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"The Problem of the 20th Century is the Problem of the Color Line": Exploring the Civil Rights MovementFall 2006Supplemental Bibliography(This list will likely be updated
and revised on the Flow of History website) General C. Vann Woodward, The
Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). Published in the wake of the
Brown decision, and reprinted many times since, Woodward’s extended
essay offers a concise, unsettling, and brilliant interpretation of
race relations and racial politics during the era of segregation (not
just in the South). This seminal work historicizes segregation and its
creators, making clear that the system was deliberately constructed
rather than "natural" and "always the way it was." Teaching Tolerance (Southern
Poverty Law Center), America’s Civil Rights Movement. This package—available for
free to teachers—contains a brief text (Free at Last), a short
documentary film (A Time for Justice), and a teacher’s guide
including ten standards-based lesson plans. The focus is on the commitment
and sacrifices of ordinary people who often encountered violence in
the struggle. It’s powerful stuff, though pretty horrifying. Local Studies Aldon D. Morris, The
Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for
Change (The Free Press, 1984). Morris’ sociological and
organizational study focuses on the period 1953-63. He highlights the
grassroots networks that African Americans steadily built throughout
the South prior to the Brown decision in 1954, the work of unheralded
activists and leaders, and the relationships among the various civil
rights organizations that led the struggle into national consciousness.
Did you know, for example, that blacks in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, mounted
a successful bus boycott in 1953 (i.e., before Montgomery), and that
before the Greensboro, N.C. action in 1960, student sit-ins occurred
in Oklahoma City (1957) and Nashville (1959)? This important book illuminates
critical aspects of the historical record that are usually obscured
in standard accounts. Diane McWhorter, Carry
Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights
Revolution (Simon and Schuster, 2001). This is the backstory to the
story of King, Shuttlesworth, and the SCLC’s pivotal Birmingham campaign.
Diane McWhorter grew up a child of the Birmingham elite, about the same
age as the girls killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist
Church. Twenty-five years later, she decided to investigate her own
family’s role in the epic battle, and discovered "that the elite
establishment of the city itself had nurtured the Ku Klux Klan and created
the brutal conditions that incited a magnificent nonviolent revolution."
This sprawling, fascinating, eloquent book begins during the Great Depression
and embeds the black freedom struggle in a deep context of class conflict,
politics, and anti-communism as well as race. The events of 1960-1963
are examined in loving detail. At times it reads like one of Gabriel
Garcia Marquez’ magical realist sagas, and is well worth the investment. Two other excellent, pathbreaking,
and similarly large community studies of the Civil Rights Movement are
John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi
(University of Illinois Press, 1995), and Adam Fairclough, Race
& Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972
(University of Georgia Press, 1995). Both books depart from the "Montgomery
to Selma narrative" and are grounded in the specific conditions, political
culture, and history of the state being examined, emphasizing the work
of relatively unheralded local activists, especially women. Of Louisiana,
Fairclough says, "The picture that emerges…is of a moderate legalistic,
incrementalist movement. There seems to have been less class tension
than in Mississippi and less Black Power militancy than in, for example,
North Carolina." Essays about various cities
(South and North) appear in Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements
in America, ed. Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodward (New York
University Press, 2005). Matthew J. Countryman,
Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). This is a prize-winning exemplar
of the recent expansion of Civil Rights Movement historiography into
the northern states. Countryman states: "The strategies and goals
that we associate with southern civil rights activism were at the core
of a vital political movement that challenged the racial status quo
in Philadelphia and other cities of the urban North beginnig in the
1940s. This study….argues that the modern civil rights movement was
as much a product of the black experience of racial oppression in the
urban North as it was of lifein the segregated South." His thesis
is that the "optimism of mid-century American liberalism about the
uses of state power to protect individual rights and encourage upward
mobility"—and liberalism’s failure to deliver on those promises—was
a critical factor shaping civil rights activism in Philadelphia and
throughout the North. James R. Ralph, Jr.,
Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights
Movement (Harvard University Press, 1993). One of the first books to focus
on civil rights organizing in the North, Ralph’s study sees the Chicago
Freedom Movement and the problematic campaign against housing discrimination
(late 1965-mid-1967) as "a decisive, transitional episode… [that]
marked a shift of the insurgency from the South to the North, accelerated
Martin Luther King’s turn to a more universalistic economic agenda,
and…signaled SCLC’s last effort at arousing a national response
to the denial of equal opportunity." In Chicago, the dispute over
fair housing "dramatically exposed the limits of the civil rights
consensus" because of "white resistance to the new quest to expand
equality of opportunity into the more private realms of American life
in the North as well as the South." The past decade has produced
similar studies of the civil rights struggle in Detroit, New York, Newark,
Oakland, and St. Louis. Martin Luther King, Jr. Taylor Branch, Parting the
Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63; Pillar of Fire, 1963-65;
At Canaan's Edge, 1965-68 (Simon and Schuster, 1988, 1998, 2006). Branch’s majesterial trilogy
is a master work. His ability to combine intimate detail with sweeping
scope is unmatched. David Garrow, Bearing the
Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (William Morrow, 1986) and Michael Eric Dyson, I May
Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (The Free
Press, 2000) are two other well-regarded biographies that offer nuanced
interpretations of King. A Testament of Hope: The
Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington
(Harper and Row, 1986). The title says it all. Part
I, Philosophy is divided into Religious: Nonviolence, Social: Integration,
and Political: Wedged Between Democracy and Black Nationalism; Part
II is Famous Sermons and Public Addresses; Part III is Historic Essays;
Part IV is Interviews; Part V is Books (excerpted). Stride Toward Freedom: The
Montgomery Story (1958) is King’s reflection on the motives and
meanings of the Montgomery campaign, which became the handbook of his
movement. The Strength to Love
(1963) is a collection of sermons King delivered at the Ebenezer Baptist
Church in Atlanta. Why We Can’t Wait
(1964), published in the wake of the Birmingham campaign, the March
on Washington, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, offered a ringing
defense of the power of nonviolent civil disobedience. "Nonviolence
is a powerful and just weapon. It is a weapon unique in history, which
cuts without wounding and and ennobles the man who wields it. It is
a sword that heals. Both a practical and a moral answer to the Negro’s
cry for justice, nonviolent direct action proved that it could win victories
without losing wars, and so became the triumphant tactic of the Negro
revolution of 1963." Where Do We Go from Here:
Chaos or Community? (1967) takes stock of the movement’s major
accomplishments (the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights
Act of 1965) and remaining challenges, as well as King’s role in a
broader movement for social justice and economic democracy that has
evolved beyond his control. This book addresses the Black Power movement,
the persistence of the ideology of white racism (even among liberals),
the inadequacies of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the problems of
urban poverty and the status of the black family, the roles of the black
middle class and organized labor, and the "larger world house "
(including Third World revolution, communism, and the Vietnam War in
a limited way): "Equality with whites will not solve the problems
of either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a world society
stricken by poverty and in a universe doomed to extinction by war. .
. . We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent
coannihilation. This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between
chaos and community." The Trumpet of Conscience
(1968) collects a series of sermonic lectures that were broadcast by
the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in December 1967. King forthrightly
attacks the Vietnam War and rebuts critics who claim his antiwar stance
is irresponsible and damaging to his civil rights work. He also discusses
the cultural and political rebellion of American youth. Malcolm X The Autobiography of Malcolm
X as told to Alex Haley (Ballantine, 1964) is perhaps the
best-known of Malcolm’s writings. He reviewed Haley’s manuscript
in process and they mutually agreed upon revisions. This is especially
interesting because the period of the interviews—early 1963 until
Malcolm’s assassination in February 1965—encompasses Malcolm’s
break with Elijah Muhammad and his pilgrimages to Mecca and Africa. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected
Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (1965) contains writings
exclusively from the last year of Malcolm’s life (with one exception).
They begin with his break from the Nation of Islam and his "declaration
of independence" from Elijah Muhammad, and include the famous speeches
"The Ballot or the Bullet" and "The Black Revolution." The selections
are preceded by valuable contextual notes. By Any Means Necessary
(1970) comprises eleven speeches and interviews in which Malcolm X presents
a revolutionary perspective, taking up political alliances, women's
rights, U.S. intervention in the Congo and Vietnam, capitalism and socialism,
and more. "…by any means necessary. That's our motto. We want freedom
by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want
equality by any means necessary." Also, "[The] thing that I would
like to impress upon every Afro-American leader is that no kind of action
in this country is ever going to bear fruit unless that action is tied
in with the overall international struggle." The End of White World Supremacy
(1971), ed. Imam Benjamin Karim, contains four seminal speeches: "Black
Man’s History," "The Black Revolution," "The Old Negro and
the New Negro," and "God’s Judgment of White America (The Chickens
are Coming Home to Roost)." The Final Speeches, February
1965 (1992) is a series of interviews and speeches that chronicle
Malcolm’s "revolutionary and internationalist political views. .
. his denunciation of every aspect of anti-Black racism and its economic
and social consequences, as well as his condemnation of the plunder
and domination of the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America by
Washington and other imperialist regimes." Young Adult Diane McWhorter, A Dream
of Freedom: The Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968 (Scholastic,
2004). Formatted like a picture book,
this is really more of a textbook pitched at middle school and high
school readers. The tone is appropriate to teenagers, and the text is
easy to read, with lots of great photographs and sidebars. McWhorter’s
perspective is broad, though the book focuses on major events and figures. Ruby Bridges, Through
My Eyes (Scholastic, 1999). Ruby Bridges steadfastly integrated
a public school in New Orleans in 1960—by her six-year-old self! Child
psychiatrist Robert Coles happened to be in New Orleans at the time
and he volunteered to work with Ruby, subsequently writing about her
in various books and publishing the children’s book The Story of
Ruby Bridges (1995). That book inspired Bridges to tell her own
story, which is just as compelling as the Little Rock saga. Illustrated
with amazing photographs and interesting excerpts from interviews and
contemporary media accounts. Deborah Wiles, Freedom
Summer, illustrated by Jerome Lagarrigue (Atheneum, 2001). For much younger readers, this lovely picture book tells the story of white and black best friends who confront segregation in the summer of 1964. |
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