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.

Build the Army

This chapter talks about a group of white ministers who aided Black Rochesterians in their struggle to create a police review board and expanded their commitment to the struggle for racial justice. It details how the white ministers acted through the local council of churches and joined forces with Rochester's Black ministers to found and fund an organizational structure capable of building a Black movement. It also traces the abortive engagement with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Chicago's Saul Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation. The chapter refers to FIGHT, Action for a Better Community (ABC), and the Urban League as the three groups that were competing for the hearts and minds of Black Rochester within a year of the uprising. It argues that in order for FIGHT to attract and retain the loyalty of the masses, it adopted an “oppositional identity.”

“Tears of Joy”

This chapter centers the jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald’s career as a racial crossover artist, whose early career was critical to securing jazz as a profession for race representation. After emerging as a popular vocalist for Chick Webb’s swing band, she became a symbol of a respectable African American woman to counter the negative characterizations of the jazz world as corrupting of youth. Her career in the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s became an effective vehicle for the desegregation of performance venues and the creation of integrated clubs, due to her popularity with black and white audiences. Fitzgerald’s race representation included her status as a wealthy African American woman who provided for her extended family and who made charitable investments in civil rights organizations, particularly the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Fitzgerald’s highly visible race representation entailed constant black and white press coverage and critical assessments that produced two major and recurring debates: whether Fitzgerald constituted a legitimate jazz singer, and whether her perceived lack of emotion in performance disqualified her as an authentic black jazz woman vocalist. Importantly, Fitzgerald showcased the jazz profession in several aspects as a non-religious vehicle for accomplishing the progressive, integrationist pursuits of religious race representatives.

Remembering Dorothy Cotton, 1930–2018

Civil rights pioneer Dorothy Foreman Cotton passed away on June 10, 2018, in Ithaca, New York, at the age of eighty-eight. On August 11, 2018, a Saturday afternoon, around seven hundred community members, friends, and local and national leaders gathered at Cornell University’s Bailey Hall to celebrate her life. Cotton was the highest-ranking woman in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) throughout the 1960s. She devoted her life to liberation and social justice. Remembered by many as an iconic feminist and grassroots innovator, she led an extraordinary life that undoubtedly transformed the lives of African Americans fighting for full citizenship and justice. Cotton was critical in opposing economic and social regimes of power, but she also ushered in a new sense of individual and collective subjectivity through political participation and mobilization in southern Black communities. Throughout her life, she reminded ordinary people of their vast power to effect change and transform society.

Where Have We Gone From There?

It is the author's position that Martin King's final keynote address at the tenth annual session of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where the theme was “Where Do We Go From Here” is a significant point of reference in the ongoing struggle of African Americans in America. Indeed, 50 years after King's sudden death, his turn toward economic and political empowerment is still the cornerstone of the Black agenda in America. Therefore, with the preceding as our contextual mooring, the author will consider that unique expression of African American culture, Black religion, and the Black church in its 21st century iteration. How has suburban life and the ongoing search for success and the “American Dream” affected Black faith traditions? What do we believe, and who is our God? What has become of the “Souls of Black Folk?”

Organizing for Economic Justice in The Late 1960s

Shortly before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched the Poor People’s Campaign that aimed to highlight the links between economic and racial injustice. Although t 1960s are usually characterized as a period in which race, gender and sexuality were the key identity issues for American protest, this chapter brings to the fore issues of class and poverty. From SCLC to labor unions to coalitions of African American single mothers, a range of activist organizations waged their own wars on poverty, putting into action the poverty tours that Robert Kennedy conducted in the mid-1960s and accounts such as socialist Michael Harrington’s influential 1962 book The Other America. These organizations worked at the intersections between economic and identity politics. Their successes and failures account for the new, often regressive contours of political action, discourse and policy around class and poverty in the following decades, and the re-emergence of a progressive vision in contemporary protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street.

Breaking White Supremacy

Breaking White Supremacy analyzes the twentieth-century heyday of the black social gospel and its influence on the Civil Rights Movement. Asserting that Martin Luther King Jr. did not come from nowhere, it describes major figures who influenced King, offers a detailed analysis of King’s leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and his catalyzing and unifying role in the southern and northern Civil Rights Movements, and interprets the legacy of King and the black social gospel tradition.