Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Struggles in America - Woodard, Komozi

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Résumé :

Pathbreaking essays on the power of local activism on the broader Civil Rights movement
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...

Biographie:

Jeanne Theoharis is distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of CUNY. She is the co-editor of The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South (NYU Press, 2019), A More Beautiful and Terrible History (Beacon Press, 2018), The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Beacon Press, 2013), Want to Start A Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (NYU Press 2009), Our Schools Suck: Students Talk Back to a Segregated Nation on the Failures of Urban Education (NYU Press 2009), and Not Working: Latina Immigrants, Low-Wage Jobs, and the Failure of Welfare Reform (NYU Press 2006).

Komozi Woodard is Professor of American History, Public Policy, and Africana Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka and Black Power Politics.

Charles M. Payne is Sally Dalton Robinson Professor of African American studies, History and Sociology at Duke University. He is the author of the prize-winning I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement.