The Techniques of Disavowal

This chapter considers the limitations of civil rights disobedience in transforming white citizens. Building on the work of James Baldwin, Charles Mills, and Elizabeth Spelman and chronicling a “failed” protest at the 1964 World’s Fair, this chapter attends to the discursive techniques of disavowal that white citizens and state officials used to dismiss black activism as inappropriate, irresponsible, gratuitous, and violent—thereby avoiding the claims such protest made upon them, while preserving their own innocence and moral standing. In stepping outside the South and the familiar set of events that make up the public memory of the “short” civil rights movement, this chapter also suggests that some aspects of campaigns like the one in Birmingham were enabled—and publicly legitimated—by the very techniques of disavowal that limited the movement’s radical potentialities.

Forcing the Better Argument

This chapter details the outward-facing dynamics of civil disobedience by examining the tactics employed in the 1963 Birmingham Campaign. Though Birmingham is often memorialized as the pinnacle of nonviolent and properly civil disobedience in the United States, the tactics that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) deployed there trouble the easy distinction between persuasion and coercion, nonviolence and force. Activists in Birmingham described and defended their actions as crisis-generating—what this chapter calls the tactics of disruption and the tactics of disclosure. In a society shaped by white supremacy, black activists knew that they would have to arrest the attention of white citizens—disrupt everyday routines, violate norms of comportment, and involve spectators in a dramatic conflict—in order to create the space for persuasion to do its work. They had to force the better argument.

An Entire World in Motion

This chapter develops an alternative framework for understanding the civil disobedience of civil rights activists: as a decolonizing praxis that linked their dissent to that of anticolonial activists and tied the context of Jim Crow to global white supremacy. If the constitutional, democratic state formed the normative horizon for liberal understandings of civil disobedience, activists’ horizon was defined by processes of imaginative transit—the process of thinking and traveling across boundaries and disparate contexts, through which activists in motion constructed civil disobedience as a means of transforming worldwide structures of racist imperialism, colonial rule, apartheid, and Jim Crow. Between 1920 and 1960, African American, Indian, South African, and Ghanaian activists proposed, debated, and wielded nonviolent direct action as a means of self-liberation from white supremacy’s structures of fear and violence, and way of disrupting and transforming the practices that held those structures in place.

Incarceration as Liberation

This chapter details the inward-facing purposes of civil disobedience by revisiting the student-led campaign of “jail, no bail” pioneered by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). It argues that accepting arrest was a practice of “comparative freedom,” through which activists reframed the experience of incarceration as one of liberation. The point of “jail, no bail”—withholding bail money and voluntarily staying in jail—was not to signal fidelity to law, stabilize state authority, or contain the unruly potential of dissent. Rather, through “jail, no bail” student activists transformed an experience defined by fear, stigma, and vulnerability into an enactment of courage, dignity, and freedom. Accepting arrest was thus a means of withholding collective and individual cooperation from illegitimate power, and thereby refusing the rituals of submission and domination that defined Jim Crow.

Introduction

The introductory chapter situates the civil rights movement within the political theory literatures on civil disobedience—old and new—and traces the way that the debate has shifted since the mid-century (from a decidedly liberal framework to various democratic ones) as well as broadened (bringing attention to new movements and forms of action). Despite the important insights generated out of these shifts, the civil rights example remains at once central and marginal—operating as a key proving ground for the political purchase of liberal and deliberative theories but also attesting to their limits, without making the movement itself the subject of sustained analysis or theoretical interest. In contrast, drawing on—but also departing from—the insights of the critical historiography of the “long civil rights movement,” the introduction presents the case for returning to the civil rights movement as a site of (and source for) political theorizing about civil disobedience.

Epilogue

The trouble started late on the evening of June 16, 1964, when members of the Ku Klux Klan set fire to a church outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi. Mount Zion Church was slated to host one of many new “freedom schools” across the state—grassroots institutions designed to empower and organize local black youth through an alternative curriculum focused on black history, civic education, and nonviolent resistance....

Seeing Like a White State

This chapter explores the political formation of the intertwined narratives about civil disobedience and the civil rights movement. Detailing their relationship to the 1960s push for “law and order,” it traces the significant ways that this context shaped the conceptualization of civil disobedience as a means of strengthening already extant constitutional principles. Theorists like John Rawls saw civil disobedience from the perspective of a white state: taking for granted the legitimacy of the constitutional order, assuming as primary the ends of constitutional integrity and stability, and figuring the problem of racial injustice as limited, exceptional, and all-but-already solved. Such a stance takes the state’s perspective by theorizing within the bounds of a presupposed legitimacy, prioritizing stability and maintenance of an existing system. This chapter shows how such a perspective delivers standards of judgment that bolster rather than undermine white supremacy.