Groundwork : : Local Black Freedom Movements in America / / ed. by Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2000-2013
• MitwirkendeR: Anderson, Reynaldo,; Charron, Katherine Mellen,; Crosby, Emilye,; Jeffries, Hasan Kwame,; Jones, Patrick,; Levy, Peter B.,; Morris, Tiyi,; Payne, Charles,; Purnell, Brian,; Spencer, Robyn Ceanne,; Theoharis, Jeanne,; Washington, Michael,; Woodard, Komozi,
• TeilnehmendeR: Payne, Charles M.
• HerausgeberIn: Theoharis, Jeanne,; Woodard, Komozi,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2005]; ©2005
• Year of Publication: 2005
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Over the last several years, the traditional narrative of the civil rights movement as largely a southern phenomenon, organized primarily by male leaders, that roughly began with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and ended with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has been complicated by studies that root the movement in smaller communities across the country. These local movements had varying agendas and organizational development, geared to the particular circumstances, resources, and regions in which they operated. Local civil rights activists frequently worked in tandem with the national civil rights movement but often functioned autonomously from-and sometimes even at odds with-the national movement.Together, the pathbreaking essays in Groundwork teach us that local civil rights activity was a vibrant component of the larger civil rights movement, and contributed greatly to its national successes. Individually, the pieces offer dramatic new insights about the civil rights movement, such as the fact that a militant black youth organization in Milwaukee was led by a white Catholic priest and in Cambridge, Maryland, by a middle-aged black woman; that a group of middle-class, professional black women spearheaded Jackson, Mississippi's movement for racial justice and made possible the continuation of the Freedom Rides, and that, despite protests from national headquarters, the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality staged a dramatic act of civil disobedience at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York.No previous volume has enabled readers to examine several different local movements together, and in so doing, Groundwork forges a far more comprehensive vision of the black freedom movement.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- Foreword -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 “They Told Us Our Kids Were Stupid” Ruth Batson and the Educational Movement in Boston -- Chapter 2 “Drive Awhile for Freedom” Brooklyn CORE’s 1964 Stall-In and Public Discourses on Protest Violence -- Chapter 3 Message from the Grassroots: The Black Power Experiment in Newark, New Jersey -- Chapter 4 Gloria Richardson and the Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland -- Chapter 5 We’ve Come a Long Way: Septima Clark, the Warings, and the Changing Civil Rights Movement -- Chapter 6 Organizing for More Than the Vote: The Political Radicalization of Local People in Lowndes County, Alabama, 1965–1966 -- Chapter 7 “God’s Appointed Savior” Charles Evers’s Use of Local Movements for National Stature -- Chapter 8 Local Women and the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi: Re-visioning Womanpower Unlimited -- Chapter 9 The Stirrings of the Modern Civil Rights Movement in Cincinnati, Ohio, 1943–1953 -- Chapter 10 “We Cannot Wait for Understanding to Come to Us” Community Activists Respond to Violence at Detroit’s Northwestern High School, 1940–1941 -- Chapter 11 “Not a Color, but an Attitude” Father James Groppi and Black Power Politics in Milwaukee -- Chapter 12 Practical Internationalists: The Story of the Des Moines, Iowa, Black Panther Party -- Chapter 13 Inside the Panther Revolution: The Black Freedom Movement and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California -- About the Contributors -- Index