Confronting the Complexities of Black Social Movements
This post is part of our online roundtable on Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.’s From Rights to Lives.
When I heard Kareem Jackson (Tef Poe)’s now famous rallying cry—“This ain’t your grandparent’s Civil Rights Movement!”—it simultaneously resonated with me and troubled me. I’m part of the “Hip-Hop Generation” but could also be described as the “Rodney King Generation.” I came of age listening to Chuck D and Public Enemy, watching Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X and journalist Gil Noble’s Black-centered news program Like It Is. There was no way to avoid learning about the Black Freedom Struggle (BFS), but I knew very little about the Civil Rights Movement (CRM) beyond Martin Luther King Jr. having a “dream.” I appreciated Martin, but I respected Malcolm. Nonviolence made no sense in the 1980s and 1990s. How could it? The police murdered Eleanor Bumpurs in the Bronx in 1984; Yusef Hawkins was killed by a white mob in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in 1989; and that year the police also framed and wrongly convicted five Black and Brown youth from Harlem. I felt like Tef Poe who asserted, “I want you [militarized police] to know that if you’re going to pull your gun out and you’re going to shoot, you will be met with resistance.” I was impatient but not only because I saw the intergenerational rift, but also, perhaps, one based on class differences. Why the surprise? How could this be? I thought there was enough information available—books, documentaries, and exhibits as well as independent Black bookstores and civic organizations doing the cultural and organizing work—to inform Black communities about this history, specifically the internal conflicts in the CRM and the Black Power Movement (BPM). I was troubled that this intergenerational conflict would be blown out of proportion.
While there is a wealth of scholarship on the nuances of the Black Freedom Struggle (BFS), we are failing, I think, when it comes to getting this historical knowledge to our community and having robust and candid dialogue about the BFS.
As historian Jarvis Givens demonstrates in Fugitive Pedagogy, we have never limited ourselves to formal educational institutions. In this political and cultural environment, if ever, we cannot expect universities to save us.
From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle, edited by historians Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr., is just the book we need to provide this critical historical knowledge! From Rights to Lives joins what might be called “Black Lives Matter Studies,” which encompasses a body of work that includes memoir, autobiography, history, and political essays. Committed to illuminating and grappling with the “messy complexity of movement making,” the contributors’ task was to do the work of the historian, which “is, at its core, to examine change over time” (240). But Hamlin and McKinney’s interdisciplinary book is also critical for adding historical pedagogy to the genre of “BLM Studies.” Working in the tradition of Black scholars’ movement writing, unwittingly side-eyeing fabrications of presentism, Hamlin and McKinney, describing their editorial approach, write, “We are primarily teachers, always pushing the importance of historical knowledge, bring these ideas, and the tools with which to analyze them, to students and beyond the academy” (6).
From Rights to Lives offers eight chapters that compare BLM to either the CRM or BPM, spotlighting how the method of comparison helps us understand historical change and continuity across the timeline of the BFS. I will focus on Charity Clay’s “‘Sincerely, Your Grandparents’ Hands’: Elucidating Similarities between the Trayvon Martin Generation of #BlackLivesMatter and the Emmett Till Generation of the Civil Rights Movement” and Althea Legal-Miller’s “‘We May Have to Defend Ourselves’: Black Women and Campaigns against Police Sexual Violence during the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter Eras” to spotlight some of the historical and pedagogical interventions of From Rights to Lives.
Clay’s “’Sincerely, Your Grandparents’ Hands,’” uses Tef Poe’s announcement and activist and journalist Rahiel Tesfamariam’s t-shirt that read “This aint yo mama’s Civil Rights Movement” to interrogate intergenerational tensions in the BFS (17, 26). An excellent choice for the first chapter, it sets up the book by introducing readers to the “master narrative” that has undermined historical understanding of the CRM. To sum it up, the master narrative claims that Martin Luther King Jr.—the respectable, charismatic, Black Christian minister and leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—solved the problem of racism with a dream and nonviolence. This narrative has maligned the historical thinking and understanding of both “Black youth aligned with #BLM and Black elders . . . aligned with the Civil Rights Movement” (18).
Clay does significant historical work to disrupt that narrative. Where others see intergenerational conflict, Clay sees a bridge between these two generations. She observes that both the Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till Generations entered “the BFS respond[ing] to the tragic killing of one of their peers by white vigilantism not punished by the criminal justice system” (22). By historicizing the role of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on its own terms, readers learn about self-defense, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, the organizing tradition, and what “group-centered” leadership looked like in the 1960s. Clay’s pedagogical work shows continuity between the Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till Generations without losing sight of the spatial and temporal differences that separate them. Clay’s approach not only creates opportunities for readers to connect with an active movement, but also it provides a language and analytical tools to interpret it. And, more significantly in my opinion, it creates space for the two generations to see themselves in each other.
In “‘We May Have to Defend Ourselves,’” Legal-Miller focuses on anti-racist campaigns against police sexual misconduct during the CRM and BLM eras. She compares Dorothy Height’s and the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW)’s campaign to protect Black women imprisoned for civil rights activity to the activism of the OKC Artists for Justice—founded by Grace Franklin and Candace Liger, two Oklahoma City-based Black women artists—and its cultural and political work to support the survivors of Daniel Holtzclaw, a white-presenting Oklahoma City police officer in 2014 and 2015.
Legal-Miller gives us a window into how the CRM movement was gendered during the summer of 1963—before the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was underway—and throughout 1964. At that time, Height and the NCNW sought support for Black women raped and sexually harassed by police and prison guards. Height interpreted this behavior as an attack upon Black women and a tactic to pressure them away from staying in the movement. That this gendered racial violence was invisible to the public made the fight even more difficult. Height received sparse support from white women-led national organizations, the Department of Justice, and the Black male-led civil rights establishment. Height exposed the truth that policing during the CRM was not about crime fighting—it was about repression, criminalization, and white supremacy. These same conditions remain true today, though it is articulated as more of a law-and-order proceduralism than in the 1960s (as seen in Peter Pihos’s chapter).
Fifty years later, OKC Artists for Justice encountered similar obstacles. Anti-rape and women’s organizations “declined their [Franklin’s and Liger’s] requests for support in order to preserve mutually beneficial partnerships with law enforcement.” The Black church wrestled with supporting them, too. The 6th Street Christian Church’s congregation in Oklahoma City “w[as] slow to rally around women who ‘aren’t little old church ladies’” (118). As Legal-Miller points out, Franklin’s and Liger’s approach represented “a progressive movement beyond strategies mobilized during the CRM,” which formed a movement politics in opposition to the respectability politics that, according to Legal-Millier, limited the scope of Height’s activism as well as others of that generation (121). But there was also change in another way. OKC Artists for Justice was buoyed by Black feminist-led national organizations (such as Black Women’s Blueprint, the Transformative Justice Coalition, and the African American Policy Forum), a robust Black feminist counterpublic, and progressive news media (119).
Hamlin’s and McKinney’s magisterial postscript speaks to the lessons learned throughout the book while also expertly elucidating the evolutionary and pedagogical aspects of the recent iteration of movement formations in the BFS. They write about the local movement in Memphis’s response to the murder of Tyre Nichols in January 2023. They interviewed four movement activists—Shahidah Jones, of the Memphis chapter of the Official Black Lives Matter organization; Rev. Dr. Earle Fisher, senior pastor of Abyssinian Missionary Baptist Church and co-organizer of the Memphis Grassroots Organization Coalition; Joshua Adams, of Memphis For All; Amber Sherman, of Decarcerate Memphis and other local organizations (240). What was critical about the postscript was Hamlin and McKinney’s foregrounding of “movement building.” Their accounting of the arc of the Memphis movement in the BLM era centered the organizing tradition and the coalitional efforts necessarily to bring about an effective movement. For example, Amber Sherman in 2020 “recognized a lack of education around policing and policy in the neighborhoods,” but they were better prepared by 2023. Throughout those three years, their efforts were “deeply coalitional: multiple people in multiple organizations helped to pool resources.” Movements are built.
In the early 1990s, I agreed—and continue to agree—with Tef Poe that “the U.S. government declared war on . . . black commun[ities.]” But I did not know about the organizing tradition; the pedagogical roles of the Highlander Folk School or the Council of Federated Organization; and the organizations that, as Barbara Ransby writes, do the “political quilting, working to build bridges and responsiveness among different sectors of the national progressive community of scholars, activists, and artists.”
Without the historical, pedagogical, and conceptual tools that these “maroon spaces” provide, we will no doubt fall for more corrosive “master narratives” than the one that has simplified and mythologized the history of the CRM and the BFS in general. Hamlin and McKinney have shown us that history matters, gifting us with a book possessing critical historical knowledge and pedagogical insights that serve as a guide to help us make sense of our present.
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