Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Research Articles

Making a Movement

Making a Movement Marcia Chatelain (bio) When does a moment become a movement? Is it in when the wails of grief over a person gunned down by police or a neighborhood vigilante become a rallying cry for change? Is it when a three-word slogan or sixteen-character hashtag deftly represents the fight to dismantle racial injustice, to uproot economic inequality, and to end state violence? Or does the transformation begin when organizers appear on cable news, are evoked by presidential candidates, or are welcomed to the White House? Since the late summer of 2014, when police officer Darren Wilson killed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the world has witnessed the evolution of an unprecedented movement. At every moment of this process, this movement has elicited a number of questions and debates about social change in the twenty-first century. The movement that calls itself Black Lives Matter has provided new models of a freedom struggle—from what leaders look like to what direct action requires to how the seeds of a struggle are planted in ground fertilized by social media. As a historian of African American people in the twentieth century and an admirer of Black Lives Matter, I’m often asked if I think that this movement “measures up” to the so-called Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. This line of inquiry—whether it comes from a place of wonder or is wrapped in a tone of dismissiveness—reveals why accessible scholarship on social movements is desperately needed. Although recent monographs on black freedom movements have used nuance and texture to dispute a sanitized, Hollywood version of the 1950s and 1960s, it is still common to hear misunderstandings of Civil Rights and how movements coalesce and define themselves. These constant mischaracterizations imperil rich storytelling and the process of building a truly democratic state. So, I relish the opportunity to participate in this special issue devoted to the critical work of social movements and to provide a few reflections on a momentous movement. We are not without texts that allow us to answer questions about the current activism landscape, from Barbara Ransby’s groundbreaking biography of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee founder Ella Baker to Danielle Maguire’s masterful reconsideration of civil rights as a resistance movement against the sexual exploitation of black women. Recent scholarship that has centered women and gender analysis in the history of civil rights has provided an important warning call to activists about the way sexism can undermine the most principled of movements. Women’s and gender studies gives us the critical frames for scholars to demand an accounting for the women seen and not heard in movement leadership. These intellectual forces have sparked creative writers, historians, and documentarians to capture the stories of activists who struggled with the seemingly disparate aims of feminism and anti-racism. The tensions that sparked the introduction of the “woman question” into the mid twentieth century race moment have not disappeared, but the ability to articulate an intersectional justice movement is due, in part, to the rewriting of the master narrative of great men leading great movements. Similarly, the thoughtful inclusion of violence against transgendered women within the Black Lives Matter platform highlights just how unbound today’s activists are by earlier movements’ dependence on only welcoming bodies that comply with normative, and even heroic, standards. The brilliance of Black Lives Matter is its resistance from the character assassination of the victims of state violence and their insistence that black lives are substantive and valuable. In a piece for The Feminist Wire, movement co-creator Alicia Garza wrote: Black Lives Matter…goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within some Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black and buy Black, keeping straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all. Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation...

On the Novel and Civic Myth

On the Novel and Civic Myth

‘I second that emotion’: a case for using imaginative sources in writing civil rights history

ABSTRACTImaginative sources are a rich archival store. Facts may be as slippery as the sources in which they are contained, but to limit the sources we use in building a civil rights historiography is to risk curtailing the reach and interdisciplinary scope of historical scholarship. We need to read imaginative and subjective sources as objects for the study, analysis and explanation of the Civil Rights Movement. In civil rights, as in other historical subjects, there is a privileging of an ‘objective’, detached approach to historiography in which ‘the knower’ is made distinct from what is known, and fact distinct from its imaginative representation. Monteith's essay argues that much can be gained by examining those sources in which the feeling of the movement is explored sensitively and intellectually—or even exploited. Organizers in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Freedom Summer volunteers chose to represent the movement in fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction, and found themselves represented in fiction films. Monteith argues that imagination and emotion should be more closely incorporated into civil rights history writing but attention needs to be paid to genre and style if generically unstable sources are not to be misread as unadorned fact.

Lifting as They Climb: Race, Sorority, and African American Uplift in the 20th Century

The common narrative about African Americans’ quest for social justice and Civil Rights during the Twentieth Century consists, largely, of men and women working through organizations to bring about change. The typical list of organizations includes, inter alia, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. What is almost never included in this list is African American collegiate-based fraternities. However, at the turn of the Twentieth Century emerged a small group of organizations founded on personal excellence, the development and sustaining of fictive-kinship ties, and racial uplift. Given these organizations’ almost immediate creation of highly-functioning alumni chapters in cities around the United States, members of these organizations who were college graduates could continue their work in actualizing their respective organizations’ ideals. Two such organizations, founded at Howard University and Butler University in 1920 and 1922, respectively, were Zeta Phi Beta and Sigma Gamma Rho Sororities. This article explores the history of these sororities involvement in African American’s question for racial uplift in the United States. In doing so, the article raises a few interesting points: First, black sorority racial uplift engagement was different from that of black fraternities in one particular sense. There was far less civil rights litigation and possibly public policy work on the part of black sororities, at least when compared to black fraternities. Second, and as a result, black sororities — like Zeta Phi Beta and Sigma Gamma Rho — largely engaged in racial uplift work via efforts to shape public policy and through philanthropy. Much of their racial uplift work, however, was demonstrated through community service and non-social justice philanthropy. Third, when compared to the black sororities that predated them, Zeta Phi Beta and Sigma Gamma Rho engaged in less social justice work, comparatively. Fourth, over time, Zeta Phi Beta and Sigma Gamma Rho’s racial uplift efforts and strategies shifted, largely, away from social justice work to even more community service and philanthropy work. In an effort to clarify these points, the authors rely heavily on Zeta Phi Beta and Sigma Gamma Rho’s primary documents — their history books and national magazines.

“To Live a Humanity under the Skin”: Revolutionary Love and Third World Praxis in 1970s Chicana Feminism

“To Live a Humanity under the Skin”:Revolutionary Love and Third World Praxis in 1970s Chicana Feminism Natalie Havlin (bio) Love, naming both affection and an expression of ethical commitment, is often considered foundational to feminist and queer frameworks of collective social change. As Maria Lugones argues, a feminist practice of love that recognizes interdependence and seeks to understand other women’s perspectives can serve as the groundwork for coalition building, particularly among women of color in the United States (1987, 8). Scholars and activists have typically followed Lugones and subsequently Chela Sandoval in tracing the emergence of love as a radical ethic and political methodology to the interventions of U.S. third world feminism and women of color coalition building in the 1970s (Lugones 1987; Sandoval 2000; Nash 2011; Moore and Casper 2014). As Sandoval explains, U.S. third world feminists developed a “hermeneutics of love,” a method and mode of resistance rooted in collective care and transformation (2000, 140). In this article, I contribute to elucidating U.S. third world feminist love politics by tracing what I describe as a revolutionary love-praxis in the work of Chicana feminist writer Elizabeth “Betita” Sutherland Martínez and her collaborations with fellow Chicana journalists Dolores Varela and Enriqueta Vasquez during the 1970s. Active in the civil rights movement, women’s liberation organizations, and the Chicano movement, Martínez also contributed to left and emergent political formations of Chicana feminism and U.S. third world feminism during the 1970s.1 Martínez’s collaborators and movement scholar-activists such as Tony Platt and Angela Davis have celebrated Martínez’s dedication to and influence on Chicana/o and interracial movements for social justice (Platt 2013; Davis 2013). Yet Martínez’s [End Page 78] contributions to theorizing and practicing Chicana feminism, third world feminism, and Black and Latina/o coalition building have not been examined in-depth in feminist scholarship. Through an analysis of Martínez’s journalism about transnational alliance building in relation to writing by fellow Chicana feminists Varela and Vasquez, I trace an emergent Chicana feminist praxis that links interpersonal feeling and affection to the project of revolutionary internationalism, the latter a political commitment to global proletarian struggle against capitalism and imperialism most often associated with third world Marxist theorists, U.S. Black Power, and Asian American and Chicano radical politics during the 1970s (Pulido 2006; Wilkins 2007, Watkins 2012; Young 2006).2 The revolutionary love-praxis that I locate in the work of Martínez and her collaborators reflects an alternative framework to left paradigms of revolutionary discipline and political love popular in the 1970s. Martínez and fellow Chicana feminist writers Varela and Vasquez portray experiential feeling and expressions of interpersonal care as constitutive of, rather than incidental to, collective struggles against capitalism, imperialism, racism, and sexism. Love and the Dilemma of Revolutionary Discipline In May 1967 leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a key civil rights organization known for leading lunch counter sit-ins and the Mississippi Freedom Summer project, voted to transition to an all-black staff and membership. In the months following the decision, Elizabeth “Betita” Sutherland Martínez, the director of the New York City office of SNCC and one of two Chicanas on staff, offered a singular analysis of the shifting political vision in SNCC.3 In a series of notes titled “Black, White and Tan” submitted to the SNCC Atlanta offices in June 1967, Martínez provides a “personal and incomplete attempt to think things out” with respect to SNCC members’ growing black nationalism and exploration of third world revolutionary struggles as models for social change. In Martínez’s assessment, the growing “ideology of blackness” in SNCC and emergent “consciousness of peoplehood” among black Americans represents a stage of struggle necessitating a consideration of the “price of revolution, the human toll of righting wrong” (1967, 2). She recounts that prior to and during her work in SNCC she traveled to Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Cuba to understand what a revolutionary struggle to fundamentally restructure a society [End Page 79] would require. The armed revolutionary struggles that she studied and observed often entailed a “moratorium on humanism (sometimes...

The Tragedy of Stokely Carmichael

The Tragedy of Stokely Carmichael David J. Garrow (bio) Peniel E. Joseph. Stokely: A Life. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2014. xiv + 399 pp. Notes, sources, bibliography, and index. $29.99. Stokely Carmichael burst onto the U.S. political scene in June 1966 as the newly elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) when he led SNCC’s cry for “Black Power” during the Meredith March Against Fear through the Mississippi Delta. When the March entered Green-wood on June 16, police arrested Carmichael as the marchers tried to pitch their tents in a schoolyard. Quickly released on bail, an angry Carmichael told an evening rally: “This is the 27th time I have been arrested—I ain’t going to jail no more.” Then, with his SNCC colleague Willie Ricks helping to prompt the crowd, “Five times Mr. Carmichael shouted, ‘We want black power!’ And each time the younger members of the audience shouted back, ‘Black power.’ ‘Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down to get rid of the dirt,’ Mr. Carmichael added as the audience applauded enthusiastically.”1 An August 5, 1966, New York Times profile of Carmichael titled “Black Power Prophet” declared that “some have begun to describe him as a new Malcolm X,” the apostate Nation of Islam (NOI) firebrand whom NOI gunmen had murdered eighteen months earlier. Carmichael, who had just turned twenty-four, was an unlikely successor to Malcolm. Born in Trinidad, his family had moved to a virtually all-white section of the Bronx in 1952, and Carmichael attended the Bronx High School of Science. The spring of his senior year witnessed the burgeoning sit-in movement against segregated Southern lunch counters, but Carmichael was unimpressed. “Actually what I said,” he told the writer Robert Penn Warren four years later, “was ‘Niggers always looking to get themselves in the papers, no matter how they do it.’” As the sit-ins spread, Carmichael’s response remained jaundiced. “My reaction then was ‘Niggers are just like monkeys: one do, all do.’”2 Two months later, however, in Washington, D.C., Carmichael happened to meet some participants and immediately joined them in a northern Virginia sit-in. “I was really impressed by the way they conducted themselves,” he told Warren.3 Carmichael’s serendipitous civil rights involvement led him to enroll at Howard University, though he confessed to Warren that he “didn’t want to [End Page 564] go to an all-Negro school . . . and I wasn’t sure that Howard . . . could give me a good education.” In December of his freshman year, he traveled to Fayette County, Tennessee, where black citizens’ attempts to register to vote had met with intense economic retaliation by local whites. Carmichael was “very impressed with the people” and said “I thought this was way more important than a restaurant . . . the power to vote.”4 Six months later, Carmichael joined one of the Freedom Rides to Jackson, Mississippi, where the riders were arrested and sent to Parchman state prison. Carmichael served forty-nine days before being released, but he continued his studies at Howard and graduated in June 1964. That spring he told Warren that black separatism was “nonsense” and “no solution,” while dismissing the NOI as “full of beans.” One great danger for black leadership, Carmichael said, “is that you get an opportunist, and he becomes [a] rhetorician” who “says things” rather than striving to “really look for solutions. . . . I get very afraid if I read the name of one person over and over again, who’s saying nothing, essentially nothing, he’s got the press following him around, and he’s saying actually nothing.”5 In March 1965, when the Selma-to-Montgomery march was followed by the murder of a Northern white volunteer, Viola Liuzzo, in neighboring Lowndes County, Carmichael and several SNCC colleagues launched a new organizing effort there. One of the best recent civil rights histories, Hasan Kwame Jef-fries’ Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (2009), narrates in vivid detail how Carmichael and his compatriots aided Lowndes’ small band of indigenous activists to build their group—the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights—into...

Black Lives Matter, Then and Now

The current grassroots ‘‘Black Lives Matter’’ campaign resonates with the freedom movements of the 1960s. Today’s attempts at organizing youth against police brutality and other social injustices recall moments nearly five decades earlier when leaders from groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as local organizations, fought for the civil rights and voting rights of all Americans. The 2014 Paramount Pictures film release, Selma, and the New-York Historical society’s exhibition, Freedom Journey 1965: Photographs of the Selma to Montgomery March by Stephen Somerstein, remind audiences how much ground America has covered while also pointing out the distances it still must travel. In the mid-1960s, the Civil Rights Movement reached fever pitch. The United States faced extreme racial tensions, particularly in the South. Civil rights organizations challenged racial segregation and fought for the right to vote for all citizens. On March 7, 1965, nearly eight hundred people led by local and national civil rights leaders like James Bevel, Amelia Boynton, John

“There Can Be No Business as Usual”: The University of North Carolina and the Student Strike of May 1970

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, like so many of their counterparts across the nation's campuses, were caught unprepared for President Richard Nixon's speech on the evening of April 30, 1970. Nixon, elected in 1968 because of his campaign promises to end the war, announced that evening that U.S. ground troops would invade Cambodia to thwart North Vietnamese supply lines. Not only was Nixon not ending the war, but he was actually expanding the conflict. The anger over this betrayal fueled the escalation of antiwar activism at America's colleges and universities as appalled students turned indignation into action. On one of these campuses, Kent State University, the student protests became a national tragedy when the Ohio National Guard killed four protesters and wounded nine. The horrific images that flooded the airwaves, including the lifeless bodies of fellow college students, filled demonstrators with a mixture of sadness, fear, and rage. Student demonstrators forced hundreds of colleges to shut down as the May 1970 protests became the largest demonstration in the history of American higher education. UNC students too took part in the May 1970 protests. The UNC students, as did students on other campuses, had protested the Vietnam War since its inception, yet the conflict seemed unending. Believing that murders make it clear that protest in this society has become a matter of life and death, student leaders at UNC issued a statement that condemned the invasion of Cambodia, denounced the deaths at Kent State, and threatened to strike. For these students, there could be no business as usual until the government's policies changed, (1) and so for two weeks, thousands of UNC students demonstrated their outrage through marches, rallies, vigils, and sit-ins. During the student strike of May 1970, UNC students' voices were finally heard. The student protests of May 1970, both nationally and at UNC, can be viewed as the culmination of a decade-long rise in campus activism. Beginning on February 1, 1960, when four African American students braved segregation policies and refused to leave a Woolworth's lunch counter, activism became an increasingly growing part of campus life. As the decade progressed, those pioneering activists of the early 1960s were joined by others on campus as students began to challenge long-held policies, both de jure and de facto, that pervaded American society. Campus-based groups, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), became integral to the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, while the Student Peace Union (SPU) and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) assumed leadership roles in the mounting opposition to the Vietnam War. Leaders within these organizations, such as Stokely Carmichael and Tom Hayden, became household names as images of student protests flooded the American media. (2) For some time, much of the discussion over the May 1970 student protests devalued the contributions of southern campuses. The common perception was that the South, with its strong martial heritage, was generally supportive of the Vietnam War. The South is home to more military bases than any other region and witnessed the greatest number of casualties during the Vietnam War. That said, recent studies have begun to show that, while many campuses in the South did lag behind other regions in their level of antiwar protests, southern students were heavily involved in student antiwar activism. In fact, UNC could boast levels of antiwar activism that rivaled universities considered the centers of student peace demonstrations: Berkeley, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Columbia. (3) As the largest university in North Carolina and the flagship of the University of North Carolina system, the institution had grown from one building in 1795 to a small regional campus throughout the nineteenth century, even closing its doors for a few years after the Civil War. …

Clyde Warrior, 1939–1968

To identify Clyde Warrior as an intellectual subverts prevailing notions of intellectualism. We often think of intellectuals as older men and women whose major contributions are revealed late in life, once the passions of youth have been tempered by experience. Warrior was not this. People frequently imagine intellectuals as existing in isolation, insulated from the demands of regular folk. Warrior was not this either. He was a Ponca, born on the reservation and raised with the influence of his grandparents and community. He was also a renowned singer and powwow fancy dancer, as well as a college student, an organizational leader, a husband, and father of two daughters. Warrior’s political consciousness grew out of the deep connections he maintained to his rural Ponca roots, but he took care to educate himself about the problems affecting Native Americans across the United States as well as colonized peoples globally. As an Oklahoman, he was attuned to race relations in the South and empathized with the struggles of Africans and African Americans. His approach to indigenous political struggles was shaped and informed, for example, by his early and active participation with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign.

From Freedom Schools to Freedom University: Liberatory Education, Interracial and Intergenerational Dialogue, and the Undocumented Student Movement in the U.S. South

Freedom University is a modern freedom school that provides liberatory education and leadership development to undocumented students banned from Georgia’s top public universities following the passage of Policy 4.1.6 in 2010. The author discusses how Freedom University draws from both the Southern Freedom School tradition and Latin American popular education methods to provide education for social action. The article also presents a first-hand account of interracial and intergenerational dialogues between undocumented youth and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) veterans, and features photographs that illuminate how undocumented youth recombine SNCC’s tactics of non-violent civil disobedience with new symbols and meanings. In doing so, the article demonstrates how the legacy of freedom schools and student activism in the Black Freedom Movement are shaping the new freedom dreams of undocumented youth today.

“This is our Alabama”: Racial Segregation, Discrimination, and Violence in Tamio Wakayama's <em>Signs of Life</em>

This essay examines the civil rights photography of Tamio Wakayama. In 1963, Wakayama, a twenty-year-old Japanese Canadian philosophy student, left the University of Western Ontario and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). A self-taught photographer, he shot pictures of SNCC’s grassroots organizing activities in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama. Upon returning to Canada, Wakayama became the photographer for the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA). In 1965 and 1966, he toured Canada taking pictures of SUPA’s community empowerment projects in urban slums and on reservations. The majority of photographs collected in Wakayama’s first photography book, Signs of Life (1969), come from his time as a field photographer for SNCC and SUPA. In this essay, I argue that Wakayama’s representations of race in Signs of Life encourage his audience to see civil rights activists’ demands for meaningful racial reform and redress as both legitimate and urgently necessary. Wakayama’s photographs of African American and Native struggles against racial segregation’s material and psychological effects reveal the US South and Canada’s shared histories of racialized dispossession, dehumanization, and discrimination.

Lauren Araiza. To March for Others: The Black Freedom Struggle and the United Farm Workers.

Lauren Araiza's book is a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarship on black-brown organizational relationships during the long civil rights era. Several scholars, including Brian D. Behnken, William S. Clayson, Jorge Mariscal, Gordon Keith Mantler, and others have explored these at times contentious and at other times cooperative associations. To March for Others: The Black Freedom Struggle and the United Farm Workers adds greatly to our understanding of that period by examining the affiliation between the United Farm Workers (UFW) and five leading African American civil rights organizations: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the National Urban League (NUL), and the Black Panther Party (BPP). Araiza demonstrates convincingly that the UFW created alliances or coalitions of varying length and strength with each of these organizations. Araiza identifies five key variables (race, class, region, ideology, and individual leadership) that helped determine the depth of the UFW's coalitions with each of these black civil rights organizations. She essentially argues that the more areas of agreement between the UFW and the black civil rights organization within those five variables, the closer the alliance or coalition.

We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement by Akinyele Omowale Umoja (review)

Reviewed by: We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement by Akinyele Omowale Umoja Michael Vinson Williams (bio) We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. By Akinyele Omowale Umoja. (New York: New York University Press, 2013. Pp. 339. $40.00 cloth) In We Will Shoot Back, Akinyele Omowale Umoja presents a compelling and important argument for the role armed resistance played in the Mississippi freedom struggle. Without armed resistance, Umoja contends, many civil rights organizations “would not have been able to organize in Mississippi” (p. 2). Despite advocating nonviolence, We Will Shoot Back demonstrates that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) benefitted from the presence of armed resistors whose actions saved lives in some instances by deterring white violence. Umoja’s strength rests in his deft use of a wide range of source materials, as well as his careful attention to the racial environment of Mississippi and African Americans’ open and sometimes volatile response to racial oppression. We Will Shoot Back then challenges conventional narratives presenting black Mississippians as either passive participants in the movement or as dependent, for the most part, upon the leadership of national civil rights organizations and a nonviolent platform for bringing about sociopolitical change; this approach is far too myopic as Umoja demonstrates. By focusing on the work of key Mississippi activists, such as C. O. Chinn, Vernon Dahmer, [End Page 709] Amzie Moore, and E. W. Steptoe, Umoja provides an important view into the lives, mission, and work of Mississippi civil rights activists and their relationship to the larger movement with armed resistance as the backdrop. He adds to the discussion of civil rights activism by connecting it with armed self-defense in a way that is fresh and symbolic of the ever-changing dynamics of the civil rights struggle. Throughout, We Will Shoot Back provides readers with a sense of the dangers faced by activists, as well as those who were willing to house, feed, and introduce civil rights workers to the larger community. More importantly, the author demonstrates the lengths to which they were willing to go to stand as men and women; shooting back underscored that determination. The depth of white oppression that African Americans faced and what it took to resist will be important to readers’ understanding of what civil rights activism really meant, and Umoja accomplishes this quite well. However, ideas of armed resistance did not always go over smoothly, and he effectively demonstrates the constant tension and divisions created around the issue of armed resistance versus nonviolence as primary strategies. Yet, Umoja acknowledges that ideas about the feasibility of armed resistance changed in light of the inability, or unwillingness, of the federal government to protect those suffering from white oppression and violence. Dave Dennis of CORE symbolized this shift in 1964 when cautioning Robert Kennedy that blacks “shall not watch their families starve, be jailed, beaten, and killed without responding to protect themselves. You have proven by your refusal to act that we have no other recourse but to defend ourselves with whatever means we have at our disposal” (p. 96). Individuals did not use armed resistance as a stand-alone strategy but often employed it in conjunction with economic boycotts to bring about change. Umoja stretches the conventional timeline of the civil rights movement from the late 1960s to include the mid-1970s and does an effective job of demonstrating the ways that small Mississippi towns organized using multiple tactics and blending the strategies of economic boycotts and armed resistance. We Will Shoot Back accomplishes [End Page 710] Umoja’s primary goal of demonstrating that “armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disfranchisement” (p. 2). Thus, he successfully challenges the often silent narrative on the importance and prevalence of armed resistance in Mississippi and, in doing so, We Will Shoot Back underscores the importance of reexamining the Mississippi movement in all of its complexities. Michael Vinson Williams MICHAEL VINSON WILLIAMS is the author of Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr and dean of the Division...

Selma to Saigon: the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War

The civil rights and anti--Vietnam War movements were the two greatest protests of twentieth-century America. The dramatic escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam in 1965 took precedence over civil rights legislation, which had dominated White House and congressional attention during the first half of the decade. The two issues became intertwined on January 6, 1966, when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) became the first civil rights organization to formally oppose the war, protesting the injustice of drafting African Americans to fight for the freedom of the South Vietnamese people when they were still denied basic freedoms at home. Selma to Saigon explores the impact of the Vietnam War on the national civil rights movement. Before the war gained widespread attention, the New Left, the SNCC, and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) worked together to create a biracial alliance with the potential to make significant political and social gains in Washington. Contention over the war, however, exacerbated preexisting generational and ideological tensions that undermined the coalition, and Lucks analyzes the causes and consequences of this disintegration. This powerful narrative illuminates the effects of the Vietnam War on the lives of leaders such as Whitney Young Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as other activists who faced the threat of the military draft along with race-related discrimination and violence. Providing new insights into the evolution of the civil rights movement, this book fills a significant gap in the literature about one of the most tumultuous periods in American history.

A Tribute to the Women: Rewriting History, Retelling Herstory in Civil Rights

Much of the scholarship on the modern Civil Rights Movement (CRM) has recaptured dramatic and poignant events through eyewitness accounts and oral narratives—from letters, speeches, newspaper editorials, press releases, photographs, and documentary films that summon vivid images of fire hoses and police dogs, peaceful protestors, and violent rioters (McAdam 1982; Morris 1984; Payne 1994; Robnett 1997; Williams 1988). The conventional approach to (or master narrative of) civil rights history has focused almost exclusively on extraordinary, elite men from W.E.B. DuBois to Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall to such notable civil rights organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—that led the fight for equal protection under the law, desegregated lunch counters, and the right to vote in local and national elections (Branch 1988, 1998, 2006; Carson 1981; Fairclough 1987; Garrow 1986; Lewis 1993; Reed 1997; Sullivan 2009). Rather than broaden and deepen our understanding of individual and collective forms of resistance, however, such an approach simplifies and distorts a more nuanced and complicated version of civil rights history in the United States. All too often people come to associate the modern CRM with celebrated heroes and a static, fixed understanding of discrimination that is less than critical of hierarchal relationships determined solely (or primarily) by a racial caste system—specifically, an era of Jim Crow when “separate but equal” accommodations were legally sanctioned by the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Far less common is an association of the modern CRM with a richer, more nuanced understanding of discrimination that is critical of hierarchal relationships determined by interlocking systems of oppression—namely, racism and sexism—experienced by forgotten heroines who similarly risked their lives and reputations for equality and justice before the law (notable exceptions being Collier-Thomas and Franklin 2001; Giddings 1984; Gilmore 1996; Ling and Monteith 2004; Olson 2001; Robnett 1997).

We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement Akinyele OmowaleUmoja. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

We Will Shoot Back: Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement Akinyele Omowale Umoja. New York: New York University Press, 2013.In We Will Shoot Back, Akinyele Omowale Umoja, Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Georgia State University and a participant in the Black Freedom Struggle, challenges the traditional interpretation of the Civil Rights Movement as committed to nonviolence. Concentrating his study upon oral histories of the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi, Umoja emphasizes a tradition of self-defense among blacks in Mississippi in resistance to the efforts of the white power structure to foster fear and intimidation in the post-Civil War South. Umoja argues that armed resistance drew upon the image of the Bad Negro who was outspoken and aggressive in opposition to white intimidation. Thus, he concludes, Armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement (2).Following the murder of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in 1954, Umoja describes how Medgar Evers assumed the leadership of black resistance in Mississippi. As a public representative of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Evers denounced violence. Umoja, however, insists that Evers was actually a Bad Negro, who posed as a trickster, for in reality Evers advocated self-defense and traveled the state with armed security. In fact, Umoja maintains that Evers was a secret admirer of the radical Mau Mau faction in Kenya. Nevertheless, being armed did not protect Evers from an assassin's bullet.According to Umoja, the Black experience of self-defense in Mississippi often clashed with the nonviolent tactics advocated by such national civil rights organizations as the NAACP, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Thus, when SNCC embraced the strategy of encouraging college students to come to Mississippi to register black voters during the Freedom Summer of 1964, the national organization agreed that organizers would remain unarmed. This strategy, however, was compromised when whites unleashed a campaign of violence against the SNCC volunteers, who soon became dependent upon local armed Blacks to protect them. With the Federal government failing to provide protection, SNCC workers were increasingly reliant upon the black Mississippi tradition of armed resistance. And as the civil rights struggle embraced Black Power in the late 1960s, Umoja argues, Activists generally believed that the Movement and Black people in general would have to rely upon themselves and their own resources for their own protection (120).Beginning in 1965 into the 1970s, the so-called Natchez model became the example for social change in Mississippi. To provide leverage for demands regarding black employment and police brutality, blacks in Natchez, Mississippi commenced a boycott of white businesses to undermine the white power structure. …

Thomas L. Bynum. NAACP Youth and the Fight for Black Freedom, 1936–1965.

Thomas L. Bynum's book examines the youth councils and college chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), moving from the formal organization of NAACP youth activities under Juanita Jackson in the late 1930s through the sit-in movement of the 1960s. Bynum describes how “youth chapters staged antilynching demonstrations, campaigned for equal educational and employment opportunities, challenged discrimination and segregation in public facilities, and called for full civil liberties” (p. xiii). These young NAACP members engaged in grassroots organizing and nonviolent direct-action protests in the decades before the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) brought national attention to black youth activism. NAACP Youth and the Fight for Black Freedom surveys dozens of different NAACP youth protests across the country, including demonstrations that targeted movie theaters, skating rinks, and barbershops. The book is at its best when it offers detailed examples regarding local protests. The Youth Council in East Chicago, Indiana, for example, challenged the segregated seating policies at local movie theaters. To avoid desegregation, the owners of two of the theaters began showing Spanish movies, which they thought would drive away the black teenagers. In response, the Youth Council members “picketed the theater using Spanish placards and distributed Spanish leaflets.” After six weeks of picketing, they successfully desegregated the theater (p. 55). Similarly, the NAACP chapter at Pennsylvania State College staged a mass demonstration to protest the fact that the school's barbershops refused to serve black students. “The boycott of the state college barbershops symbolized more than the students' fight to get a haircut at the local barbershop,” Bynum writes. “The boycott revealed their fight for human dignity and their sincere efforts to be fully integrated into all aspects of campus life at white colleges and universities” (p. 57).

Tell It Like It Isn't: SNCC and the Media, 1960–1965

In recent decades, revisionist challenges to the traditional “declension hypothesis” have generated a much more nuanced and positive approach to the Black Power movement. However, attempts to explain the narrative's initial popularity have too often focussed on the latter half of the decade and blamed a media-assisted white backlash or the inflammatory rhetoric of Black Power activists. Concentrating instead on the earlier half of the decade, this article examines the media strategies of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and demonstrates how its public approach to nonviolence and interracial organizing purposefully hid developments within the movement that were seen to be at odds with the dominant discourse. By highlighting the ways in which the early media strategies of a militant organization like SNCC strengthened and legitimized a misleading movement narrative, this article challenges scholars to be more critical of early movement rhetoric and re-examine how and why Black Power was portrayed as a fundamental break with the past.

NAACP youth and the fight for black freedom, 1936-1965

Historical studies of black youth activism have until now focused almost exclusively on the activities of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). However, the NAACP youth councils and college chapters predate both of those organizations. They initiated grassroots organizing efforts and nonviolent direct-action tactics as early as the 1930s and, in doing so, made significant contributions to the struggle for racial equality in the United States. This deeply researched book breaks new ground in an important and compelling area of study. Thomas Bynum carefully examines the activism of the NAACP youth and effectively refutes the perception of the NAACP as working strictly through the courts. His research illuminates the many direct-action activities undertaken by the young people of the NAACP -- activities that helped precipitate the breakdown of racial discrimination and segregation in America. Beginning with the formal organization of the NAACP youth movement under Juanita Jackson, the author traces the group's activities from their early anti-lynching demonstrations through their post-World War II withholding patronage campaigns to their participation in the sit-in protests of the 1960s. He also explores the evolution of the youth councils and college chapters, including their sometime rocky relationship with the national office, and shows how these groups actually provided a framework for the emergence of youth activism within CORE and SNCC. The author provides a comprehensive account of the generational struggle for racial equality, capturing the successes, failures, and challenges the NAACP youth groups experienced at the national, state, and local levels. He firmly establishes the vital role they played in the history of the civil rights movement in the United States and in the burgeoning tradition of youth activism in the postwar decades.

Black Power Beyond the Slogan

Born in Trinidad in 1941, Stokely Carmichael immigrated to the United States in 1952, where he would become a key figure in both the civil rights and Black Power movements. As an activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Carmichael participated in many of the epic battles of the heroic phase of the movement, including the Freedom Rides. By 1966, however, largely disenchanted with the gains of the civil rights movement, he would become one of the key spokespersons for a nascent but nonetheless vibrant Black Power movement, after his call for Black Power in Greenwood, Mississippi introduced Black Power to the nation. After working to develop a blueprint for achieving Black Power, including the publication of the book Black Power with Howard University Political Scientist Charles V. Hamilton, he would eventually change his name to Kwame Ture and move to Guinea, where he died from prostate cancer at the age of fifty-seven, still an unrepentant critic of American racism and imperialism. His life has recently become the work of Peniel Joseph. In 2001, in the midst of an explosion of scholarship examining issues related to the Black Power movement, Peniel Joseph published an influential article in Black Scholar that outlined the contours of what would become the historical subfield of Black Power Studies. In it, Joseph called for an interrogation of the local, national, and international roots of Black Power. Over the course of the next thirteen years, his trailblazing scholarship has continued to deepen our understanding of the movement, the period, and its leading figures. His award-winning 2006 book, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America, laid the basis for his most recent publication, Stokely: A Life. Joseph recently sat down for an interview with Dr. Yohuru Williams, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of History at Fairfield University. They discuss Joseph’s motivations for writing about Stokely Carmichael, as well as new directions he sees emerging in Black Power Studies.