History Matters Now More Than Ever
This post is part of our online roundtable on Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.’s From Rights to Lives.
First, we offer our humble gratitude for the essays written in response to From Rights To Lives. All of these scholars had bigger and better things to do, but they thoughtfully read and wrote their assessments. Each read with care, and we actually learned more about our own book in their essays. The generosity of their comments and their syntheses of the book makes clear that we hit the mark with our initial goals, motivations, and interventions that we hoped to capture. Thank you for your generative insights.
We want to start our response with a nod to movement historiography and all of the powerful narratives that historians have produced over the years. There are a plethora of studies focused on the Civil Rights Movement, our two monographs notwithstanding. This capacious inquiry extends to the contemporary moment where a growing number of publications now focus on the Black Lives Matter Movement. While there are more monographs than any of us can read, there remains so much left to study, reveal, and analyze at the international, national, and local levels. As always, we have much work to do. As we worked out the shape and scope of our intervention, the prodigious civil rights literature buttressed us and encouraged the emerging #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) scholarship. In From Rights To Lives, we sought to highlight the dynamic interplay between the cyclical nature of movement history and the societal pendulum swings between tyranny and justice. We are grateful that our respondents recognized our attempt to craft a unique intervention.
Living in the world today makes it impossible to not make the comparison between past and present mass movements, particularly when most of the goals and wants remain the same, albeit with different public faces and different circumstances. As teachers and scholars of the Civil Rights Movement trained with an Africana lens, most of our students came to political consciousness in the shadow of the Obama administration, an era when national dialogues about a “post racial” nation loomed large in the national imagination. Most of these students received high school curricula simplified, edited, and devoid of all nuance, and most recently, of all fact. We both recognized a common dilemma. We could not teach the history effectively without first doing the restorative work of excavating the rhetoric in order to rebuild with facts, evidence, and critical thinking. We had to lower our bar of basic knowledge, which meant spending precious classroom time getting students to where we needed them to be in order to introduce more advanced material, and we heartily complained about it to each other.
Conversations tinged with exasperation developed into this book. From Rights To Lives reminds people that the current social and political climate also has a history firmly embedded on the Black Freedom Struggle timeline. Living ahistorically is not an option. As such, we wanted to introduce explicit comparisons between two mass movements—demonstrating the work we do in our classes—and bring home how and why history matters. We came to this as a methodological, intellectual, and teachable project that morphed into a book with distinct and diverse chapters (from scholars at all ranks from different kinds of institutions) that all answer the questions about continuity and change over time while teaching history and provoking conversation and discourse. The edited volume allows for a certain kind of accessibility with the case studies that approach the task in different ways and with different analytical tools within the social sciences and humanities. Together, these chapters demonstrate the extent of systemic white supremacy and the ways in which the system constantly maneuvers to subvert democracy. In this way From Rights To Lives helps readers understand both the legacies of white supremacy and Black struggle.
As Shannon King rightly identified, we wanted this book to reach beyond the academy in terms of not only the dissemination of information, but also as a pedagogy. The creation of the book mirrors its collaborative contents. The COVID-19 global pandemic slowed down our collective ability to publish sooner. Black Americans endured two pandemics: one caused by a deadly virus made worse by the mishandling and incompetency of elected officials, and the other caused by the insistence of white supremacy over Black life as police literally got away with murder. Ironically, the pandemic brought us opportunities in the midst of the devastation. The Summer of 2020, a lethal season, allowed us to get a better grip on the then-revived Black Lives Matter Movement. The resulting delay also gave us the space, time, and opportunity to gather at Brown University to workshop these papers. Everyone read everyone else’s chapter, and the workshop forged an intimate space where authors gave and received critical feedback for their essays. This convening was crucial in that it contributed to a scholarly investment and camaraderie that belies most academic endeavors of this sort.
As we thought about the shape, scope, and nature of our intervention, we knew we wanted to create a volume that was, first and foremost, accessible to both people within formal academic spaces and the folks outside of the academy who engage in all manner of social justice work. We both understood the need to shape a volume that addressed multiple audiences in this crucial moment.
In his exquisite 1981 essay “Listen to the Blood: The Meaning of Black History,” historian and Ebony Magazine editor Lerone Bennett admonished scholars that writing history is a “heartbreakingly . . . difficult and dangerous enterprise,” one that could not be truly accomplished without the aid of other disciplines. Bennett’s wisdom conforms with the imperatives of Black Studies: to reach beyond our home discipline to get at the truths of the Black life, thought, and struggle we hoped to chronicle. Taking this imperative to heart necessitated the construction of a volume that reached beyond history. While a seemingly increasing number of academics grow wary of edited volumes, our book forum participants recognized the utility of this approach to contend with a multiplicity of issues presented by this type of comparative analysis.
We wanted to create something that would not go stale too quickly—a real possibility when writing about a movement currently in motion. The collection had Marcia Chatelain thinking less about the more uniform approach of examining change over time (“narratives of unidirectional progress”) to the “places of resonance and revision” that appear over the longer timeline. The essays, which we encourage readers here to explore further, individually and as a whole, portray the messiness, instability, and capacious nature of movement work. Brett Gadsden referred to the essays as “first drafts of history,” a brilliant term. Our postscript focused on one place and one campaign, the organizing in Memphis in the wake of the police murder of Tyre Nichols. It is our hope that our postscript—along with the other essays in the book—becomes a blueprint for the ways in which people research, teach, and grapple with the perils and prospects of organizing movements.
In December 2024 we had the distinct honor of presenting this work to a Teachers’ Workshop organized by the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. The workshop was an opportunity for teachers, from kindergarten to the twelfth grade, to augment their pedagogical toolkit and learn new scholarship. It is our hope that teachers from all levels will continue to find their way to the book and use it in their classrooms as they see fit. A central benefit of our edited volume is the ability to pick the chapters most useful for particular purposes. The focus on localized case studies presents opportunities for research projects in the classroom. For younger students who may not have the opportunity to read the book yet, their teachers can lean on our content, particularly the chapters that focus on cultural production and its political possibilities. We offer three examples here.
Mickell Carter’s essay, “When the Cultural Revolution Comes: Anthem Making in the Era of BLM,” uses the expression and use of music to talk about protest from the Civil Rights Movement to BLM. This is perfect for children with varying levels of literacy—using the universal language of music and art can provide students with an enhanced opportunity to form opinions and generate discussion about the past and the contemporary moment. Many young folks want to know more about rap and hip hop, so using that point of interest, teachers can find samples to show students the progression of that art form over time. In her essay, Mickell unpacks the work of the Last Poets (often called the grandfathers of rap) during the Black Arts Movement. Their rhymes carry themes of militancy, Black pride, and the dismantling of white supremacy, and Mickell’s essay serves as a guide enabling teachers to engage with the written word (more suitable for high schoolers) or pique interests with the syncopated poetry to drum beats (where sound plays a larger role). When she jumps decades to 2018 and Childish Gambino’s “This is America,” Mickell highlights the link between activism and cultural producers, noting what made this an anthem and where it showed up during protests after police murders. Teachers can exploit the genealogy she plots, using their discretion to present it to students in age appropriate ways.
In a similar way, Aram Goudsouzian and Scott Brooks’s chapter on sports provides another easy pathway to open up classroom discussions. Their essay, “Revolts of the Black Athletes: Race, Sport, and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter,” provides a comparative exploration of Black athletic activism during the Civil Rights—Black Power period and the #BLM moment. It would be easy for teachers to use the visual material of athletes protesting to anchor their class. They can then move on to the essay’s argument that reminds us of how the actions (or inactions) of Black athletes frequently mirror the range of responses to racial inequality in the larger society. Aram and Scott reveal the broad, dynamic range protest action can take. While some athletes contemplated boycotting the 1968 Olympics, others did not. While some athletes expressed support for #BLM in bold, explicit ways, others did not. In both moments, the actions of Black athletes—whether individual or collective—played a key role in shifting the political terrain of sports in ways that made social dissent possible. Additionally, this essay provides another vital entryway for students of all ages to engage with questions of social action.
David Mason’s more personal chapter on photographing movements and subjectivity, “The Ambivalence of Activist Photography: July 10, 2016,” provides further topics of dialogue in classrooms. In the essay, David outlines and unpacks his positionality as a witness and a photographer during a protest in Memphis in 2016. When is photography a tool for good and when is it a tool to create bias, to distort images? While David goes through his thought processes and then “reads” his own photographs, the essay gives opportunities to talk about positionality, allyship, intention versus reception, the nuts-and-bolts about how to read a photograph, and how to think about photographs as primary sources or secondary sources.
Finally, Charity Clay’s essay drew most of the comments from our reviewers and it made sense to begin the book by dismantling the master narrative the country tells itself, and then teaches to our children (who might end up in our classroom). Wesley Hogan’s work literally puts this into practice. The SNCC Digital Gateway brings together these two time periods with the many opportunities created to facilitate the meeting of SNCC veterans to today’s young activists. This work dispels the myths within the master narrative, and it gives BLM organizers the solid foundation and wisdom to tackle simultaneously very similar, yet completely different, challenges. The inherited wealth shared is not material but informational, transformative, and irreplaceable.
From Rights to Lives leaves a solid foundation upon which to build the “next chapter of social movement history” (Gadsden) and the inevitable extension of the Black Freedom Struggle timeline where Black people demand the right to live, and as Marcia Chatelain asks, “Are we better off?” The May 2025 acquittal of the former police officers who inflicted Tyre Nichols’s lethal injuries gives us pause. The re-election of a self-proclaimed white supremacist as president who has done nothing but consolidate that point since assuming the office again, gives us pause. Unfortunately and predictably, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s 1849 saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” rings true. However, that is not our parting message. Rather, we have the tools with which to make change. We learned them from those who came before us, and while we need to update them for a more complex society, we know they still work.
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