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This chapter presents the address Fortune gave before the inaugural convention of the Afro-American League in Chicago on January 25, 1890. The league was the nation's first national civil rights organization and a group whose creation Fortune had called for since 1884. In the speech he outlined the organization and its agenda. In many ways this organization and the program that Fortune was outlining would be echoed in the formation of other organizations in the years to follow, including the Afro-American Council, the Constitution League, the Committee of Twelve, the Niagara Movement, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

This chapter presents the editorial, “Failure of the Afro-American People to Organize,” where Fortune reflected on the attempts of the race to organize civil rights organizations. He examined his own efforts to create the Afro-American League and the efforts of those individuals who had tried to sustain the Afro-American Council and the Niagara Movement. Although he acknowledged the importance of their efforts, he concluded that the masses have taken no interest in sustaining the organization and therefore the groups were failures. They need to get the masses aroused, he argued, and stop being windjamming organizations.

This chapter discusses how school districts employed “freedom-of-choice” (FOC) plans after the 1964 Civil Rights Act to comply ostensibly with school desegregation orders. It relays the stories of several black parents and students in Mississippi who were the first to test their school district's desegregation plans. Some of them were closely associated with their local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) chapters; others had no prior history or experience in challenging segregation, and they acted without help from local or national civil rights organizations. All were tenacious in waging the fight in their local communities to desegregate their schools. As reflected in the stories told in this chapter, being the first in their communities to send their children to formerly all-white schools or being the first black student to attend such a school was a fearful experience.

Chapter 3 looks at the social movements of the 1930s and 1940s, their historical uniqueness, and how they gave support to and magnified the strength of labor movements, especially in the South—a distinguishing feature of this era. First and foremost were the struggles of the unemployed, led mostly by leftists, often Communists. The chapter also looks at the role of farmers, sharecroppers, and tenants, as well as the special role of civil rights organizations, north and south.

This chapter looks at the time when Fannie Lou Hamer and her husband, Pap, stayed in Mississippi and cobbled together a living as farmers. Hamer challenged white supremacy and her boldness earned her respect. The chapter then considers how the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and nascent Mississippi civil rights organizations like the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) faced physical and economic reprisals from local white vigilantes. How much Hamer knew about the national issues, or what the NAACP and other civil rights organizations were doing in Mississippi during the 1940s and 1950s is difficult to discern. Nevertheless, when she was robbed of her fertility after a doctor secretly performed a complete hysterectomy on her, Hamer could no longer contain her rage. Hamer later referred to the practice as a "Mississippi appendectomy." Eugenics-inspired support for race-based involuntary sterilization, centralized in the South, promoted the procedure for thousands of African American women and girls without their consent starting in the 1920s and continued through the early 1970s.

This chapter demonstrates how, after five years of heading up a few of the left-led Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) refugees, the DPO and District 65 were attacked and on the verge of collapse. It had proved almost impossible to continue to organize without the security provided by the CIO, and the union's Executive Board finally decided to accept the CIO's terms for reinstatement. The chapter follows District 65 as it attempted to rebuild and, essentially, prove its worth to the rest of the labor movement and to civil rights organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The chapter explores the consequences of the reaffiliation for the union's “militant” fight for economic equality and offers an analysis of how District 65's organizing strategies were affected by reaffiliation with the CIO.

This chapter discusses the history of The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races, the monthly magazine of the civil rights organization the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Its editor, African American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, envisaged The Crisis as much more than the mouthpiece of NAACP protest — its diverse content featured pan-Africanism, revisionist history, and anti-lynching campaigns alongside poetry, essays, short fiction, and pioneering children's literature, which targeted a specifically African American audience. Building upon the dynamic interplay between protest and affirmation (and word and image) in The Crisis, the chapter focuses on tensions in a magazine that was ‘to remain a paradox from its inception — a self-financing publication whose freewheeling, militant editor was expected to advance policies of an organization guided by the careful decisions of a board of directors’. Such an approach illuminates a number of contemporary critical conversations about the Harlem Renaissance.

This chapter describes Fannie Lou Hamer's experience of police brutality while she was on a trip back to Greenwood with other civil rights activists from various Mississippi counties. This experience would test their commitment to the fight for freedom. Winona had a particularly vicious history of using violence to enforce segregation despite federal laws. No matter how well they had been prepared for getting arrested and lodging in jail, Hamer and her Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) colleagues were not prepared for what was about to happen to them. They were taken to the county jail house where they were interrogated and beaten by the police. Hamer was also raped by one of the men; the sadism-sexual pleasure from the pain, suffering and humiliation of another-was part of a pattern of domination designed to dehumanize and degrade victims. Numerous attorneys from several civil rights organizations then negotiated the activists' release. Finally, three Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) representatives secured the activists' release from jail. Throughout, Hamer's faith and commitment to the causes of freedom and equality did not waver. But the horror, the trauma of Winona stayed with her, driving her anger deep into every speech and protest song she delivered for the rest of her life.