Peter J. Ling

Gender and the civil rights movement

This book is a collection of nine essays that analyse the people, the protests and the incidents of the civil rights movement through the lens of gender. More than just a study of women, the book examines the ways in which assigned sexual roles and values shaped the strategy, tactics and ideology of the movement. The essays deal with topics ranging from the Montgomery bus boycott and Rhythm and Blues to gangsta rap and contemporary fiction, from the 1950s to the 1990s. Referring to groups such as the National Council of African American Men and events such as the Million Man March, the authors address male gender identity as much as female, arguing that slave/master relations carried over from before the Civil War continued to affect Black masculinity in the post-war battle for civil rights. Whereas feminism traditionally deals with issues of patriarchy and prescribed gender roles, this volume shows how race relations continue to complicate sex-based definitions within the civil rights movement.

Local Leadership in the Early Civil Rights Movement: The South Carolina Citizenship Education Program of the Highlander Folk School

Between 1953 and 1961 Myles Hortons Highlander Folk School developed the Citizenship Education Program (CEP) beginning in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Within the program from 1957 onwards Septima Clark and Bernice Robinson developed Citizenship Schools centered on literacy classes. By slowly developing local leaders, like Esau Jenkins, the CEP evolved as an educational framework for social mobilization, which was later used by the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. In the summer of 1961, since the Folk School faced closure by Tennessee state authorities, Highlander transferred the CEP to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Between 1961 and 1970, hundreds of civil rights activists from across the South attended the SCLCs Citizenship School teacher training courses at the Dorchester Center near Savannah in south-east Georgia. Moreover, in the mid-1960s the Southwide Voter Education Project enabled civil rights activists from across the region to study the political organization that the CEP had spawned in Charleston county as a model for their own community work. Given its widespread influence, the CEPs work was a vital aspect of the Civil Rights Movement itself and constituted Highlanders chief contribution to it.

Backing Dr King: the financial transformation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1963

This article details how the fund-raising efforts of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the wake of the 1963 Birmingham protests transformed the finances of the SCLC. Having struggled to sustain itself prior to 1963, the SCLC experienced a massive influx of donations. Contributions were sparked by outrage at police brutality in Birmingham but the impulse to give had to be systematically channeled to optimize the windfall: rallies, newspaper appeals and direct mail generated funds. Based on new archival research, this article presents an analysis of the timing of donations which shows that donations peak over a month after the media coverage of the children’s marches in Birmingham because it took time to organize the public events that encouraged giving. The article also offers the first analysis of the geographical distribution of donations, demonstrating the primacy of New York and California as sources for SCLC funds. By examining the fund-raising events in different cities, the ability of the SCLC to tap into church networks, union supporters, and Jewish American groups of sympathizers is confirmed. At the same time, it becomes clear that support is selective: not all black churches or all unions gave. The SCLC had to work hard to secure church donations and even within liberal unions such as the UAW, donations came primarily from local branches that had mainly African American members. Jewish donations tended to be from individuals rather than institutions. The article points out that the loss of administrative staff over the course of 1963 weakened efforts to professionalize fund-raising, leaving the SCLC highly reliant on individual donations triggered by headline-grabbing public clashes. The protest style of Birmingham was thus integral to the SCLC’s future approach to both the pursuit of federal action and its own financial survival. At the same time, the article links its discussion of the surge of donations to the SCLC to demonstrate that the pattern of resource mobilization evident in relation to the civil rights movement in the summer of 1963 was distinctive. It marked a level of movement development that was different from that evident earlier and the volatility of support in subsequent years suggests that the emphasis on continuity within the new scholarship of the “long civil rights movement” is mistaken. The breadth of appeal of the civil rights movement in the summer of 1963 made it different in character as well as composition from the March on Washington Movement of 1940 or the movements that supported Black Power goals in the early 1970s. While the freedom struggle was long and continues, the movement of the Sixties was distinctive and protean.

Operation breadbasket: an untold story of civil rights in Chicago

be truly French, because to be French is to be white. At these junctures I was left longing for a deeper theorization of what this means for a race critical reading of France that avoids comparison with, most prominently in this book, the United States but gives more room for a discussion of the lasting legacy of coloniality on France. A minor quibble, therefore, with the book is that it did not make sufficient use of the work of decolonial scholaractivists, such as Sadri Khiari or Said Bouamama, for example, but often referred to US-based writers on France such as Lamont and Wacquant. This being said, Beaman opens the way for an excellent and much-needed critique of Loïc Wacquant’s colourblind approach to race in France which I would love to see developed in a further paper. The brief discussion of transnational Blackness at the end of the book, not only returns us to Beaman’s positionality as a Black woman researching France but also makes a serious challenge to the turn against ‘political Blackness’ in more recent years. She observes that second generation maghrébin and Black people in France identify with a global vision of Black solidarity, in part due to the dominance of narratives about Black Power, that have a profound impact on how they see themselves, but also how they can think themselves out of the narrow confines offered to them by approved French republican modes of identification. A follow-up study of how transnational Blackness, in the way Beaman begins to theorize it here, could be brought to bear on understandings of race, racism, and coloniality in France and beyond would be most welcomed.

Ray Watching: The Highly Protected, British Prison Experience of Martin Luther King’s Killer

Abstract The arrest of James Earl Ray at London Airport on 8 June 1968 marked the final stage of an international manhunt that had begun with the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. on 4 April. Arrested for travelling on a false passport and with an unlicensed firearm, Ray faced extradition to the US to face charges of murder. While in prison in Britain, the US Government feared that he might escape, commit suicide or be himself assassinated. Each of these outcomes risked reigniting the African-American anger that had wracked major US cities in April. Accordingly the UK Government was requested to take special security measures and complied. Was this a supine response from a Labour government anxious to placate a disgruntled superpower ally or did it also reflect contemporaneous UK anxieties about the tense state of race relations at home? Drawing on Home Office records, this article examines these questions.

What a difference a death makes: JFK, LBJ, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964

When the Kennedy assassination occurred in November 1963, it was not clear that his civil rights bill would pass without major modifications, and most Americans told pollsters that they were unsure of his policy. Fifty years later, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is seen by Kennedy apologists as evidence of what JFK could have achieved had he lived, and by Lyndon Johnson biographers as evidence of LBJ’s superior political skill. This article argues that Kennedy’s death made a difference but not simply by replacing one president with another. Far more importantly, it amplified pressure for action on moral and emotive grounds, mobilizing church groups (particularly midwestern Protestant ones), energizing liberal congressional leaders, and changing the mindset of US Justice Department insiders who moved from a posture of defending Kennedy from the minefield of the race question to acting to fulfill his legacy. The violent death and public reaction also shaped the conduct of moderate Republicans whose support for the measure was the margin of victory. The strategy for passing the Civil Rights Act did not change significantly after the events in Dallas, but the formula for success did.

Political education in post-Second World War Germany and the American South

Abstract Both American and European adult educationalists saw the Danish folk high school as a model for how to educate citizens for more active involvement in their communities. This article examines the experience of Wislade Folk School in Germany and the Highlander Folk School in the United States after the Second World War. In the German case, Wislade was unable to persuade local people to confront the evils of Nazism, but did facilitate the practical tackling of pressing social and economic problems. Highlander struggled to retain support from white Southerners as the School increasingly addressed the evils of segregation, but developed one of its most effective programmes in conjunction with African Americans as part of the emerging civil rights movement. The study concludes that political education is most effective when it addresses peoples aspirations, and builds upon existing social capital.

Spirituals, Freedom Songs, and Lieux de Mémoire: African-American Music and the Routes of Memory

In countries where the history has not assumed the same didactic role in forming the national consciousness, the history of history need not burden itself with such polemical content. For example, in the United States, a country of plural memories and diverse traditions, historiographical reflection has long been part of the discipline. Different interpretations of the American Revolution or the Civil War may involve high stakes but do not threaten to undermine the American tradition because, in a sense, there is no such thing, or if there is, it is not primarily a historical construct. In France, by contrast, historiography is iconoclastic and irreverent.

The Incomparable Elkins

Abstract First published in 1959, Stanley Elkinss work Slavery was an invitation to American scholars to look at this subject in new ways. It proposed that systematic comparison of slave systems should replace moral absolutism, and it suggested that neglected aspects of slavery could be highlighted by a process of analogy. This essay reviews Elkinss work, highlighting the strengths and the flaws of a methodology that drew on social scientific and literary techniques, and indicating how Slavery reflected its origins in the New York intellectual world of the 1950s.

Review article: Plagiarism, preaching and prophecy: The legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the persistence of racism

Clayborne Carson, et al. (eds), THE PAPERS OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: VOLUME TWO: REDISCOVERING PRECIOUS VALUES, JULY 1951‐NOVEMBER 1955, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995, xxv + 645pp.,