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In different ways, all three works represented a departure from what Julian Bond calls the Master Narrative of the civil rights movement. That narrative, so familiar as to constitute almost a form of civic religion, goes:
Scholars are questioning the top-down and triumphal underpinnings of the narrative; the overemphasis on the South as a site of struggle; the extent of nonviolence; the character of white resistance, including the idea that it was mostly a problem of the South; the continued marginalization of women; the chronology; the role of liberals; the equation of Black Power with the end of the movement; the separation between civil rights history and labor history; and the related tendency to underemphasize the economic goals of the movement.
“The most common response of African Americans to the numerous drive-by shootings and bombings carried out by white supremacists in black neighborhoods was to reach for their firearms” (p. 189).
even within a single county, the course of the movement could be very different from one town to another.
We are only beginning to think about how Southern white people understand their own adjustments to a post-movement world, a story which needs to be told at multiple levels.
This kind of analysis is part of a larger, ongoing effort to see the defenders of white supremacy as something more than one-dimensional, cardboard racists.
The emerging literature on Black Power sees its advocates as more than hate-filled nihilists; rather, they were rational political actors whose work grew naturally out of the earlier movement and helped reshape the American political landscape, including the character of Black leadership.
This involves an ongoing reexamination of the meaning of nonviolence. Rather than seeing attitudes toward violence as one of the sharpest differences between the two phases of the movement, the new scholarship emphasizes the continuities, arguing that philosophical commitment to nonviolence was always rare and became more so over time; that support for self-defense was always widespread; and that, in the South, many movement participants saw little tension between nonviolence as they understood it and self-defense.
soon as one does that, the Master Narrative is pretty much done for. Now one has to rethink the role of the church, the nature of militance, the role of left radicalism, and how McCarthyism reconfigured the movement.
Looking at the North gives us a different way to think about the limits of liberalism, and of antidiscrimination as the end-all of racial policy.
They raise questions that fundamentally challenge our conception of what it means to be a citizen. What works for the sharecropper doesn’t work for them. In modern America, does citizenship entail a right to some minimum level of consumption? Can you be a citizen without access to some kind of credit?
One can see Black people growing more confident, partly in response to the leadership of Rudy Shields, a remarkable organizer even by the standards of the Mississippi movement, and white people growing more frustrated and uncertain.
One can see that at all points in the process there are divisions among both Blacks and whites that do not become part of the public transcript. Crosby
There is a real temptation for bottom-up history to sing praises to the agency, courage, and wisdom of the poor and look no further. In fact, it is probably a good idea to assume that people are formed by the society they struggle against and carry some of its flaws within them.
chapter of Light of Freedom which has been least commented upon by reviewers is chapter 12 with
Blacks from movement counties still enjoyed a higher level of some public goods—more political participation, more Black officeholders, more influence over social welfare policies.6 “In the face of resistance, movements built infrastructures and propelled changes in an array of local institutions and those efforts have had an enduring legacy in Mississippi”
What can be said at this point about work currently in the pipeline is that it will definitely put the Southern movement more closely in dialogue with struggles in the rest of the country, not all of them African American. It will focus on what happened in the South after national attention turned elsewhere, which will include a reevaluation of the role of federal government and market forces, as well as a reevaluation of class tensions within Black communities.
the role the movement played in pushing the country’s political center rightward.
seeing is a way of not seeing. Bottom-up analysis carries its own temptations, beyond the temptation of seeing only virtue in the oppressed—or, for that matter, seeing only oppression in the oppressed. Every historical parallel isn’t a case of historical continuity.
All that acknowledged, it remains true that scholars trying to understand the world through the eyes of its subaltern classes do not bear primary responsibility for the fact that most Americans profoundly misunderstand the nature of the movement. Partly because of
A history that challenges that is, of course, useful, but doing that doesn’t require any embellishment. Hagiographic
history is going to be attacked sooner or later. As James Baldwin noted:
The clarion call is Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, and Matthew Countryman, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003); but see also Martha Biondi, To
If it captures a portion of the eloquence and the insight of the people I have interviewed, this book will be worth something. The process of doing the interviews was instructive in itself.
“Local people” could also be very astute at picking up on a wrong-headed question—and far gentler about pointing it out. What I remember most about talking to them, though, is their predisposition to assume without evidence that I was doing something good and worthwhile, a reflection of the same expansive sense of community they brought to the movement, transforming it. I am deeply grateful to everyone who shared stories and arguments.
of the sit-ins of 1960. Wherever they were
The Mississippi movement reflects another tradition of Black activism, one of community organizing, a tradition with a different sense of what freedom means and therefore a greater emphasis on the long-term development of leadership in ordinary men and women, a tradition best epitomized, Moses argues, by the teaching and example of Ella Baker—and, I would add, by that of Septima Clark. That tradition, and placing the history of Greenwood within it, is the second major theme of this book.
Chapters 1 through 3 argue that in fact the initiative that made change possible was far more widely dispersed in Black communities than we ordinarily realize.
The period before mid–1964 is special because it marks a time when the Mississippi movement had only the most minimal resources. The federal government was still criminally lax about protecting
the experience of the early years was sufficiently transformative—empowering, if you will—that local people who had become active in that period were able to create and sustain several movement-related institutions, even in the face of decreasing help from the outside organizers who had first brought many of them into political motion. Their very success contributed to the erosion of the climate of relationships that had helped energize the pre–1964 movement.
The idea that everyone had some part of freedom’s light was close to the heart of the message that organizers both carried into the Delta and found there.
The idea that everyone had some part of freedom’s light was close to the heart of the message that organizers both carried into the Delta and found there. P 5.
Near the end of the thirties, Canton, Mississippi, had two killings, both of which, according to an NAACP investigator, reflected, in different ways, a trend toward “quieter” lynchings. In July of 1938, a white man named A. B. McAdam visited the city to see his daughter who was hospitalized there. After he left the hospital, he was, he claimed, attacked and robbed by a Black man. Law-enforcement officers and citizens decided to blockade the part of town where the incident was supposed to have taken place. At the
The 1943 killings were only a week apart, separated by only a few miles. The first involved two fourteen-year-old boys, Charlie Lang and Ernest Green, arrested for attempting to rape a thirteen-year-old white girl near the small town—population fourteen hundred—of Quitman.
Such mutilations—parading dead bodies around the town, shooting or burning bodies already dead, severing body parts and using them for souvenirs, using corkscrews to pull spirals of flesh from living victims or roasting people over slow fires—were as much a part of the ritual of lynching as the actual act of killing. They sent a more powerful message than straightforward killing would have sent, graphically reinforcing the idea that Negroes were so far outside the human family that the most inhuman actions could be visited upon them.
There were
The point was that there did not have to be a point; Black life could be snuffed out on whim, you could be killed because some ignorant white man didn’t like the color of your shirt or the way you drove a wagon. Mississippi Blacks had to understand that viscerally. Those who wanted to work for change had to understand that they were challenging a system that could and would take their lives casually.
a way of life, as he noted elsewhere, dependent above all else upon Black labor.11 Most Delta counties were three-quarters Black, and the Blacks were overwhelmingly agricultural laborers, tenant farmers, and domestics. They were a poor and suppressed population even as compared to Blacks in the rest of Mississippi.
Sharecroppers were vulnerable to all manner of exploitation. Powdermaker estimates that twenty-five or thirty percent of them may have gotten an honest settlement at the end of the year. Since sharecroppers and tenants were largely illiterate, without recourse to the law, and often unable even to move to a different plantation without the permission of their landlord, less scrupulous landowners were free to do as they chose. Indeed, it was for just this reason that Black tenants were preferred to white ones. Blacks could be more easily squeezed; poor whites were thought to be too
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The school calendar was built around the cotton season, which meant that most Black youngsters were in school only when they weren’t needed in the fields.
(Aaron Henry, who as an adult would be among the important most Black leaders in Mississippi, as a child asked his mother why he could only go to school for five months while the white kids went seven. She answered that it was because he was smarter than white kids; they needed extra time.) Powdermaker
While cotton production was being mechanized, competition from synthetics and cheap foreign cotton made cotton a less valuable crop. During the Depression, the bottom fell out of the cotton market. Across the South, the average price of a pound of cotton, which had been thirty-five cents in 1919, dropped to six cents in 1931. In Mississippi it fell to nine cents. Delta farmers began switching to other crops—corn, oats, soybeans—all requiring much less labor than cotton.16 By the 1960s, modernized plantations found they needed barely a fifth of their former work force.
function. Schemes to reduce the size of the Black population became a popular subject of discussion. The Great Migration during World War I had generated near-panic among wealthier whites. Labor agents from the North were shot at, beaten, harassed with every legal device planters could think of. Blacks caught trying to leave might be jailed or even strung up as a lesson to others. By the 1950s, gubernatorial candidates were competing to see who could promise to drive the greatest number of Negroes from the state in the shortest period of time.
“Although isolation of any single election factor risks presenting a false picture, the reality that Afro-American votes were now determinative in 16 non-South states with 278 electoral votes escaped no serious political strategist.”
An equally important factor in the gradual decline of racial terror may have been the collapse of the cotton economy, which led to less need to control Blacks, either through the near-peonage of sharecrop-ping or through violence.
In the early 1930s, according to Arthur Raper’s classic study of lynching, Mississippi officials prevented fourteen lynchings, more than they allowed to take place. Hortense Powdermaker, conducting her study of Sunflower County at the same time, concluded that the fear of outside opinion was a potent factor in reducing community support for the mob. By the thirties, newspapers in larger Southern cities typically criticized lynchings, at least in principle. By the forties, their criticisms were clearly linked to fear of outside scrutiny. In 1943, for example, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger warned
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Jessie Daniel Ames of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching pointed out that those poor whites reached by New Deal programs actually may have had more cash money in their pockets than they were accustomed to and thus had less
For wealthier whites in the South, lynching was beginning to look counterproductive. In 1939, Ames noted, “we have managed to reduce lynchings . . . not because we’ve grown more law-abiding or respectable but because lynchings became such bad advertising. The South is going after big industry at the
The oldest generation, those over sixty at the time of the study, had been born either in slavery or just after the Civil War. They were the generation most prone to put their trust in “good” white people and most prone to believe that Blacks were indeed inferior to whites. Still, they resented the suffering the system imposed on them. Among this generation, both belief and behavior tended to acknowledge white superiority.
Their children, though, born just before the turn of the century, more typically continued to behave as if they accepted the superiority of whites but seldom really believed it. They grew up having less intimate contact with whites than had their parents, and many of them, with at least the rudiments of literacy and exposure to newspapers, movies, and the radio, were more aware of the world beyond the plantation.
They held that Blacks were just as good as whites but recognized as a plain fact of life that such a belief could not be acted on publicly. In the presence of whites, they presented the countenance whites typically wanted to see—respectful, content, subservient. Some deriv...
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