Nonviolence, Black Power, and the Surveillance State in Memphis’s War on Poverty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony C. Siracusa
Keyword(s):  
Black Power ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Antipoverty Programs ◽  
Freedom Movement

This essay examines the intertwined histories of federal antipoverty programs and the Black Power movement in Memphis, framed through the unlikely alliance of the Reverend James Lawson and members of the Black Organizing Project. Employing primary sources from antipoverty organizations in Memphis and newly surfaced FBI documents, it argues that the explosive events of late March and early April 1968 cannot be explained only by differences among black activists. The fracture within Memphis’s black freedom movement—a rupture that nearly thirty years of scholarship has attributed chiefly to deepening fissures between advocates of Black Power and advocates of nonviolence in the Memphis sanitation strike of 1968—is better explained by two factors: political resistance at both the local and national levels to black-led antipoverty efforts, and a robust and likely illegal effort by the FBI to infiltrate and undermine both the Black Power and nonviolent wings of the black freedom movement. The political efforts to halt the antipoverty movement and the black freedom struggle in Memphis were bound inextricably together.

Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Greene
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
White Male ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are the names that come to mind for most Americans if asked about the civil rights or Black Power movements. Others may point to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, both of whom backed pathbreaking civil rights legislation. However, recent scholarship suggests that neither black male leaders nor white male presidents were always the most important figures in the modern struggle for black freedom. Presidents took their cues not simply from male luminaries in civil rights organizations. Rather, their legislative initiatives were largely in response to grassroots protests in which women, especially black women, were key participants. African American women played major roles in local and national organizing efforts and frequently were the majority in local chapters of groups as dissimilar as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Black Panther Party. Even familiar names like Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King have become little more than sanitized national icons, while their decades-long efforts to secure racial, economic, and gender justice remain relatively unknown. Aside from activists and scholars, even fewer of us know much, if anything, about the female allies of the black freedom struggle, including white southerners as well as other women of color. A closer look at the women who made enormous contributions to both the modern civil rights and Black Power movements sheds new light on these struggles, including the historic national victories we think we fully understand, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In short, examining women’s participation in the “long civil rights movement,” which historians increasingly date to the New Deal and World War II, calls for a redefinition of more conventional notions of leadership, protest, and politics.

Black Power and Black Theology in Cairo, Illinois

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerry L. Pimblott
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Church ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Moral Suasion ◽  
Over Time

This chapter argues that the thesis of Black Power's de-Christianization must be tested on the ground, with scholars paying attention to local struggles as they evolved over time, and in response to changing social and economic conditions. It follows the religious contours of Cairo's black freedom struggle from the 1950s to the 1970s to illustrate that while Black Power's reliance upon the black church was consistent with earlier campaigns, the United Front's theology nevertheless reflected a significant departure from the established Civil Rights credo. Whereas civil rights leaders expressed a firm belief in the redemptive power of Christian nonviolence and moral suasion to topple the walls of segregation, Cairo's Black Power advocates were less optimistic.

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

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.

Introduction

Prison Power ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Rhetorical Analysis ◽  
State Repression ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
Freedom Movement

This introduction discusses the beginnings of the “jail, no bail” strategy in the southern civil rights movement, introduces the Black Power vernacular as a critical optic of the book, and charts the ways in which jailing and imprisonment were central features of the black freedom movement from Greensboro to Black Power. This chapter also introduces the writings of Rap Brown (Jamil Al-Amin), Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Assata Shakur as the central texts for this rhetorical analysis. Finally, the chapter suggests that these extremely popular, though understudied, writings are useful spaces to understand how imprisonment occupied a contested terrain, used simultaneously for black liberation and for state repression.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Garrett Felber
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Carceral State ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Struggle ◽  
Freedom Movement

Describes how Those Who Know Don’t Say uses the NOI as a vehicle to explore forgotten sites and forms of Black struggle that confronted the carceral state during the mid-twentieth century. Reconsidering the place and scope of the NOI within the history of the Black Freedom Struggle in this way expands the boundaries of Black liberation struggles by revealing a more dynamic freedom movement in which objectives and strategies were always contested and debated within communities themselves, changing who we see as political theorists and agents of change, and expanding our spatial lens to include prison yards and courtrooms as sites of activism.

"A Monument to Blackness"

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Jeffery
Keyword(s):  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Black Consciousness ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Pivotal Moments ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Instrumental Role ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

Murals have been present at pivotal moments during the Black freedom struggle, yet they remain on the margins of scholarship. Birthed during the Harlem Renaissance, cresting in the streets during Black Power, and resurrected today during #BlackLivesMatter, murals are radical, visual counterparts to the spoken politics of a movement. This article highlights the instrumental role murals played in fostering Black unity and empowerment in grassroots mobilizations since the 1920s. It introduces their complex, malleable roles as touchstones of communication, sites of ritual, visual tombstones, and talismans of a new Black consciousness, demonstrating how they became what a 1968 newspaper called “a monument to blackness.”

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