After decades of scholarship on the civil rights movement at the
local level, the insights of bottom-up movement history remain
essentially invisible in the accepted narrative of the movement and
peripheral to debates on how to research, document, and teach about
the movement. This collection of original works refocuses attention
on this bottom-up history and compels a rethinking of what and who
we think is central to the movement.
The essays examine such locales as Sunflower County,
Mississippi; Memphis, Tennessee; and Wilson, North Carolina; and
engage such issues as nonviolence and self-defense, the
implications of focusing on women in the movement, and struggles
for freedom beyond voting rights and school desegregation. Events
and incidents discussed range from the movement's heyday to the
present and include the Poor People's Campaign mule train to
Washington, D.C., the popular response to the deaths of Rosa Parks
and Coretta Scott King, and political cartoons addressing Barack
Obama's presidential campaign.
The kinds of scholarship represented here--which draw on oral
history and activist insights (along with traditional sources) and
which bring the specificity of time and place into dialogue with
broad themes and a national context--are crucial as we continue to
foster scholarly debates, evaluate newer conceptual frameworks, and
replace the superficial narrative that persists in the popular
imagination.
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