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This chapter discusses the history of Alabama State University during the crucial period between the New Negro Era and the rise of the modern civil rights movement. It was during this period that Montgomery, Alabama became a launching point for one of the most important protests in American history – the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Yet few understand the crucial role that Alabama State University played in sowing the seeds of that movement by training the leadership that helped to carry it out, and generating a spirit of resistance long before the boycotts took place. It was the members of the Women’s Political Council, a group of educators teaching at ASU, that designed the ideas for a massive boycott, and it was their leadership on campus, alongside the college president Harper Councill Trenholm, that transformed that campus into one of the most militant centers for student activism in the deep south. The campus soon came under the watchful eye of Jim Crow legislatures who controlled the purse strings and held the keys to the institution, but not before the communitas of ASU summoned the vision and the will to carry out their own sit-in protests in downtown Montgomery.

This chapter describes Correspondence’s reaction to three major events in 1956 and 1957: the Hungarian Revolution, the independence of Ghana, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. C.L.R. James pushed the writers at Correspondence to focus on the Hungarian revolution above all else, while James and Grace Lee Boggs sought to emphasize colonial revolts.

Chapter 1 focuses on the efforts of the black community in Montgomery, Alabama, to desegregate the city's buses between 1955 and 1956. It explores the way in which city authorities attempted to destroy the bus boycott by using the threat of arrest and imprisonment to intimidate supporters and isolate the leadership. In response, community members resisted such repression by seeking to transform imprisonment from something to be feared into a source of pride and an act of resistance. However, the author concludes that the period from 1955 to 1960 was one of limited change in terms of movement responses to the legal repression of civil rights activity.

This chapter provides an overview to the entire book by tracing King’s engagements with Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son” during the years 1956–1967. In addition to quoting Hughes’s poem from memory, King also riffed on Hughes’s poem as well by changing its words to meet specific contexts. As a result of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King regularly conflated the speaker in Hughes’s poem with figures such as Sister Pollard and Rosa Parks as he expanded on ideas from the poem. Beyond simply engaging in what Keith Miller defines as “voice merging,” Hughes’s subversive reputation demanded that King sub-merge Hughes’s ideas within his own rhetoric from 1960 to 1965. Lyndon Johnson’s national address on March 15, 1965, signalled the end of the era where overt references to Hughes had to be intentionally omitted from King’s rhetoric, and Hughes’s poem reappeared in King’s addresses soon after.

In the 1950s, Cold War politics made anticolonial alliances between Africans, Asians, and black Americans suspect, as the demands of governing—as opposed to coordinating a freedom movement—redirected energies and attention. Yet India and Ghana, in particular, remained concrete examples for the network at the center of this book. Benjamin Mays returned to India in 1953 to witness the world’s largest democracy composed of people of color. Bayard Rustin went to Ghana in 1959 to coordinate an international antinuclear and antiimperial protest of French nuclear testing in the Sahara desert. Mays and Rustin were both instrumental to the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which inaugurated Martin Luther King Jr. as a civil rights leader. The decade closed with a new generation of activists and intellectuals taking lessons from the people at the center of this book to spur a mass, nonviolent American freedom movement.

This chapter narrates the dramatic socioeconomic changes occurring in the former states of the Confederacy after World War II. The changes culminated with the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared public school segregation unconstitutional, as well as the early events in the American Civil Rights Movement, including the Emmitt Till Lynching and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The chapter then analyses the response of white southerners to these transformative events. The white South’s response channelled into two recognized programs. Southern leaders either outright refused to implement Brown, which became known as Interposition or, called for a gradual or piecemeal implementation, which became known as moderation.

This chapter traces the development of the modern civil rights movement and the eventual displacement of Lift Every Voice and Sing by “freedom songs.” Nevertheless, the anthem continued to resonate, specifically in the most challenging movements in the movement.