dates back to Lewis's clash with elite Black leaders over the content of his prepared address for the 1963 March on Washington. The address provides a glimpse into Lewis's complicated political legacy. The youngest speaker at the March, Lewis faced the daunting task of both representing the political philosophy of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and meeting the expectations of established civil rights leaders. Negotiating the political interests of the organizers of the March alongside the demands of SNCC foreshadowed the congressman's political vocation: a lifetime of civil rights advocacy through a politics of respectability and Black Power's political philosophy of freedom and economic transformation. Lewis's political legacy is complicated; and yet, it was fueled by an unabashed commitment to Black freedom struggles, human rights activism, and racial reconciliation.

New Black Power

In 1966, the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee stood in Mississippi and raised a call, “What do we want?” A resounding response poured from hundreds of voices, “Black Power!” (Jeffries 171). This was the first time that the two words came together as a public rallying cry, a punctuating symbol in political struggles in the United States. In the decades after Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) led that chant in Mississippi, the slogan “Black Power” became an activist mantra throughout the Black Diaspora....

Capturing the South: Imagining America’s Most Documented Region by Scott L. Matthews

Reviewed by: Capturing the South: Imagining America’s Most Documented Region by Scott L. Matthews Carol Quirke Capturing the South: Imagining America’s Most Documented Region. By Scott L. Matthews. Documentary Arts and Culture. (Chapel Hill: Published by University of North Carolina Press in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, 2018. Pp. xvi, 312. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4645-9; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-4644-2.) Travel writers, poets, ethnographers and other social scientists, musicologists, folklorists, journalists, and photographers made “the American South . . . the most documented place on earth” (p. 2). Scott L. Matthews surveys this oeuvre; his history’s title conveys that he is equally interested in what the [End Page 145] region’s rich vein of documentary studies communicates about its practitioners. For Matthews, documentarians’ will to chart “appealing primitivism and appalling pathology” often overshadowed much else—hence the book explores documentarians’ motives and mythologizing (p. 239). If James Agee claimed the camera testified to “the cruel radiance of what is” (James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men [Boston, 1941], p. 9), Matthews argues that documentarians’ witnessing often resulted in patronizing attempts at reform or twisted caricature that still adhere to the South. They conspired to preserve a “premodern” regionalism before “modernity wiped it away,” yet Matthews evidences how documentary subjects often rejected such representations (p. 2). The author’s well-researched case studies span the twentieth century. Beginning with social scientist Howard W. Odum’s development of the University of North Carolina’s Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, Matthews moves to New Deal–era Farm Security Administration (FSA) images of a Georgia county through Jack Delano’s eyes. For the postwar period, Capturing the South: Imagining America’s Most Documented Region explores musicologist/musician John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, who tracked down and then promoted the “high lonesome sound” of Appalachian singers (p. 113). Matthews then investigates Danny Lyon’s evocative photos of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and finishes with a deep dive into Hale County, Alabama, where Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is set. Matthews’s probing of a range of documentary materials is a strength, allowing him to identify common patterns of representation. He also delineates documentary projects’ overlapping audiences. For example, Odum’s staff introduced photographer Dorothea Lange to several southern communities. Photographers, academics, policy makers, and the general public then engaged with this imagery, a generation later embraced by folk lovers, art enthusiasts, and political activists. Another strength is Matthews’s mining of poor southerners’ reactions to their documentation. One Kentucky musician shot and killed an interviewer. Most subjects found less brutal forms of resistance. Matthews makes an important scholarly intervention in demonstrating how elites, such as Zora Neale Hurston or W. E. B. Du Bois, and common sharecroppers or churchgoers registered distaste or actively sabotaged documentarians’ efforts to pin down southern folkways. For half a century, critics and scholars have argued photographers exert an adverse power over their subjects. Matthews’s analysis provides evidence where others offer theory alone; but as each chapter shows documentarians forcing themselves upon resisting subjects, the argument becomes formulaic. Greater suppleness in limning the relations between subject and maker would persuade more. Similarly, Capturing the South flattens differences in the wide variety of practitioners who made the South their subject. Certainly, documentarians in the center (urban North) sought to preserve an “authentic” culture in the periphery (rural South). And yet what drew such diverse people as snobbish, WASPy Walker Evans; genteel, racist Odum, a southerner; or Jewish Brooklynite and antiracist Lyon to documenting the South? Lyon was held in high esteem by his subjects and his activist sponsor, SNCC. Ultimately, SNCC [End Page 146] advanced Black photographers, paralleling the movement’s radicalization to Black Power. This does not appear proof of Lyon’s “well-meaning white liberal[ism]” (pp. 187–88). A final concern is that Matthews’s southern documentarians are largely men. His discussion of Lyon’s SNCC work focuses on leaders such as Bob Moses and John Lewis. But one of Lyon’s most famous photographs portrays teenage women in the Leesburg, Georgia...