From Shiloh to Selma:The Impact of the Civil War Centennial on the Black Freedom Struggle in the United States, 1961–65

Prompted by the current debate and cognitive dissonance surrounding the #BlackLivesMatter protest campaign’s desired goals of securing freedom, justice, equality, and human dignity for people of African descent in the United States, this article addresses this social movement as an extension of Black humanism. This claim is a direct result of the #BlackLivesMatter movement’s sui generis origin and evolution beyond any identifiable Black religious institution. Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us that “insisting that we are human and productive members of [American] society has been a first principle of Black abolitionist politics since at least the eighteenth century.” Thus it is important to recognize the contemporary significance of #BlackLivesMatter by placing it within a broader historical context that resonates with many tenets of the traditional Black freedom struggle yet also charts future directions, including nontheistic thought and praxis such as atheism, agnosticism, humanism, and other expressions of unbelief as part of the broader African American experience. In 2009, Pew Research Center data on religious pluralism in the United States revealed that more than 12 percent of African Americans nationwide readily self-identified as being unaffiliated with any particular religion. This group of Black nonbelievers constitutes the third largest cohort within African American religious life—a major development in the history of African American faith and culture that ought to be more fully explored and explained. Scholars have discussed the origins and varied nature of Black humanism at considerable length; this article builds upon that existing research by examining the origins and nature of Black humanism within the history of the Black freedom struggle.

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Hostile Heartland

10.5622/illinois/9780252042492.001.0001 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Brent M. S. Campney

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

Civil Rights ◽

World War I ◽

Racial Violence ◽

World War ◽

Black Freedom Struggle ◽

Freedom Struggle ◽

Civil Rights Organizations ◽

Black Freedom ◽

New Research

Hostile Heartland examines racial violence—or, more aptly, racist violence—against blacks (African Americans) in the Midwest, emphasizing lynching, whipping, and violence by police (or police brutality). It also focuses on black responses, including acts of armed resistance, the development of local and regional civil rights organizations, and the work of individual activists. Within that broad framework the book considers patterns of institutionalized violence in studies of individual states, like Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas over a number of decades; it also targets specific incidents of such violence or resistance in case studies representative of changes in these patterns like the lynching of Joseph Spencer in Cairo, Illinois, in 1854 and the lynching of Luke Murray in South Point, Ohio, in 1932. Significantly, Hostile Heartland not only addresses the years from the Civil War to World War I, which are the typical focus of such studies, but also incorporates the twenty-five years that precede the Civil War and the additional twenty-five that follow World War I. It pioneers new research methodologies, as exemplified by Chapter 4’s analysis of the relations between and among racist violence, family history, and the black freedom struggle. Finally, Hostile Heartland situates its findings within the historiography more broadly.

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Slave Self-Activity and the Bourgeois Revolution in the United States: Jubilee and the Boundaries of Black Freedom

Historical Materialism ◽

10.1163/1569206x-00001817 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 27 (3) ◽

pp. 31-76

Author(s):

Brian Kelly

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Civil War ◽

The United States ◽

Complex Relationship ◽

Important Advance ◽

Major Work ◽

Comprehensive Review ◽

Black Freedom ◽

Marxist Tradition ◽

General Strike

Abstract For more than a generation, historical interpretations of emancipation in the United States have acknowledged that the slaves played a central role in driving that process forward. This is a critically important advance, and one worth defending. But it is also a perspective whose influence seems increasingly precarious. This article explores the complex relationship between the slaves’ ‘revolution from below’ and the bourgeois revolution directed from above, in part through an appraisal of W.E.B. Du Bois’s argument about the ‘slaves’ general strike’ and the wider revolutionary upheaval encompassing civil war and reconstruction. Grounded in a close familiarity with sources and interpretive trends, the article offers a detailed reading of shifting perspectives in current historiography, a comprehensive review of left engagement with Du Bois’s work, and an extended ‘critical and sympathetic’ appraisal of his major work from within the framework of the Marxist tradition.

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1968/2008: Reflections on Social Movements in an Age of Permanent War

Kalfou A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies ◽

10.15367/kf.v2i1.50 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Nikhil Pal Singh

Keyword(s):

Black Politics ◽

The United States ◽

Historical Narrative ◽

Black Freedom Struggle ◽

Freedom Struggle ◽

Black Freedom Movement ◽

Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽

Black Freedom ◽

Bus Boycott ◽

White Terror

1968 represents a crossroads of sorts, whose alternative political trajectories continue to influence the present in often confusing and contradictory ways. We have an increasingly exhaustive historical narrative detailing the long Black freedom struggle against white supremacist monopolizations of power and resources in the era before the Montgomery bus boycott. From the heroic mobilizations of Reconstruction-era Black politics in the face of white terror, through two great migrations, the mobilizations of Black labor, a new Black urbanism, and forms of worldly engagement in an era of global wars and decolonization struggles, the Black freedom movement simultaneously carried and deepened a demand for racial democracy. It is ironic, however, that even as aspects of this past become clarified, the more immediate history and political meaning of this long struggle have grown murky. I am specifically thinking about the foreclosure of Black freedom imperatives in the United States, particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for which the year 1968 retains an iconic significance. Here the story often bifurcates, becoming a tale either of teleological fulfillment and narrative closure, or of violent fragmentation and ragged endings. These different trajectories lead us in turn to starkly different eventualities: the election of Barack Obama and the symbolic validation of the promise of Black politics, or the increasingly global US war-prison complex, where the tattered ends of our social contract once again meet the unforgiving cut of racialized governance. In this context, the searching question asked by Martin Luther King in his fateful final year—“Where Do We Go from Here?”—remains as relevant as ever.

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The Black Freedom Struggle in the Urban North

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.45 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Thomas J. Sugrue

Keyword(s):

Civil Rights ◽

Racial Discrimination ◽

20Th Century ◽

The United States ◽

Industrial Complex ◽

Late 20Th Century ◽

Black Freedom Struggle ◽

Freedom Struggle ◽

The North ◽

Black Freedom

Racism in the United States has long been a national problem, not a regional phenomenon. The long and well-documented history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and racial violence in the South overshadows the persistent reality of racial discrimination, systemic segregation, and entrenched inequality north of the Mason-Dixon line. From the mid-19th century forward, African Americans and their allies mounted a series of challenges to racially separate schools, segregated public accommodations, racially divided workplaces, endemic housing segregation, and discriminatory policing. The northern civil rights movement expanded dramatically in the aftermath of the Great Migration of blacks northward and the intensification of segregation in northern hotels, restaurants, and theaters, workplaces, housing markets, and schools in the early 20th century. During the Great Depression and World War II, emboldened civil rights organizations engaged in protest, litigation, and lobbying efforts to undermine persistent racial discrimination and segregation. Their efforts resulted in legal and legislative victories against racially separate and unequal institutions, particularly workplaces and stores. But segregated housing and schools remained more impervious to change. By the 1960s, many black activists in the North grew frustrated with the pace of change, even as they succeeded in increasing black representation in elected office, in higher education, and in certain sectors of the economy. In the late 20th century, civil rights activists launched efforts to fight the ongoing problem of police brutality and the rise of the prison-industrial complex. And they pushed, mostly through the courts, for the protection of the fragile gains of the civil rights era. The black freedom struggle in the North remained incomplete in the face of ongoing segregation, persistent racism, and ongoing racial inequality in employment, education, income, and wealth.

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Out of Oakland

10.7591/cornell/9781501702396.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Sean L. Malloy

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Cold War ◽

Support Groups ◽

The United States ◽

Black Freedom Struggle ◽

Freedom Struggle ◽

Republic Of The Congo ◽

Eldridge Cleaver ◽

The Cold War ◽

North Vietnam

This book explores the evolving internationalism of the Black Panther Party (BPP); the continuing exile of former members in Cuba is testament to the lasting nature of the international bonds that were forged during the party's heyday. Founded in Oakland, California, in October 1966, the BPP began with no more than a dozen members. Focused on local issues, most notably police brutality, the Panthers patrolled their West Oakland neighborhood armed with shotguns and law books. Within a few years, the BPP had expanded its operations into a global confrontation with what Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver dubbed “the international pig power structure.” This book traces the shifting intersections between the black freedom struggle in the United States, Third World anticolonialism, and the Cold War. By the early 1970s, the Panthers had chapters across the United States as well as an international section headquartered in Algeria and support groups and emulators as far afield as England, India, New Zealand, Israel, and Sweden. The international section served as an official embassy for the BPP and a beacon for American revolutionaries abroad, attracting figures ranging from Black Power skyjackers to fugitive LSD guru Timothy Leary. Engaging directly with the expanding Cold War, BPP representatives cultivated alliances with the governments of Cuba, North Korea, China, North Vietnam, and the People's Republic of the Congo as well as European and Japanese militant groups and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.

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Violence, Social Movements, and Black Freedom Struggles

Contention ◽

10.3167/cont.2021.0901of ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-9

Author(s):

AK Thompson

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Social Movements ◽

The United States ◽

United States Today ◽

Black Freedom ◽

Current Events ◽

Research Agendas ◽

Ambivalent Relationship ◽

The Relationship ◽

Freedom Struggles

George Floyd’s murder by police on 26 May 2020 set off a cycle of struggle that was notable for its size, intensity, and rate of diffusion. Starting in Minneapolis, the uprising quickly spread to dozens of other major cities and brought with it a repertoire that included riots, arson, and looting. In many places, these tactics coexisted with more familiar actions like public assemblies and mass marches; however, the inflection these tactics gave to the cycle of contention is not easily reconciled with the protest repertoire most frequently mobilized during movement campaigns in the United States today. This discrepancy has led to extensive commentary by scholars and movement participants, who have often weighed in by considering the moral and strategic efficacy of the chosen tactics. Such considerations should not be discounted. Nevertheless, I argue that both the dynamics of contention witnessed during the uprising and their ambivalent relationship to the established protest repertoire must first be understood in historical terms. By considering the relationship between violence, social movements, and Black freedom struggles in this way, I argue that scholars can develop a better understanding of current events while anticipating how the dynamics of contention are likely to develop going forward. Being attentive to these dynamics should in turn inform our research agendas, and it is with this aim in mind that I offer the following ten theses.

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