Civil Rights

Question 1

At the Dark End of the Street - Danielle L. McGuire (2010)

Answer 1

• the civil rights movement is also rooted in African American women’s long struggle against sexual violence
• Recy Taylor, Rosa Parks, Committee for Equal Justice
• Claudette Colvin, Joane Little

Question 2

“Black Freedom Studies: Re-imagining and Redefining the Fundamentals” - Jeanne Theoharis

Answer 2

• the Civil Rights era lasted from the 1940s through the 1970s
• 55-65 Civil Rights history “takes away the black freedom struggle’s relevance for today by focusing on charismatic leadership,long-suffering rural folk, and backward Southern rednecks”

Question 3

“The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field” - Peniel Joseph

Answer 3

• black power movements did not undermine civil rights movements
• black power challenged the scope of liberalism, democracy, and the nation-state, as well as how we envision the practice of democracy at the local, regional, national, and global levels
• black power origins were in the 1950s with Malcolm X and other black militant groups

Question 4

Defying Dixie - Glenda Gilmore

Answer 4

• significance of communism and anti-communism to civil rights agitation
• before Cold War, segregation and Jim Crow could be compared to fascism by Communists
• after Cold War began, backlash towards Communism forced shift away from economic justice

Question 5

How Long, How Long - Belinda Robnett (1997)

Answer 5

• need to pay attention to black women in civil rights movements
• there was a long civil rights movement that can be traced back to Mary MacLeod Bethune
• African-American women participated in civil rights struggles through their work in the women’s club movement, the NAACP, and many other activist groups prior to the 1950s
• Ella Baker and SCLC –> SNCC

Question 6

“The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past” - Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (2005)

Answer 6

• long Civil Rights movement
• the dominant narrative chronicles a short civil rights movement that begins with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, proceeds through public protests, and culminates with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
• civil rights look less like a product of the Cold War and more like a casualty

Question 7

Color-Blind Conservatives

Answer 7

• insisted that color blindness (defined as the elimination of racial classifications and the establishment of formal equality before the law) was the Civil Rights Movement’s singular objective, the principle for which King and the Brown decision, in particular, stood

Question 8

THE “LONG MOVEMENT” AS VAMPIRE: TEMPORAL AND SPATIAL FALLACIES IN RECENT BLACK FREEDOM STUDIES - Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang (2007

Answer 8

• the long Civil Rights movement misinterprets the modern Black Liberation Movement (BLM)
• By constantly relocating the BLM’s origins and endpoints forward and backward, Long Movement scholars treat Civil Rights and/or Black Power as virtually eternal, like a vampire
• the BLM may have had ANTECEDENTS in the 30s and 40s, but not its ORIGINS
• the Cold War as a critical moment of rupture
• the Civil Rights Movement emerging in the mid 1950s differed qualitatively in terms of goals, ideology, discourse, and symbols from those associated with the National Negro Congress, the Council on African Affairs, and other African American initiatives which sought to link race, class, anticolonialism, and in the case of the “Sojoumers for Truth,” gender during the 1930s and 1940s

Question 9

Sojourning For Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism - Erick S. McDuffie (2011)

Answer 9

• black left feminism = a distinct radical black feminist politics and subject position forged by a small community of black women in the Communist Left during the Old Left period
• black communist women first to work within paradigm of intersectionality
  -The Sojourners for Truth and Justice “forged a leftist, gendered vision of diaspora that viewed black women as the vanguard for radical global social change.”
  McCarthyism crushed black left feminism

Question 10

The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change - Aldon D. Morris (1984)

Answer 10

• seeks to understand the origins of the civil rights movement by focusing on the crucial first ten years of the modern movement, 1953-1963
• the Civil Rights movement was the result of coherent planning by the “black counterpublic” located in preexisting indigenous African American social networks and organizations