The Notion of Progress in 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.

Reading From Rights to Lives in 2025 forces readers to gain a more sophisticated understanding of the mid-twentieth century civil right struggle while also grappling with their recent memories of the past decade’s Movement for Black Lives. Were things better in 2014 than they are today? Is it irrational to look back at 2020, in the thick of the COVID-19 crisis and the George Floyd summer, and think of it as more functional than the first quarter of the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidential term? Or are we better off when we look at the Black Freedom Struggle across decades and eras to search for the places of resonance and revision rather than hew ourselves to looking for change over time exclusively? Do we need to free ourselves from narratives of unidirectional progress in order to actually comprehend the history of the Black Freedom Struggle? These are the questions that lingered in my mind as I read this collection of thoughtfully curated essays on how more than half a century of Black political organizing and activism can be understood through various lenses and an array of students, practitioners, and scholars of struggle.

Drawing upon a rich body of historical scholarship informed by political science, religious studies, and media analyses of the civil rights struggle, From Rights to Lives includes writing about some of the most important topics in Black Freedom Struggle studies from the 1960s to the present. This field has challenged the idea of charismatic leadership, surfaced the sexism and homophobia rampant among some local and national networks, and amplified the class dynamics that time and again undermined movement solidarity, and the writers in this volume have deftly applied lessons learned about the past to analyze the present. Existing for little more than a decade, the Black Lives Matter (BLM)/Movement for Black Lives—as well as the derivative organizations it inspired or that were created due to splinters with BLM—is still a critical object lesson on how movements form, evolve, disassemble, and reckon under specific conditions such as mobilizing in the age of social media.

Also, the emergence of BLM is important to understand in relationship to the presidencies that it encountered—BLM’s birth under a Black president and its growing pains under the presidency of a modern white supremacist adds another layer of complexity to its origin story. In this collection, readers will be able to trace the contours of both movement histories because the writers highlight some common threads within recent scholarship on the two struggles, namely: intergenerational understanding and conflict, the role of faith and spirituality, the persistent problem of racist policing, the testimony of sexual assault survivors, the participation of artists and athletes in responding to movements, the convergence of diasporic Black communities, and the importance of media in storytelling and image-making. The ability to structure the volume around these issues is a testament to the editorial process as well as a celebration of the interventions made by historians in the analytic frames around movements over a longer period of time. Outside of the frame of the current political moment, this is a significant model of history that supposes the Black America pre-1968 has echoed into the Black America of the twenty-first century, and riffing off of the construction of continuity versus change is an appropriate way of presenting the differences and similarities of the movements.

Yet, reading this volume against the grain of the reactionary extremism that was not only activated by the emergence of Black Lives Matter, but also fed on the resentments of the COVID-19 protocols and nurtured on the expansion of right-wing media, From Rights to Lives cautions against employing a “good ol’days” analysis of the recent past.

The mass targeting and dismantling of anything gesturing toward inclusion, the move toward outlawing the teaching of history accurately, and the collusion of higher education with political actors committed to advancing a white supremacist vision of the ruling political class is disheartening to say the least. And in these troubled times, it is more important than ever to turn to history to remind oneself that this current wave is nothing new, it is tied to and a continuation of recent struggle rather than an aberration from it—although the rapidity of the second Trump administration is truly overwhelming. Whether confronted with a slow or rapid attack on their lives and rights, Black freedom movements have always relied on political analysis alongside various methods of on-the-ground mobilization and care of community to respond to harm. This volume reminds us of this. The demands for accountability for police violence, the commitment to winning economic and racial justice together, and the mobilization to stop sexual violence has always been with us, and the strategies for confrontation have always been met with reactionary opinion and political repression.

In the final essay in the volume, Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr. quote Rev. Dr. Earle Fisher in his assessment that protest is, at once, “miraculous, magnificent, and messy.” These adjectives, which also serve as the title for the entry, direct readers and scholars to search for all three elements in their evaluation of social movements. The miracle of the past seven decades of the Black Freedom Struggle resides not only in the spectacular moments that have been photographed time and again or heralded as emblematic such as the integration of Little Rock Central High School or the Selma to Montgomery March. As From Rights to Lives reveals, we must also look to the local—the acts of organizing and community that may never get captured by news cameras but grant communities the space to grieve, strategize, and wonder about the future. Similarly, the magnificence of this history rests in the ways that it provides models for activists and cautionary tales for their respective generation’s work.

And there is a lot of messiness. Throughout and across the essays, the debates about strategy, approach, and the next steps gesture at a move toward a series of productive, and at times contentious, conflicts about those deemed as extensions of an establishment approach to civil rights and their domination of media attention or the possible exploitation of vulnerable and mournful communities. Ultimately, this framework for thinking how our perception of activism moved from securing rights to affirming the right to our lives is a necessary one to not only understand the ideological and political shifts that occurred, but also to understand how to equip ourselves to fight the clear and present danger of our current moment.