Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America

by Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, Charles M. Payne

Overview

Pathbreaking essays on the power of local activism on the broader Civil Rights movement

Over the last several years, the traditional narrative of the civil rights movement as largely a southern phenomenon, organized primarily by male leaders, that roughly began with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and ended with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has been complicated by studies that root the movement in smaller communities across the country. These local movements had varying agendas and organizational development, geared to the particular circumstances, resources, and regions in which they operated. Local civil rights activists frequently worked in tandem with the national civil rights movement but often functioned autonomously from—and sometimes even at odds with—the national movement.

Together, the pathbreaking essays in Groundwork teach us that local civil rights activity was a vibrant component of the larger civil rights movement, and contributed greatly to its national successes. Individually, the pieces offer dramatic new insights about the civil rights movement, such as the fact that a militant black youth organization in Milwaukee was led by a white Catholic priest and in Cambridge, Maryland, by a middle-aged black woman; that a group of middle-class, professional black women spearheaded Jackson, Mississippi's movement for racial justice and made possible the continuation of the Freedom Rides, and that, despite protests from national headquarters, the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality staged a dramatic act of civil disobedience at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York.

No previous volume has enabled readers to examine several different local movements together, and in so doing, Groundwork forges a far more comprehensive vision of the black freedom movement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814782842
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	01/01/2005
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jeanne Theoharis is distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of CUNY. She is the co-editor of The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South (NYU Press, 2019), A More Beautiful and Terrible History (Beacon Press, 2018), The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Beacon Press, 2013), Want to Start A Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (NYU Press 2009), Our Schools Suck: Students Talk Back to a Segregated Nation on the Failures of Urban Education (NYU Press 2009), and Not Working: Latina Immigrants, Low-Wage Jobs, and the Failure of Welfare Reform (NYU Press 2006).

Komozi Woodard is Professor of American History, Public Policy, and Africana Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka and Black Power Politics.

Charles M. Payne is Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of African American studies, History and Sociology at Duke University. He is the author of the prize-winning I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Introduction
“They Told Us Our Kids Were Stupid”: Ruth Batson & the Educational Movement in Boston
“Drive Awhile for Freedom”: Brooklyn CORE’s Stall-In & Public Discourses on Protest Violence
Message from the Grassroots: The Black Power Experiment in Newark
Gloria Richardson & the Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge
We’ve Come a Long Way: Septima Clark, the Warings, & the Changing Civil Rights Movement
Organizing for More Than the Vote: The Political Radicalization of Local People in Lowndes County
“God’s Appointed Savior”: Charles Evers’s Use of Local Movements for National Stature
Local Women & the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi: Re-visioning Woman power Unlimited
The Stirrings of the Modern Civil Rights Movement in Cincinnati
“We Cannot Wait for Understanding to Come to Us”: Community Activists Respond to Violence at Detroit’s Northwestern High School
“Not a Color, but an Attitude”: Father James Groppi and Black Power Politics in Milwaukee
Practical Internationalists: The Story of the Des Moines, Black Panther Party
Inside the Panther Revolution: The Black Freedom Movement and the Black Panther Party in Oakland
About the Contributors

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

-,

“The thirteen essays in this important collection examine grass-roots struggles for racial justice throughout the United States from 1940-1980...Read together, these essays remind us that activism changes people as much as society.”
-Journal of American History

,

“The essays in Groundwork assert individually and collectively that at the root of any national movement for change are local activists working from the bottom up to change their communities first, then the world. This excellent and invigorating collection is crucial reading in an election year.”
-Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and author of America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans

“A major contribution to the ever expanding historical literature of the modern African American freedom struggle. This book brings together outstanding examples of detailed and thoughtful studies of northern as well as southern local movements.”
-Clayborne Carson,Professor of History and Director, Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, Stanford University

“Brilliantly conveys the vibrancy and creativity of community-based movements that transformed America's racial and civic landscape in the decades following World War II.”-Patricia Sullivan,author of Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years

Editorial Reviews

This work demonstrates again and again how local movements complicate the standard civil rights narrative of nonviolence, black power, busing, and the nature of leadership.”
-Tracy E. K’Meyer,Associate Professor US History, University of Louisville

“Brilliantly conveys the vibrancy and creativity of community-based movements that transformed America's racial and civic landscape in the decades following World War II.”-Patricia Sullivan,author of Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years

“The essays in Groundwork assert individually and collectively that at the root of any national movement for change are local activists working from the bottom up to change their communities first, then the world. This excellent and invigorating collection is crucial reading in an election year.”
-Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and author of America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans

“Required reading for anyone who wants to understand what the Civil Rights Movement actually was - a national movement conceived and executed by local people in cities and towns across this country. They are the people who made the movement that made Martin Luther King, Jr.—not the other way around.”
-Julian Bond,Professor of History, University of Virginia, American University, and Chairman of the NAACP

“The thirteen essays in this important collection examine grass-roots struggles for racial justice throughout the United States from 1940-1980...Read together, these essays remind us that activism changes people as much as society.”
-Journal of American History

“A major contribution to the ever expanding historical literature of the modern African American freedom struggle. This book brings together outstanding examples of detailed and thoughtful studies of northern as well as southern local movements.”
-Clayborne Carson,Professor of History and Director, Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, Stanford University

“These essays enrich understanding of the valiant struggles to make real the promise of a more democratic US.”
-CHOICEHighly Recommended

From the Publisher

"A major contribution to the ever expanding historical literature of the modern African American freedom struggle. This book brings together outstanding examples of detailed and thoughtful studies of northern as well as southern local movements."

Clayborne Carson

"This work demonstrates again and again how local movements complicate the standard civil rights narrative of nonviolence, black power, busing, and the nature of leadership."

Tracy E. KMeyer

"These essays enrich understanding of the valiant struggles to make real the promise of a more democratic US."

CHOICEHighly Recommended

"The essays in Groundwork assert individually and collectively that at the root of any national movement for change are local activists working from the bottom up to change their communities first, then the world. This excellent and invigorating collection is crucial reading in an election year."

Henry Louis Gates

"Brilliantly conveys the vibrancy and creativity of community-based movements that transformed America's racial and civic landscape in the decades following World War II."

Patricia Sullivan

"The thirteen essays in this important collection examine grass-roots struggles for racial justice throughout the United States from 1940-1980...Read together, these essays remind us that activism changes people as much as society."

Journal of American History

"Required reading for anyone who wants to understand what the Civil Rights Movement actually was - a national movement conceived and executed by local people in cities and towns across this country. They are the people who made the movement that made Martin Luther King, Jr.not the other way around."

Julian Bond

"The essays in Groundwork assert individually and collectively that at the root of any national movement for change are local activists working from the bottom up to change their communities first, then the world. This excellent and invigorating collection is crucial reading in an election year."

Henry Louis Gates Jr.