On the Road and out of the Box: Teaching the Civil Rights Movement from a Chrysler Minivan

“I’ve never heard a political opinion from a Chinaman,” African American civil rights activist and Mississippi Delta entrepreneur Amzie Moore recounted in a 1967 interview. Although Congress passed and enacted major pieces of legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Moore understood that there was still a long way to go on the road to equality and was more than a bit flustered over what he identified as Asian Americans’ lack of participation in the civil rights movement. A native of the Mississippi Delta born to sharecropping parents on a plantation near the small town of Grenada and later a store owner in Cleveland, Mississippi, Moore became a leader in the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, an organization that encouraged self-help and entrepreneurship among African Americans in Mississippi. While the 1955 murder of Emmett Till spurred Moore to action in the search for Till’s body (where Moore and others learned that there were hundreds of unknown Emmett Tills whom whites had murdered and dumped in the swamps, bayous, and murky, slow-winding rivers of the Delta for decades and probably centuries), Moore was most comfortable in the economic arena of civil rights. Moore believed deeply in the value of small business and property ownership in uplifting black southerners and placing them on the path to equality. This was often difficult to accomplish in the Delta, the “most southern place on earth,” as journalists described the flat, cotton-bespeckled landscape of the area. Since the immediate post–Civil War years, however, Chinese migrating to the region from the West Coast in search of business opportunities or to join other family members who lingered after brief stints as plantation workers during the early days of Reconstruction had a strong foothold in the small business scene in the Delta. ...

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An Unfiltered Dose of the Human Condition

Roadside Americans ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469655000.003.0005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 103-132

Author(s):

Jack Reid

Keyword(s):

Civil Rights ◽

Human Condition ◽

Significant Drop ◽

The Road ◽

Previous Decade ◽

The Status ◽

The Media ◽

State And Local ◽

On The Road ◽

The Times

After a significant drop in ride solicitation during the previous decade, the early 1960s witnessed what journalists at the time deemed a “hitchhiking renaissance.” Young people, the predominant hitchhikers of the era, attached different meanings to the practice. For those frustrated with the status quo and inspired by the Beat novel On the Road, hitchhiking was part of an alternative lifestyle. Others saw thumbing as a thrifty way to get to civil rights and anti-war demonstrations. “Sport hitchhikers” characterized the practice as a pathway to adventure and authentic experience. Finally, some continued to associate hitchhiking with utter necessity. Although there continued to be vocal critics of the practice, the media of the early sixties put forth a more nuanced analysis of hitchhiking as journalists tried to make sense of the era’s youth culture. At the same time, some state and local legislatures softened their anti-hitchhiking laws. Despite concerns about highway safety and periodic acts of violence, this brand of hitchhiking found greater acceptance in American culture because it tracked with the spirit of the times, including the optimism and ambition of President John F Kennedy’s vision of a “New Frontier.”

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We Shall Be Heard

Blue Texas ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469626758.003.0007 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Max Krochmal

Keyword(s):

Civil Rights ◽

Urban Areas ◽

Political Power ◽

Equal Treatment ◽

The South ◽

Economic Opportunities ◽

The Road ◽

Civil Rights Movements ◽

On The Road ◽

The 1960S

This chapter describes the growing demonstrations during the 1960s, as the sit-in movement spreads to Texas. Elder activists join the young in expressing their demands. In less than three years after the first sit-ins, the revived African American civil rights movements would succeed in desegregating public accommodations in urban areas throughout Texas and the South, counting a major coup on the road to their larger goals of equal treatment, improved economic opportunities, and real political power.

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Roadside Americans

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469655000.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Jack Reid

Keyword(s):

Civil Rights ◽

Ronald Reagan ◽

The United States ◽

Traditional Values ◽

White House ◽

The Road ◽

The Great Depression ◽

On The Road ◽

American Society ◽

Reagan Era

Between the Great Depression and the mid-1970s, hitchhikers were a common sight for motorists, as American service members, students, and adventurers sought out the romance of the road in droves. Beats, hippies, feminists, and civil rights and antiwar activists saw "thumb tripping" as a vehicle for liberation, living out the counterculture's rejection of traditional values. Yet, by the time Ronald Reagan, a former hitchhiker himself, was in the White House, the youthful faces on the road chasing the ghost of Jack Kerouac were largely gone—along with sympathetic portrayals of the practice in state legislatures and the media. In Roadside Americans, Jack Reid traces the rise and fall of hitchhiking, offering vivid accounts of life on the road and how the act of soliciting rides from strangers, and the attitude toward hitchhikers in American society, evolved over time in synch with broader economic, political, and cultural shifts. In doing so, Reid offers insight into significant changes in the United States amid the decline of liberalism and the rise of the Reagan Era.

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