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This book explores the tensions between cultural memory of the African American Freedom Struggle and representations of African American identity staged in five plays between 1959 and 1969 during the civil rights era. Through close readings of the plays, their popular and African American print media reviews, and the cultural context in which they were produced, the book shows how these representations complicate narrow ideas of blackness, which often limit the freedom struggle era to Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest and cast Malcolm X's black nationalism as undermining the Civil Rights Movement's advances. These five plays strategically revise the rhetoric, representations, ideologies, and iconography of the African American freedom struggle, subverting its dominant narrative. This revision critiques racial uplift ideology's tenets of civic and moral virtue as a condition of African American full citizenship. The dramas also reimagine the Black Arts Movement's restrictive notions of black authenticity as a condition of racial identity, and their staged representations construct a counter-narrative to cultural memory of the freedom struggle during that very era. In their use of a “postblack ethos” to enact African American subjectivity, the plays envision black identity beyond the quest for freedom, anticipating what blackness might look like when it moves beyond the struggle. Finally, the book discusses recent revivals, showing how these 1960s plays shape dimensions of modern drama well beyond the decade of their creation.

This work combines black business and civil rights history to explain how economic concerns shaped the goals and objectives of the black freedom struggle. Brandon K. Winford examines the “black business activism” of banker and civil rights lawyer John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978). Born on the campus of Kittrell College in Vance County, North Carolina, he came of age in Jim Crow Atlanta, Georgia, where his father became an executive with the world-renowned North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (NC Mutual). As president of Mechanics and Farmers Bank (M&F Bank), located on Durham’s “Black Wall Street,” Wheeler became the Tar Heel State’s most influential black power broker and among the top civil rights figures in the South. Winford places Wheeler at the center of his narrative to understand how black business leaders tackled civil rights while continuously pointing to the economy’s larger significance for the success and advancement of the postwar New South. In this way, Wheeler articulated a bold vision of regional prosperity, grounded in full citizenship and economic power for black people. He reminded the white South that its future was inextricably linked to the plight of black southerners. He spent his entire career trying to fulfill these ideals through his institutional and organizational affiliations, as part and parcel of his civil rights agenda. Winford draws on previously unexamined primary and secondary sources, including newspapers, business records, FBI reports, personal papers, financial statements, presidential files, legal documents, oral histories, and organizational and institutional records.

This book challenges the popular perception that sport has provided an arena in which African-Americans have been able to advance the aims of the civil rights struggle by excelling as athletes. Instead, it is argued, the specific dynamics created by the intersection of sporting ideals and racial change in the late 1960s provided great difficulties for athletes who attempted to use their position to advance the black freedom struggle. The Black Athletic Revolt, most famously expressed by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics, crossed the divide of the racial politics of the era. Their stand and that of many college athletes across the country drew on the traditions of both the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Nevertheless, sport never fully realised its potential to positively impact the civil rights struggle and the reaction against those who sought to speak out and protest represented a unique element of the white backlash. Using extensive oral histories and previously untapped archival material, Shades of Grey explores the myriad of difficulties facing black and white athletes who tried to use their position to engage with the black freedom struggle on the campus and international sporting stage.

This book conducts a close, gendered reading of the modern black press to reinterpret it as a crucial tool of black men’s leadership, public voice, public image, gender and identity formation, and a space for the construction of ideas of proper masculinity that shaped the long twentieth-century black freedom struggle to promote a fight for racial justice and black manhood. Moving from the turn of the twentieth century to the rise of black radicalism, the book argues that black people’s ideas, rhetoric, and strategies for protest and racial advancement grew out of a quest for manhood led by black newspapers. Drawing on discourse theory and studies of public spheres to examine the Chicago Defender, Crisis, Negro World, Crusader, and Muhammad Speaks and their publishers during the Great Migration, New Negro era, Great Depression, civil rights movement, and urban renewal, this study engages the black press at the complex intersections of gender, ideology, race, class, identity, urbanization, the public sphere, and black institutional life. Departing from typical histories of black newspapers and black protest that examine the long roots of black political organizing, this book makes a crucial intervention by advancing how black people’s conceptions of rights and justice, and their activism in the name of both, were deeply rooted in ideas of redeeming Black men, prioritizing their plight on the agenda for racial advancement. Yet, the black press produced a highly influential discourse on black manhood that was both empowering and problematic for the long black freedom struggle.

The 1960s civil rights movement has been properly memorialized as an era of tremendous social progress in America. Yet the integration of public accommodations and passage of federal laws started a much longer process toward racial equality and justice that still persists. In Beyond Integration: The Black Freedom Struggle in Escambia County, Florida, 1960-2000, J. Michael Butler examines the accomplishments, contradictions, and limitations of the continuing black freedom struggle in one southern community. The racial unrest that surfaced during the 1970s regarding the use of Confederate imagery at Escambia High School and the persistent police brutality that resulted in the deaths of African American men demonstrates that the local movement did not end, but evolved to confront blatant reminders that blacks remained second class citizens in Northwest Florida. The power that white civic leaders possessed over issues that effected racial minorities beyond the 1960s—and the African American powerlessness to alter the status quo—culminated in the arrest and conviction of Reverend H. K. Matthews, the county’s foremost organizer, and revealed that economic, political, and educational discrepancies plagued local race relations into the twenty-first century. Beyond Integration offers a new perspective on the literature of the black freedom struggle and reveals how with each legal step taken toward racial equality, notions of black inferiority became more entrenched in Northwest Florida.

In An Unseen Light, eminent and rising scholars offer a multidisciplinary examination of Memphis’s role in African American history during the twentieth century. The city was at the epicenter of the civil rights movement on April 4, 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel. But the essays in this book broaden the scholarly understanding of the black freedom struggle in Memphis. In chronicling the significant events that took place in the city and its citizens’ many contributions to the black freedom struggle, they show how Memphis has been largely overlooked by historians of the civil rights movement. In this volume, the authors investigate episodes such as black political resistance to the 1917 lynching of Ell Persons and the 1940 “Reign of Terror,” when black Memphians experienced a prolonged campaign of harassment, mass arrests, and violence at the hands of police. They also examine topics including the relationship between the labor and civil rights movements, the fight for economic advancement in black communities, and the impact of music on the city’s culture. Covering subjects as diverse as politics, sports, music, activism, and religion, An Unseen Light illuminates Memphis’s place in the long history of the struggle for African American freedom

The case of the Wilmington Ten is one of the most egregious instances of injustice and political repression from the post-World War II Black Freedom Struggle. In February 1971, racial tension surrounding school desegregation in Wilmington, North Carolina culminated in four days of violence between white vigilantes and black residents. The turmoil resulted in two deaths, six injuries, more than $500,000 in damage, and the firebombing of a white-owned store, before the National Guard restored uneasy peace. Despite glaring irregularities in the subsequent trial, ten young persons were convicted of arson and conspiracy and then sentenced to a total of 282 years in prison. They became known internationally as the Wilmington Ten. A powerful movement arose within North Carolina and beyond to demand their freedom. Powered by the grassroots organizing of black nationalist organizations, it came to include adherents of other political ideologies, elected officials, foreign governments, and Amnesty International. After several witnesses admitted to perjury, in 1980, faced with both a mobilized domestic and international public outcry and overwhelming evidence of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct, a federal appellate court overturned the convictions. This book tells the dramatic story of the Ten, connecting their story to a larger arc of Black Power and the transformation of post-Civil Rights era political organizing. It thoroughly examines the 1971 events and the subsequent movement for justice that strongly influenced the wider African American freedom struggle.

The labor of black workers has been crucial to economic development in the United States. Yet because of racism and segregation, their contribution remains largely unknown. Spanning the 1930s to the present, this book tells the hidden history of African American workers in their own words. It provides striking firsthand accounts of the experiences of black southerners living under segregation in Memphis, Tennessee. Eloquent and personal, these oral histories comprise a unique primary source and provide a new way of understanding the black labor experience during the industrial era. Together, the stories demonstrate how black workers resisted racial apartheid in American industry and underscore the active role of black working people in history. The individual stories are arranged thematically in chapters on labor organizing, Jim Crow in the workplace, police brutality, white union racism, and civil rights struggles. Taken together, they ask us to rethink the conventional understanding of the civil rights movement as one led by young people and preachers in the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, we see the freedom struggle as the product of generations of people, including workers who organized unions, resisted Jim Crow at work, and built up their families, churches, and communities. The collection also reveals the devastating impact that a globalizing capitalist economy has had on black communities and the importance of organizing the labor movement as an antidote to poverty.

This book recounts the story of the Indian freedom struggle from the Great Revolt of 1857 and the attainment of independence in 1947. While mentioning most of the principal actors and events, the volume focuses more on the aims and development of Indian independence rather than on personalities and ideologies. The book covers the decline of the Mughal empire, establishment of British rule, the Revolt of 1857, the birth of modern India, the rise of nationalism, reform movement, the revolutionary activities, rise of extremists and moderates, the era of Mahatma Gandhi, the impact of world events, and the partition of India and Pakistan. Aimed at the present generation, the aim of this book is that those who have never worn the yoke of servitude should appreciate the sacrifices of men and women who made freedom possible.

Louis Austin (1898–1971) came of age at the nadir of the Jim Crow era and became a transformative leader of the long black freedom struggle in North Carolina. From 1927 to 1971, he published and edited the Carolina Times, the preeminent black newspaper in the state. He used the power of the press to voice the anger of black Carolinians, and to turn that anger into action in a forty-year crusade for freedom. In this biography, Jerry Gershenhorn chronicles Austin’s career as a journalist and activist, highlighting his work during the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar civil rights movement. Austin helped pioneer radical tactics during the Depression, including antisegregation lawsuits, boycotts of segregated movie theatres and white-owned stores that refused to hire black workers, and African American voting rights campaigns based on political participation in the Democratic Party. In examining Austin’s life, Gershenhorn narrates the story of the long black freedom struggle in North Carolina from a new vantage point, shedding new light on the vitality of black protest and the black press in the twentieth century.

Jim Crow Capital tells the story of how black women in Washington, D.C. transformed civil rights politics between 1920 and 1945. Even though no resident of the nation’s capital could cast a ballot, women nonetheless proclaimed their first-class citizenship rights by working to influence congressional legislation, lobby politicians, shape policy, and secure freedom and justice for all African Americans, both in Washington, D.C. and across the country. During the course of their political campaigns, African American women’s relationship to federal and local politics underwent a fundamental transformation. During the 1920s, black women seized on their location in the nation’s capital to intervene in federal matters, thereby working to improve conditions for disenfranchised African Americans who lacked a political voice on a national level. But by the early 1930s, black women turned their attention to focus more fully on local politics in Washington, D.C. by waging campaigns for economic justice, voting rights, and an end to racial segregation and interracial police brutality, making their freedom struggle an example for the nation. Black women in Washington, D.C. crafted a broad vision of citizenship by waging comprehensive and interconnected campaigns for legal equality, economic citizenship, public commemoration, and safety from violence. Women’s political activism in Washington, D.C. influenced the post-war black freedom struggle and still resonates today.

Lawrence Reddick (1910–1995) was among the most notable African American intellectuals of his generation. The second curator of the Schomburg Library and a University of Chicago PhD, Reddick helped spearhead Carter G. Woodson's black history movement in the 1930s, guide the Double Victory campaign during World War II, lead the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the Cold War, mentor Martin Luther King Jr. throughout his entire public life, direct the Opportunities Industrialization Center Institute during the 1960s, and forcefully confront institutional racism within academia during the Black Power era. A lifelong Pan-Africanist, Reddick also fought for decolonization and black self-determination alongside Kwame Nkrumah, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Léopold Senghor, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Beyond participating in such struggles, Reddick documented and interpreted them for black and white publics alike. In The Scholar and the Struggle, David A. Varel tells Reddick's compelling story. His biography reveals the many essential but underappreciated roles played by intellectuals in the black freedom struggle and connects the past to the present in powerful, unforgettable ways.