Join me, book editors Francoise Hamlin and Charles McKinney and fellow authors Peter Pihos and Althea Legal-Miller for an important discussion on the connections between Civil Rights Movement and the #BlackLivesMatter movement
The mass Civil Rights Movement was both a local and national movement, one that profoundly shaped a wide array of institutions, American culture and the nation’s political terrain. While the movement fundamentally altered many aspects of Black life, the enduring nature of racial inequality continues to delimit the possibilities and potentials surrounding the full expression of Black Humanity. Since 2012, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has challenged the deeply interconnected forms of racial oppression in American society. #BLM highlighted the growth and development of a new era of movement building and struggle, one that continues to grow, evolve, and contend with the protean nature of white supremacy
Featured panelists and chapter descriptions:
Charity Clay - “Sincerely, Your Grandparents’ Hands” addresses conflicts between Black youth of #BlackLivesMatter and their Civil Rights Movement elders, by elucidating the similarities between these generations for broad audiences. It unpacks master narrative myths of the Civil Rights Movement’s messiah leadership and passive nonviolence by presenting counternarratives of decentralized local leadership and armed self-defense. Highlighting the similarities between the two generations that can guide future movements to embrace intergenerational solidarity
Althea Legal-Miller - “We may have to defend ourselves” uses two campaigns, fifty years apart, to explore Black women’s organizing against sexual violence committed by law enforcement. By juxtaposing a 1963-1964 campaign led by Dorothy Height with a 2014-2015 campaign led by artist-activists Grace Franklin and Candace Liger, this paper facilitates consideration of how Black women have long confronted the state’s pernicious determination to fortify itself, often at the expense of Black women’s bodies. While avoiding broad generalizations, these two case studies provide a pathway for analyzing continuity and change.
Charles McKinney - “Memphis: Miraculous, Magnificent, and Messy,” grapples with the continuities and discontinuities in the Black Freedom Struggle in Memphis. Events there revealed more than simply the recurring theme of police brutality, Black death and rage, and mass-based movement. The strategy, the wins, the losses, the coalition-building effort, the stuff of movement work is often lost in the breezy stories constructed about Black Freedom that reduce the calculus of social change to the simple arithmetic of marching, chants, and confrontation. This paper will contend with the long struggle for freedom and how that work is being made manifest amidst fresh challenges to the life and safety of Black folks in the Bluff City.
Peter Pihos - “Good Cops?” addresses the changing nature of police institutions by comparing their interaction with social movements across time. During the 1960s, Black rank-and-file police officers formed the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League and used it to challenge their own department. Like Black Lives Matter activists, the League saw policing as political, drew upon the knowledge of residents, and deployed a repertoire of confrontational tactics to challenge racism and brutality of policing. No group of police would take up these positions today, not because they are incompatible with a transcendent police role, but because of the increasing impermeability and political homogeneity of police departments.
