“‘The white testimony is a blank to me. I don’t think it meant anything. I don’t think it had any impact. As soon as Fannie Lou Hamer started, it was all forgotten.’” I first met Former Vice President Walter Mondale on October 14, 2010, at the Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He delivered »
“‘The myth of rampant hard-hearted hard cruelty, that has occurred to some extent. There are always some cruel people in the world, but fortunately they’re in the minority. That warm relationship between the races did exist in times of slavery and in times of segregation. Segregation, by the way, was a northern invention. Did you »
“There were more threatened than actual lynchings in the twentieth century, while the reverse was true in the years prior to 1900. These trend data suggest that the South became more effective in suppressing mob violence after 1900, such that, although threats of mob violence remained high, the number of persons killed annually declined significantly.” »
“The 6,000 UNC students who went on strike in May 1970 not only showed the power of their collective voice but also evidenced that protests on southern campuses could rival the scale and intensity witnessed on any college or university in the nation.” Students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, like so »
Essay
“In Atlanta, nothing else seemed to matter with the champ in town. He owned the city. It was a powerful scene—’sheer Black, street-corner ebullience out for a Sunday evening promenade.” The wait was over. On October 25, 1970, on the eve of Muhammad Ali’s first professional boxing match in forty-three months, African Americans flooded the »
“No one I knew, not even Pete Seeger, could make that banjo ring with the sounds of the Appalachian mountains the way Guy could.” I first met musician-organizer Guy Carawan in the early 1970s at a gathering at Highlander Center, when it was located for a time in Knoxville, Tennessee (its current home is in »
“Cultivated not only by white architects of the New South creed but also civil rights activists across class and ideological strata, Atlanta’s image as the ‘city too busy to hate’ crumbled as its young Black residents were abducted and murdered.” On May 25, 1981, an estimated three thousand people convened at the Lincoln Memorial in »
“‘It was the beginning of my every day walk with death for nine months.’” Most folks know August 28, 1963, as the March on Washington, but for me, it has another very profound meaning. It was the beginning of my every day walk with death for nine months—the start of Public School Integration in Fayetteville, »
“[B]y emphasizing military conflict over political debate, by privileging valor over ideology, and by accentuating white heroism over black activism, the Foote–Burns interpretation of the Civil War gave PBS’s mainstream American audience something to feel good about.” This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of filmmaker Ken Burns’s PBS television series on the American Civil War. »
NYU Press, 1995 In recent years, Mississippi has become a sort of totem for historians of the black freedom struggle, much as it was for the civil rights workers of the early-to-mid-1960s. Movement supporters once believed that if unregenerate Mississippi, the ultimate “closed society,” could be brought to heel then black freedom in the United »
ILR Press, 1994 This modest little book makes a big contribution to our understanding of the complex relationship between the civil rights and labor movements during the 1950s and 1960s. In particular it challenges the contention, voiced by some practitioners of the “new labor history,” that the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial »
University of Georgia Press, 1995 If the Montgomery-to-Selma paradigm dominates civil rights history, it is easy to understand why. The Montgomery bus boycott that opened the era thrust the mantle of leadership on Martin Luther King Jr., whose prophetic charisma still defines the period. Ten years later the Selma march, which spurred passage of the »