Essay: The American Civil Rights Movement

The American Civil Rights Movement was one of the most significant events in American history. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, African-American men and women, along with whites, organized one of the largest social movements in history. The campaign was centered in the South, where racial inequality was most prevalent due to state and local enforcement of Jim Crow laws. We tend to think of the movement beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which stated that segregated schools were unconstitutional. We remember the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The sit-ins. The Freedom Riders. Most of all, we remember the face of the movement, Martin Luther King, Jr.
However, we must not forget that such a movement cannot be attributed to just one man. Local groups and organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) also helped in the fight for freedom. Many people, whom we may never know their names, sacrificed so much. Over the years, historians have challenged the standard narrative of the Civil Rights Movement. Some scholars have argued that the leader-centered narrative, one based around King, fails to acknowledge contributions of ordinary people throughout, not just the South, but the nation. While the emphasis on King and other notable players in the Civil Rights Movement is important in the historiography of the time period, it is necessary to remember those people and events that are not found in textbooks.
This is why this topic is a good candidate for a historiography essay. While King was a very influential and important person for the Civil Rights Movement, some historians question whether it could be appropriately understood as a political movement. In fact, they suggest that the “focal point…should shift to local communities and grass-roots organizations.”   Many  scholars have argued that the leader-centered narrative, one based around King, fails to acknowledge contributions of ordinary people throughout, not just the South, but the nation. The movement was, at its core, “multiracial, cross-regional, and international, with local and national actors and organizations working in concert.”  The modern civil rights movement is the most important social protest movement of the twentieth century. It was responsible for the abolition of Jim Crow and helped with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Though prominent leaders were important in shaping the struggle for civil rights in America, countless ordinary men and women also influenced the movement.
Scholars have analyzed the Civil Rights Movement through a variety of historical lenses. They have studied the key figures such as King, Malcom X, and Rosa Parks, while others have focused their lenses onto grassroots organizations. Some historians have studied the movement’s impact in northern cities such as Detroit and Chicago. Historians also disagree on the origins of the movement. Some argue that it originated as far back as The Great Depression. Robert Norrell writes in Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee, that the late 1930s and early 1940s showed “not just a few tantalizing moments of protest, but a widespread, if not yet mature, struggle to overthrow segregation and institutionalized racism.”
Renowned civil rights historian Steven F. Lawson evaluates recent scholarly work on the subject of the American Civil Rights Movement in his essay “Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement.” Through these assessments, he acknowledges the wholesome debates historians continue to have over the focus of the movement, including whether to focus on black leaders such as King, or local communities and grass-roots organizations. Lawson calls for a more in-depth look at specific influences that helped in the movement’s progression. These factors include social, political and economic aspects.
Lawson argues that interest in the history of the Civil Rights Movement grew due in part to the “regular cycles of nostalgia that prompt Americans to recall the historical era of their youth.”  He was one of the first historians to emphasize the importance of local histories in the study of the movement. The shift in focus from national leaders to local grassroots organizations also publicized the historical opinion that the Civil Rights Movement began during much earlier than previously reported. Historians, according to Lawson, are “beginning to reexamine the ideological roots of the freedom struggle, exploring the legal, theological, and political legacies left by leaders and organizations of the 1930s and 1940s.”
In Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement co-editors Danielle McGuire and John Dittmer hope to show the assortment of scholarly works on the Civil Rights Movement through a collection of twelve scholarly essays. As stated by the editors, this work is an answer to Steven F. Lawson’s call to action for a broader perspective of the topic. McGuire and Dittmer look to expand our knowledge of the movement by focusing on issues such as local and national politics, gender relations, the importance of community, and sexuality.
Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South is a revisionist look at the Civil Rights Movement. Rather than focus on the heavily studied South, co-editors Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodward emphasize struggles in the Northeast, West, and Midwest. Contributors raise questions as to the preferred timeline of the movement (1954-1965) and bring to light social activism throughout the North. Theoharris, a 2014 NAACP Image Award winner for her book The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, states in her introduction:
Foregrounding the South has constricted popular understandings of race and racism in the United States during and after WWII–making it seem as if the South was the only part of the country that needed a movement, as if blacks in the rest of the country only became energized to fight after their Southern brothers and sisters did, as if Southern racism was more malignant than the strains found in the rest of the country, as if social activism produced substantive change only in the South
Two essays in Freedom North focus on school desegregation in the Northeast. Adina Back tells the story of the “Harlem Nine” and their struggle to challenge segregated public schools. Happening a year after the more publicized events in Little Rock, Arkansas, the group of African American mothers kept their children out of three Harlem junior high schools since the beginning of the school year in 1958. Back notes the discrepancy with these events by writing “The black press dubbed the group the ‘Little Rock Nine of Harlem,’ an honorific title that favorably compared the women to the ‘Little Rock Nine’ in Arkansas.”  Theoharris also looks at 1974 Boston busing crisis by focusing on the struggle for “educational justice” pursued by local black activists, rather than working-class white resistance.  Both these essays propose that Northern public school discrimination was more formalized and purposeful than previously thought.
Economic historian Gavin Wright also goes against the standard history and argues that the Civil Rights Movement was the rarest of social revolutions. In his book Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South, he states that the movement benefited both sides – black and white. Due to better job opportunities and quality of education and life, improvements for African Americans did not come at the expense of whites in the South.  He asks: “was an economic as well as a moral and legal revolution? Did it bring significant advances in the material well-being of ordinary people? Did it open new opportunities in education, employment, and occupational status for African Americans?” More importantly, examines Wright, “did the revolution live up to the oft-repeated claims that the movement was ‘good for the white South,’ that by accepting black right white southerners would ‘lift a burden from [their] own shoulders, too.’”
Using his background as a former SNCC field secretary, Charles E. Cobb argues that black leaders’ use of firearms and the exercise of their Second Amendment rights was pivotal in the success of the Civil Rights Movement. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible is a noteworthy civil rights history, not just in its distinctive focus on armed self-defense in a non-violent movement, but because of its lack of attention on conventional leaders. Instead, Cobb writes of local community organizers.
While all these historiographic trends have brought new light to various aspects of the American Civil Rights Movement, no historian has questioned the topic more than Jacquelyn Dowd Hall. In her landmark essay, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Hall writes of a long civil rights movement. She argues that the public, as wells as historians, must not look at the Civil Rights movement as an arc, with a beginning and a conclusion, and we must come to terms with the past before we can say progress has been made. Hall maintains
By confining the civil rights struggle to the South, to bowdlerized heroes, to a single halcyon decade, and to limited, noneconomic objective, the master narrative simultaneously elevates and diminishes the movement. It ensures the status of the classical phase as triumphal movement in a larger American progress narrative, yet it undermines its gravitas. It prevents one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history from speaking effectively to the challenges of our time.
Hall sought to re-theorize the American civil rights struggle so that it would be both a “more robust, more progressive, and truer story.”
Hall argues there are six ways historians can reinterpret the fight for civil rights. First, by writing a broader story to challenge the theme of the South as an outsider. Second, historians will be able to see the connection between civil rights and workers’ rights by closely examining the New Deal. Third, survey the importance of women’s activism. Fourth, the long civil rights movement can focus on areas outside of the South. Fifth, scholars can analyze major political victories of the mid-1960s and their effects on the movement. Finally, recognize the history of criticism to civil rights activism.