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Citizenship and Self-Respect: The Experience of Politics in the Civil Rights Movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Richard H. King
Richard H. King
Affiliation:
Richard H.King is Lecturer in American Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, England.
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Extract

It once seemed that the civil rights movement resulted from a kind of historical immaculate conception and signalled an historical “break” of major proportions. Now, however, we have historical studies tracing a long tradition of “core values” at work in black American culture and sociological studies that reconstruct the dense institutional matrix from which the civil rights movement emerged and drew sustenance. We can now identify historical developments – the great migration of southern blacks to the North, the increasing prosperity enjoyed by the South after World War II, and, most crucially, the Supreme Court decision of 1954 – that set the stage for the movement. Nor could the movement have come into existence without the nexus of black churches and colleges, the early work of the NAACP or the emergence of action-oriented organizations such as SCLC, SNCC and CORE. Even before Montgomery, we now learn, there were mass action campaigns by southern blacks that provided both information and inspiration for the fledgling movement in the capital of the Confederacy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , April 1988 , pp. 7 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

1 Afro-American political culture has been most recently explored in Harding, Vincent, There is a River (New York: Vintage, 1983)Google Scholar and Franklin, V. P., Black Self-Determination (Westport, CN: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1984)Google Scholar. Recent, valuable sociological studies of the civil rights movement are MacAdam, Doug, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)Google Scholar and Morris, Aldon, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: The Free Press, 1984).Google Scholar

2 Watters, Pat, Down to Now (New York: Pantheon, 1971)Google Scholar makes this point with particular force, while Garrow, David, Protest at Selma (New Haven, 1978)Google Scholar traces the way violence and media coverage of the movement fed one another to the extent that the very strategy of the movement, even in its non-violent phase, depended upon provoking violence.

3 William, Beardslee, ed., The Way Out Must Lead In, 2nd edn. (Westport, CN: Lawrence Hill and Co., 1983), 123.Google Scholar

4 This article is part of a longer study which will analyze the civil rights movement in terms of these four concepts of freedom. My claim is not that leaders or participants had any one or all of them in mind, much less related them to one another. The terms “freedom as status” and “freedom as character” are derived from Gary Frank Reed's work on freedom in ancient Greece, but I have used them in a different way.

5 The history of SNCC can be found in Zinn, Howard, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965)Google Scholar and Carson, Claiborne, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

6 Chafe, William, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, N. C. and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 99.Google Scholar

7 See Bellah, Robert et al. , Habits of the Heart (New York: Harper Torch, 1984)Google Scholar for this point about the origins of American protest movements.

8 Watters, Down to Now Contains extensive transcriptions of mass meetings, while both Beardslee, , ed., The Way Out, 60Google Scholar, and Watters, Pat and Cleghorn, Reese, Climbing Jacob's Ladder (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1967), 156Google Scholar, illuminate the workings of the mass meetings and freedom songs. Particularly valuable on this topic is the interview with Bernice Reagon in Dick, Cluster, ed., They Should Have Served that Cup of Coffee (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 11–30Google Scholar and her Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs, 1960–1966 (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1980).Google Scholar

9 In Black Self-Determination, 29–67, V. P. Franklin argues against the older view that black religion (and hence spirituals) was traditionally “otherworldly and compensatory” with God freeing the people rather than the people freeing themselves. His point is that religion under slavery was always religious and political, sacred and secular.

10 Reagon in Cluster, , ed., Cup of Coffee, 20.Google Scholar

11 Reed, Adolph, The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1986)Google Scholar criticizes Aldon Morris for overemphasizing the religious origins of the movement. The quotation is from Robert, Hamburger, ed., Our Portion of Hell (New York: Links Books, 1973), 71.Google Scholar

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16 The poem is reprinted in Watters, , Down to Now, 117–23Google Scholar. Watters does not identify the black minister who composed it.

17 See Martin, Luther King, Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), 128Google Scholar for his account of a similar experience.

18 The dialectic of seeing and being seen, the power of the “look” or “gaze,” is central to Sartre's analysis of the ontology of interpersonal relationships in Being and Nothingness. A literary exemplification of this relationship comes near the end of Faulkner's, Light in August (New York: Modern Library, 1950)Google Scholar where the dying and castrated Joe Christmas looks back at his killers: “They are not going to lose it [the look] in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and re-assuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes” (p. 407).

19 Ernest, Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), 228, 236.Google Scholar

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24 Annie Devine, CRDP (1968), 9; John Hulett, CRDP (1968), 30.

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30 Alice, Walker, Meridian (New York: Washington Square Press, 1976), 205Google Scholar. The phrase “political death” is a variation on Orlando Patterson's claim that slaves suffer from “social death,” an obliteration of essential kinship or family ties.

31 Norrell, Robert J., Reaping the Whirlwind; The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1985), 41Google Scholar; Lillian McGill, CRDP (1969), 27; Isaac Richmond, CRDP (1968).

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34 Rosa Parks, CRDP (1967), 67; Sheyann, Webb and Rachel, West Nelson, Selma, Lord, Selma as told to Frank Sikora (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 124Google Scholar; Watters, , Down to Now, 7.Google Scholar

35 Quoted in Marshall, Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 284.Google Scholar