Conversation in the Discipline
Geneseo College, State University of New York
March 24-26, 2006
The early histories of the Civil Rights Movement tended to be national in scope, with a top-down perspective that focused on major events, national organizations and leaders, significant legal decisions, and obvious political shifts. This perspective continues to shape the prevailing popular view and even much of the scholarship that portrays the Civil Rights Movement as a reformist, interracial crusade where nonviolent protesters exposed the evils of segregation and convinced the country, especially well-intentioned white northerners, to live up to its ideals of freedom and democracy. This approach also tends to emphasize a sharp break between this "good" southern Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s and a more problematic, radicalized, Black Power Movement that shifted north in the late 1960s.
This version of the movement is particularly egregious in popular culture, especially the still popular and influential 1984 movie Mississippi Burning, and in the annual King day events and media coverage. One of my students captured this perfectly with a short synopsis at Geneseo's 2004 Martin Luther King day observance when he said, "One day a nice old lady, Rosa Parks, sat down on a bus and got arrested. The next day Martin Luther King Jr. stood up and the Montgomery Bus Boycott followed. And sometime later King delivered his famous 'I Have a Dream' speech and segregation was over. This is how the story was taught to me."[1] Even more pernicious than this simplistic characterization of the movement that denies the agency of Rosa Parks and the thousands of African Americans in Montgomery whose 13-month boycott highlighted the possibilities of mass action, is the Mississippi Burning rendition of movement history. Although it might be dismissed by some as irrelevant or extreme, this "wrongheaded attempt at a sympathetic portrayal of the movement"--which features an heroic federal government defeating firebomb throwing redneck white men, while African Americans stand by as passive victims who are handed equality--remains disturbingly current, broadly accepted, and distressingly reflective of not just popular, but scholarly assumptions and framing of the movement.[2]
In fact, although historians and historical overviews generally offer a somewhat more complex version of the Civil Rights Movement, collectively they have failed to adequately address or incorporate a new body of scholarship--particularly community studies of local movements--that has emerged in the past decade. Individually and collectively, local studies, especially, are contributing details and adding complexity to our understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and providing the basis for re-examining important historiographical questions related to the implications of particular time and place; tactical and ideological differences and choices; gender, leadership, and democratic practices; the contours of white supremacy as a broad-based, national phenomenon; and how the Civil Rights Movement--as it has been defined and generally been understood and studied, as a southern movement from the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott to the 1965 Selma march or the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.--is perhaps better framed as part of a more broadly defined and expansive post-World War II Black Freedom Movement.
Despite the compelling findings of this new body of work, however, the outdated narrative of progress with its over-emphasis on sympathetic whites and top-down change and its denial of African American agency, continues to dominate among all but a few specialists. In 2003, political scientist Jeanne Theoharis points this out in her introduction to a collection of essays on northern movements, arguing that far too much of the scholarship continues to frame the Civil Rights Movement as "a nonviolent movement born in the South during the 1950s that emerged triumphant in the early 1960s but then was derailed by the twin forces of Black Power and white backlash when it sought to move North after 1965."[3] Theoharis emphasizes that the exclusively southern focus of this traditional narrative takes "a national struggle challenging the politics and economics of race in the United States and pigeonhole[s] it as a heroic triumph over Southern backwardness between 1954 and 1965."[4] One result of both this narrow southern framework and the early emphasis by historians on charismatic leaders, major organizations, national politics, legal struggles, and legislation is a historiography dominated by dichotomies, including, South v. North; nonviolence v. self-defense (or violence); civil rights v. Black Power; integration v. nationalism or self-reliance; rural v. urban; and local v. national. These are not particularly accurate or useful and ultimately obscure much that is significant about the Black Freedom Struggle.
This Conversation in the Discipline will explore the most significant findings from the last decade of movement studies and address ways to produce a synthesis that effectively transmits the highlights of this historiography to a broad audience, including other movement scholars, academic non-specialists (from fields including history, sociology, political science, education, Africana studies, and women's studies), undergraduate and graduate students, and middle and high school teachers. To do this, the Conversation will focus especially on recent local studies and other works that offer a bottom-up, locally-based perspective that challenge the persistent dichotomies by explicitly engaging with the complexity and even contradictions within the movement and movement historiography. In particular, the Conversation will specifically re-examine many of the commonplace assumptions about leadership, gender, nonviolence, self-defense, and violence as they played out in the movement and have been portrayed in the histories.
The Conversation will feature a number of the scholars whose local studies and bottom-up perspective led the way in offered a far-reaching alternative to the previously dominant top-down approach. They will be joined by scholars who have built on their work through community studies and works that explicitly focus on people, places, ideologies, and strategies that were invisible in or obscured by the early historiography. These specialist scholars from around the country will be joined by interested participants (from the SUNY system, institutions surrounding Geneseo, and colleges and universities around the country) for a range of presentation formats, including keynote lectures, interactive panel discussions, and a teaching workshop.
[1] Alex Waldauer, Jan. 19, 2004, Geneseo King Day Celebration, speech in author's possession.
[2] David Dennis in Robert P. Moses and Charles Cobb, Radical Equations (Boston: Beacon press, 2001), vii-viii; Mississippi Burning, dir. Alan Parker, prod. Frederick Zollo and Robert F. Colesberry, 127 min., MGM, 1988, videodisc.
[3] Jeanne Theoharis, "Introduction," in Freedom North: The Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980 ed. by Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodard (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 2.
[4] Theoharis, "Introduction," in Freedom North, 3.