“I’m very skeptical about the ability of people in positions of power and privilege—including intellectuals—to name truths about the world.”
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Here is how Morris formulates the theoretical perspective that underlies his treatment of the US civil rights movement. It is a perspective on mass mobilization and social movements that gives full attention to the ordinary human beings who were the subject of racial oppression; and it emphasizes the essential role played in mobilization by effective local and regional organizations.
In the present inquiry an indigenous perspective is used to study how the modern civil rights movement actually worked. The assumption is that mass protest is a product of the organizing efforts of activists functioning through a well-developed indigenous base. A well-developed indigenous base includes the institutions, organizations, leaders, communication networks, money, and organized masses within a dominated group. Such a base also encompasses cultural elements -- music, oratory, and so on -- of a dominated group that play a direct role in the organization and mobilization of protest.... A central concern of the indigenous perspective is to examine the ways in which organizers transform indigenous resources into power resources and marshals them in conflict situations to accomplish political ends. (xii)
As this passage makes clear, Morris places organizations and an energized mass population of black Southerners at the center of his analysis. He provides information about the SCLC, NAACP, CORE, SNCC, HFS, SCEF, and FOR -- the strategies and levers of power available to each of them, and the complicated relationships that existed among them. (Full names and dates of the organizations are provided below.)
And, significantly, Morris goes into a reasonable amount of detail describing the strategies of protest organizations and their mass followers in different locations: Baton Rouge, Birmingham, Montgomery, Nashville, Shreveport, Greensboro, Virginia, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Georgia. The Birmingham experience is described in particular detail. This use of multiple case studies is important, because it establishes that Morris is not aiming merely to provide an explanatory template of mobilization; instead, he wants to use the research tools of the historian to see how mobilization unfolded in specific times and places. And this means documenting the organizations, leaders, and strategies that were present in different places.
One relative blindspot in Origins is its inclination to be urban-centered. The bulk of the protests and activism described in the book take place in cities across the South. But the struggle for racial equality -- including especially voting rights -- had an important reality in the rural South. Morris refers briefly to the circumstances of rural black people in the Jim Crow South that made mass mobilization extremely difficult in rural locations:
The rural setting was hardly ideal for organized, sustained collective action by blacks. In the rural milieu blacks experienced grinding poverty that closely tied them to the land and to the white man. Whites usually arranged the economy so that blacks always owed them money and were forever dependent on them for food and shelter. Outnumbered, defenseless, and with no hope of protection from the law, blacks usually avoided overt conflict with whites simply to stay alive. On the rural plantations, furthermore, blacks seldom experienced themselves as a tightly knit, cohesive group, because they were widely dispersed across the countryside. The sociologist E. Franklin Frazier described rural black communities as follows (78):
"The cabins are scattered in the open country so that the development of village communities has been impossible. Consequently, communication between rural families as well as the development of rural institutions has been limited by the wide dispersion of the population."
However, some of the most difficult developments in the struggle for equality in the South took place in rural counties (for example, Lowndes County, Alabama). This is especially true in the struggle for the right to vote, and the persistent campaigns of voter registration organized by SNCC, CORE, and other organizations were a highly important step in the progress of the movement. Here is how Hasan Kwame Jeffries describes Lowndes County in Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt:
Jim Crow was a grim reality in Lowndes County, Alabama, at the beginning of 1965. African Americans attended separate and unequal schools, lived in dilapidated and deteriorating housing, and toiled as underpaid and overworked domestics and farm laborers. They were also completely shut out of the political process. There were five thousand African Americans of voting age in the overwhelmingly black rural county, but not a single one was registered. (Introduction)
Origins gives almost no attention to these rural voter registration drives, but they were an important part of the history of the movement. Bob Moses is mentioned once, but no detail is offered for the nuts and bolts of mobilization under these special circumstances. (It is true that much of that activism occurred after the end of Morris's narrative, which is confined to 1953-1963. The SNCC Freedom Summer initiative took place in 1964.)
The special strengths of Morris's book are its detailed focus on the workings of the major civil rights organizations during this crucial period of US history; his emphasis on the essential role played in the movement by masses of highly committed ordinary people in supporting mass meetings, boycotts, demonstrations, marches, and strikes; and the strategic and facilitating role played by the Black church in almost all of these episodes of contention. The book also does an excellent job of allowing the reader to see how the struggle for equality played out somewhat differently in different locations. Different local organizations, different leaders, and different circumstances for ordinary local people led to a fascinating degree of local variation. This use of detailed cases throughout the book offsets the inclination to subsume "struggles for Civil Rights in the South" under a single template of homogeneous processes and outcomes. There were deep similarities, of course, in the experience of the Jim Crow regime across the whole region; but there were also important local differences in the way that struggles for equality were constructed and carried out. Morris also documents the ways in which experiences in one city influenced strategies and outcomes in other cities -- for example, the successful bus boycott in Baton Rouge was influential on leaders and organizations in Montgomery when the struggle to reform the bus system came to a head in Montgomery.
Is Origins chiefly a theoretical exercise, illustrating a sociological theory of social movements? Or is it a work of historical research, making use of sociological ideas but fundamentally dependent on reaching an understanding of what the facts were about successes and failures in different parts of the South? In my view, this is what differentiates Morris's book from McAdam's Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. Morris's book is seriously committed to uncovering the important historical details, whereas McAdam's book is an exposition of "latest thinking" on the sociology of social movements, with illustrations drawn from the history of the Civil Rights movement. McAdam's book is historical sociology; Morris's book is sociologically informed history. Both approaches are valuable. But ideally, interested readers would read both books, and keep track of both theoretical insights about mechanisms and important but contingent features of the historical experience of places as diverse as Nashville and Baton Rouge. Each work is a perfect companion to the other for anyone interested in understanding better the course of the movement for racial equality in the United States.
And for the reader in 2023, Morris's account of the full-scale effort by southern legislatures, governors, and business groups to destroy the NAACP (26-39) and to refuse compliance with Federal court mandates is disturbingly familiar from today's headlines. Today's southern governors and legislatures are highly focused on reducing voting rights for African-Americans (gerrymandering, long lines for voting, voter ID rules, limitations on absentee ballots ...). And the war on "critical race theory" and the 1619 project sounds very much like the organized resistance to desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s.
-----
Here is a list of the primary organizations that Morris discusses:
Southern Christian Leadership Congress (SCLC, 1957)
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, 1910)
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, 1942)
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, 1960)
Highlander Folk School (HFS, 1932)
Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF, 1938)
Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR, 1915)
Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA, 1955)
Inter Civic Council (ICC, 1956)
Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR, 1956)
Here is how Morris formulates the theoretical perspective that underlies his treatment of the US civil rights movement. It is a perspective on mass mobilization and social movements that gives full attention to the ordinary human beings who were the subject of racial oppression; and it emphasizes the essential role played in mobilization by effective local and regional organizations.
In the present inquiry an indigenous perspective is used to study how the modern civil rights movement actually worked. The assumption is that mass protest is a product of the organizing efforts of activists functioning through a well-developed indigenous base. A well-developed indigenous base includes the institutions, organizations, leaders, communication networks, money, and organized masses within a dominated group. Such a base also encompasses cultural elements -- music, oratory, and so on -- of a dominated group that play a direct role in the organization and mobilization of protest.... A central concern of the indigenous perspective is to examine the ways in which organizers transform indigenous resources into power resources and marshals them in conflict situations to accomplish political ends. (xii)
As this passage makes clear, Morris places organizations and an energized mass population of black Southerners at the center of his analysis. He provides information about the SCLC, NAACP, CORE, SNCC, HFS, SCEF, and FOR -- the strategies and levers of power available to each of them, and the complicated relationships that existed among them. (Full names and dates of the organizations are provided below.)
And, significantly, Morris goes into a reasonable amount of detail describing the strategies of protest organizations and their mass followers in different locations: Baton Rouge, Birmingham, Montgomery, Nashville, Shreveport, Greensboro, Virginia, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Georgia. The Birmingham experience is described in particular detail. This use of multiple case studies is important, because it establishes that Morris is not aiming merely to provide an explanatory template of mobilization; instead, he wants to use the research tools of the historian to see how mobilization unfolded in specific times and places. And this means documenting the organizations, leaders, and strategies that were present in different places.
One relative blindspot in Origins is its inclination to be urban-centered. The bulk of the protests and activism described in the book take place in cities across the South. But the struggle for racial equality -- including especially voting rights -- had an important reality in the rural South. Morris refers briefly to the circumstances of rural black people in the Jim Crow South that made mass mobilization extremely difficult in rural locations:
The rural setting was hardly ideal for organized, sustained collective action by blacks. In the rural milieu blacks experienced grinding poverty that closely tied them to the land and to the white man. Whites usually arranged the economy so that blacks always owed them money and were forever dependent on them for food and shelter. Outnumbered, defenseless, and with no hope of protection from the law, blacks usually avoided overt conflict with whites simply to stay alive. On the rural plantations, furthermore, blacks seldom experienced themselves as a tightly knit, cohesive group, because they were widely dispersed across the countryside. The sociologist E. Franklin Frazier described rural black communities as follows (78):
"The cabins are scattered in the open country so that the development of village communities has been impossible. Consequently, communication between rural families as well as the development of rural institutions has been limited by the wide dispersion of the population."
However, some of the most difficult developments in the struggle for equality in the South took place in rural counties (for example, Lowndes County, Alabama). This is especially true in the struggle for the right to vote, and the persistent campaigns of voter registration organized by SNCC, CORE, and other organizations were a highly important step in the progress of the movement. Here is how Hasan Kwame Jeffries describes Lowndes County in Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt:
Jim Crow was a grim reality in Lowndes County, Alabama, at the beginning of 1965. African Americans attended separate and unequal schools, lived in dilapidated and deteriorating housing, and toiled as underpaid and overworked domestics and farm laborers. They were also completely shut out of the political process. There were five thousand African Americans of voting age in the overwhelmingly black rural county, but not a single one was registered. (Introduction)
Origins gives almost no attention to these rural voter registration drives, but they were an important part of the history of the movement. Bob Moses is mentioned once, but no detail is offered for the nuts and bolts of mobilization under these special circumstances. (It is true that much of that activism occurred after the end of Morris's narrative, which is confined to 1953-1963. The SNCC Freedom Summer initiative took place in 1964.)
The special strengths of Morris's book are its detailed focus on the workings of the major civil rights organizations during this crucial period of US history; his emphasis on the essential role played in the movement by masses of highly committed ordinary people in supporting mass meetings, boycotts, demonstrations, marches, and strikes; and the strategic and facilitating role played by the Black church in almost all of these episodes of contention. The book also does an excellent job of allowing the reader to see how the struggle for equality played out somewhat differently in different locations. Different local organizations, different leaders, and different circumstances for ordinary local people led to a fascinating degree of local variation. This use of detailed cases throughout the book offsets the inclination to subsume "struggles for Civil Rights in the South" under a single template of homogeneous processes and outcomes. There were deep similarities, of course, in the experience of the Jim Crow regime across the whole region; but there were also important local differences in the way that struggles for equality were constructed and carried out. Morris also documents the ways in which experiences in one city influenced strategies and outcomes in other cities -- for example, the successful bus boycott in Baton Rouge was influential on leaders and organizations in Montgomery when the struggle to reform the bus system came to a head in Montgomery.
Is Origins chiefly a theoretical exercise, illustrating a sociological theory of social movements? Or is it a work of historical research, making use of sociological ideas but fundamentally dependent on reaching an understanding of what the facts were about successes and failures in different parts of the South? In my view, this is what differentiates Morris's book from McAdam's Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970. Morris's book is seriously committed to uncovering the important historical details, whereas McAdam's book is an exposition of "latest thinking" on the sociology of social movements, with illustrations drawn from the history of the Civil Rights movement. McAdam's book is historical sociology; Morris's book is sociologically informed history. Both approaches are valuable. But ideally, interested readers would read both books, and keep track of both theoretical insights about mechanisms and important but contingent features of the historical experience of places as diverse as Nashville and Baton Rouge. Each work is a perfect companion to the other for anyone interested in understanding better the course of the movement for racial equality in the United States.
And for the reader in 2023, Morris's account of the full-scale effort by southern legislatures, governors, and business groups to destroy the NAACP (26-39) and to refuse compliance with Federal court mandates is disturbingly familiar from today's headlines. Today's southern governors and legislatures are highly focused on reducing voting rights for African-Americans (gerrymandering, long lines for voting, voter ID rules, limitations on absentee ballots ...). And the war on "critical race theory" and the 1619 project sounds very much like the organized resistance to desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s.
-----
Here is a list of the primary organizations that Morris discusses:
Southern Christian Leadership Congress (SCLC, 1957)
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, 1910)
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, 1942)
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, 1960)
Highlander Folk School (HFS, 1932)
Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF, 1938)
Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR, 1915)
Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA, 1955)
Inter Civic Council (ICC, 1956)
Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR, 1956)
The Solidarity Movement was a remarkable instance of broad popular mobilization within a Communist dictatorship. As students of contention are common to point out, grievances and discontent are to be found almost everywhere; but organized protest, struggle, and resistance are rare. Successful concerted collective resistance is the exception rather than the rule. So the key scientific problem is to try to discover how this successful mass mobilization came about, and that means conducting investigations to --
Or in short, how, why, and through what mechanisms did mobilization and protest emerge?
The approach that Touraine's group took in attempting to discover answers to these questions was a deliberately granular approach. Rather than focusing on high-level statements of grievances, exhortations, and proposed plans of actions by nationally recognized leaders, the Touraine group recognized that this movement took shape through activist participants at the factory and local levels, and that the ideas, grievances, and mental frameworks about possible reforms that would ultimately become the "Solidarity Manifesto" took shape through conversations and debates at the local levels. Accordingly, the research teams gave significant weight to the processes of thought-change that were underway in six industrial centers: Gdansk, Katowice, Warsaw, Szezecin, Wroclaw, and Lodz.
Solidarity was not simply a social and political force which modified the course of Polish history. It was, and is, a movement, a collective will, and its significance goes far beyond the results it has obtained. When the dominated protest and seek liberation, their hopes are never entirely realised: the shadows cast by history remain. But great upsurges like Solidarity bring with them at least the certainty that the behaviour of the dominated is never totally determined by the dominant forces. (5)
The research also paid attention, of course, to the leadership conversations and debates that were occurring within the national movement. But the heart of their analysis derives from the "sociological interventions" at the level of the regional groups of activist workers. Touraine writes,
Because a social movement challenges a situation, it is always the bearer of normative values and orientations. Rather than enclosing the group in a reflexion upon itself, the technique involves opening it up so that it can experiences, in conditions which one might describe as experimental, the practices of the social group or movement to which it sees itself as belonging. (7)
This method resembles the use of focus groups to sort out attitudes, beliefs, and values within a target population; but it is more than that. It is critical and constructive, in the sense that it seeks to elicit from participants the more articulated versions of their beliefs, goals, and grievances. And Touraine suggests that this method is especially relevant for treatment of a social movement, because the ideas and values of participants in a social movement are themselves in a process of change and articulation. The method involves several "discussion leaders" who work to elicit ideas from the group; articulate those ideas in writing; and come back for further discussion and debate in a subsequent meeting. Here is how Marcin Frybes describes the method of "sociological intervention" (link).
The sociological intervention consists in organizing meetings of groups (composed of eight to fifteen people) in order to discuss a specific issue (which had been proposed and formalized by the sociologists). The group of intervention is not a real group of militants. It brings together individuals who share either the same commitment or the same kind of experience, but who, if it is possible, do not know other members of the group. The Sociological Intervention involves having the same group meet in a neutral area on several (ten or more) occasions in order for them to be able to propose some analytical schemas representing the historical dynamics and the different components of the action (the logic of the action and the levels of the action). During every sociological intervention, the sessions (which take 2 or 3 hours) could be open or closed. (72)
There are two noteworthy aspects of this method.
First is the localism that it supports. It is entirely possible that the articulations of grievance, goal, and values that emerge from Gdansk will be different from those that emerge from Warsaw. And this is a sociologically important fact; a social movement is not homogeneous across regions and workplaces.
The second is the interactiveness that the method implies between researcher and "subject". Touraine's view appears to be that the results of these "interventions" come closer to a truthful reflection of the political perceptions and values of the participants than would a survey instrument or a traditional focus group. It is analogous to an in-depth conversation with a group of men and women on the subject of gender equality -- superficial views may be expressed to start, and then more considered and reflective views emerge. But the critic might argue that the investigators have injected their own frameworks into the conversation in ways that lead to a less authentic representation of the political consciousness of the workers of Gdansk or Warsaw. (Frybes refers to subsequent criticisms along these lines; 77.) But Touraine justifies the validity of this method in these terms:
This work of self-analysis does, however, have its limits. Every actor is an ideologist, in the sense that he produces a representation of the situation in which he finds himself, and that that representation corresponds to his own interests. No actor can become a disinterested analyst. The researcher must therefore intervene more directly. But at this point a double difficulty arises. On the one hand, if he adopts the attitude of a remote and objective observer, he cannot reach the very thing which he seeks to understanding: the coldness of objectivity will hold him back from the heat of the social movement. Conversely, if he identifies with the actors' struggle, he ceases to be an analyst and becomes nothing more than a doctrinaire ideologist; in this case, his role becomes entirely negative. The method's response to this difficulty is to say that the researcher must identify not with the actors' struggle in itself, but with the highest possible meaning of that struggle, which is nothing other than the social movement. (7)
The method is defended, that is, because it helps to elucidate the process of the formation of the collective will that eventually characterized the movement. And this implies that Touraine believes the active and critical nature of the research -- the open-ended discussions with the various groups, and the effort to formulate these ideas in writing -- illuminates the processes through which the agency of workers and other participants in a social movement find their ground in the processes of contention in which they are involved.
The Solidarity Movement was a remarkable instance of broad popular mobilization within a Communist dictatorship. As students of contention are common to point out, grievances and discontent are to be found almost everywhere; but organized protest, struggle, and resistance are rare. Successful concerted collective resistance is the exception rather than the rule. So the key scientific problem is to try to discover how this successful mass mobilization came about, and that means conducting investigations to --
Or in short, how, why, and through what mechanisms did mobilization and protest emerge?
The approach that Touraine's group took in attempting to discover answers to these questions was a deliberately granular approach. Rather than focusing on high-level statements of grievances, exhortations, and proposed plans of actions by nationally recognized leaders, the Touraine group recognized that this movement took shape through activist participants at the factory and local levels, and that the ideas, grievances, and mental frameworks about possible reforms that would ultimately become the "Solidarity Manifesto" took shape through conversations and debates at the local levels. Accordingly, the research teams gave significant weight to the processes of thought-change that were underway in six industrial centers: Gdansk, Katowice, Warsaw, Szezecin, Wroclaw, and Lodz.
Solidarity was not simply a social and political force which modified the course of Polish history. It was, and is, a movement, a collective will, and its significance goes far beyond the results it has obtained. When the dominated protest and seek liberation, their hopes are never entirely realised: the shadows cast by history remain. But great upsurges like Solidarity bring with them at least the certainty that the behaviour of the dominated is never totally determined by the dominant forces. (5)
The research also paid attention, of course, to the leadership conversations and debates that were occurring within the national movement. But the heart of their analysis derives from the "sociological interventions" at the level of the regional groups of activist workers. Touraine writes,
Because a social movement challenges a situation, it is always the bearer of normative values and orientations. Rather than enclosing the group in a reflexion upon itself, the technique involves opening it up so that it can experiences, in conditions which one might describe as experimental, the practices of the social group or movement to which it sees itself as belonging. (7)
This method resembles the use of focus groups to sort out attitudes, beliefs, and values within a target population; but it is more than that. It is critical and constructive, in the sense that it seeks to elicit from participants the more articulated versions of their beliefs, goals, and grievances. And Touraine suggests that this method is especially relevant for treatment of a social movement, because the ideas and values of participants in a social movement are themselves in a process of change and articulation. The method involves several "discussion leaders" who work to elicit ideas from the group; articulate those ideas in writing; and come back for further discussion and debate in a subsequent meeting. Here is how Marcin Frybes describes the method of "sociological intervention" (link).
The sociological intervention consists in organizing meetings of groups (composed of eight to fifteen people) in order to discuss a specific issue (which had been proposed and formalized by the sociologists). The group of intervention is not a real group of militants. It brings together individuals who share either the same commitment or the same kind of experience, but who, if it is possible, do not know other members of the group. The Sociological Intervention involves having the same group meet in a neutral area on several (ten or more) occasions in order for them to be able to propose some analytical schemas representing the historical dynamics and the different components of the action (the logic of the action and the levels of the action). During every sociological intervention, the sessions (which take 2 or 3 hours) could be open or closed. (72)
There are two noteworthy aspects of this method.
First is the localism that it supports. It is entirely possible that the articulations of grievance, goal, and values that emerge from Gdansk will be different from those that emerge from Warsaw. And this is a sociologically important fact; a social movement is not homogeneous across regions and workplaces.
The second is the interactiveness that the method implies between researcher and "subject". Touraine's view appears to be that the results of these "interventions" come closer to a truthful reflection of the political perceptions and values of the participants than would a survey instrument or a traditional focus group. It is analogous to an in-depth conversation with a group of men and women on the subject of gender equality -- superficial views may be expressed to start, and then more considered and reflective views emerge. But the critic might argue that the investigators have injected their own frameworks into the conversation in ways that lead to a less authentic representation of the political consciousness of the workers of Gdansk or Warsaw. (Frybes refers to subsequent criticisms along these lines; 77.) But Touraine justifies the validity of this method in these terms:
This work of self-analysis does, however, have its limits. Every actor is an ideologist, in the sense that he produces a representation of the situation in which he finds himself, and that that representation corresponds to his own interests. No actor can become a disinterested analyst. The researcher must therefore intervene more directly. But at this point a double difficulty arises. On the one hand, if he adopts the attitude of a remote and objective observer, he cannot reach the very thing which he seeks to understanding: the coldness of objectivity will hold him back from the heat of the social movement. Conversely, if he identifies with the actors' struggle, he ceases to be an analyst and becomes nothing more than a doctrinaire ideologist; in this case, his role becomes entirely negative. The method's response to this difficulty is to say that the researcher must identify not with the actors' struggle in itself, but with the highest possible meaning of that struggle, which is nothing other than the social movement. (7)
The method is defended, that is, because it helps to elucidate the process of the formation of the collective will that eventually characterized the movement. And this implies that Touraine believes the active and critical nature of the research -- the open-ended discussions with the various groups, and the effort to formulate these ideas in writing -- illuminates the processes through which the agency of workers and other participants in a social movement find their ground in the processes of contention in which they are involved.
Social movements are a process of collective action aimed at structural change. I am interested in the social psychology of collective action from the standpoint of Black women activists. My research adopts Black feminist thought as a lens through which to conduct a sociology of antiracist social movements in the contemporary era. However, Black feminist scholars from a wide range of fields have done research on Black women’s activism throughout history. Below is a list of five groups of Black women activists with some insights from Black feminist scholars.
The Black Panther Party was formed in 1966 in Oakland, California. This worldwide network of chapters advocated for Black self-defense and self-determination by publishing a Ten-Point platform based on anticapitalist and antiracist ideals, which included a demand to cease police violence. Their political expressions reimagined femininity, masculinity, and empowerment to challenge hegemony and patriarchy as well as to mobilize women. For example, in Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era, Ashley D. Farmer argues the work of Gayle Dickson for Bobby Seale’s mayoral campaign in 1973 portrays Black women as “militant domestics” or “revolutionary women” for the purposes of communicated global solidarity among U.S. Black women.
In “Engendering the Black Freedom Struggle: Revolutionary Black Womanhood and the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area, California”, Robyn C. Spencer writes that Black Panther Party historiographies tend to portray Black women as victims or opponents of misogyny and sexism in Black nationalist social movements. However, this framing obscures the agency and empowerment of Black Panther Party women:
The Panthers created images that valorized the armed, revolutionary black woman at a time when the dominant sociological and public policy arguments said that strong black women were detrimental to the family and therefore the community, and both liberal integrationist and conservative nationalist rhetoric promoted patriarchy. In stark contrast to the image of women spontaneously and individually engaging in self–defense, which emerged from the civil rights movement, the Panthers posited black women as proactive and organized—acting alongside men as defenders of the black community.
- Spencer (2008:99)
Spencer and Farmer’s work both highlight the significance of Black feminist thought in Black Power throughout the 1970s, challenging long-held assumption about Black women’s marginalization within the Black Power Movement.
Historically, anti-racist social movements in the west have centered men of color as the primary victims of racism. For example, the #BlackLivesMatter social movement addresses police violence as a global issue that all Black people suffer, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. Yet, the media and internet advocates of #BlackLivesMatter tend to amplify police violence against Black heterosexual men.
The African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS) initiated the #SayHerName campaign in December 2014 to respond to the lack of attention to Black women victims of police brutality. In 2015, AAPF Executive Director Kimberlé Williams Crenshawand Andrea J. Ritchie, a researcher in resident at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, released a report that demonstrated the pervasiveness of police brutality against Black women.
>>>CLICK HERE TO READ THE SAY HER NAME REPORT<<<
#SayHerName activists engage in multiple strategies including direct advocacy and policy suggestions to support in Black women and girls slain by police. As suggested by the “#,” advocates also use online social networking tools in their activism. Therefore, #SayHerName shows how Black feminism today uses both conventional strategies and new media to achieve its aims.
After the National Women’s Clubs barred black women from attending the World Columbian Exposition in 1893, they formed their own clubs. Many club women were former slaves’ children who had to contend with White feminists who held racist and classist views.
Ida B. Wells embarked on a global anti-lynching speaking tour, exposing the bigotry of American liberal organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) whose sole Black executive member was Frances Ellen Harper.
>>>Click here to listen to Making Ida B. Wells from WBEZ Chicago.<<<
Following the President of the Missouri Press Association’s retaliation to Wells’ campaign, 36 Black Women’s Clubs formed the National Federation of Afro-American Women. Margaret Murray Washington, Booker T.’s wife, was president. The organization ultimately became the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), which was led by Mary Church Terrell.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, middle-class Black women spearheaded the Colored Women’s Club Movement. In her 1993 book Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880-1920, historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham coined the term politics of respectabilityto describe their activism. Respectability politics enabled women to combine their spiritual practices with their social and political values, allowing them to use the church as a home base for teaching, organizing, and community outreach.
According to the Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia, communism is “a concept or system of society in which the major resources and means of production are owned by the community rather than by individuals.” For the most part, the role of Black women in communist movements has been suppressed. However, scholars such as Erik S. McDuffie and Carole Boyce Davies have started a new wave of literature that illuminates the legacies of Louise Thompson Patterson, Audley Moore, Eula Gray, and Claudia Jones.
Michigan State University Associate Professor of History LaShawn Harris documents this history during the Great Depression in a 2009 article, “Running with the Reds: African American Women and the Communist Party during the Great Depression,” for the Journal of African American History. The Great Depression exacerbated the existing employment problems faced by Black people including poverty, low wages, and discrimination. The refusal of governments in the South to extend the New Dealto Black Americans pushed many to turn to leftist organizations for assistance.
Communist-based organizations such as the League of Struggles for Negro Rights, the Unemployed Councils, and the International Labor Defense, provided support for issues such as housing evictions, food for the jobless and homeless, and labor marches and strikes. Additionally, the Communist Party gave Black women leadership roles in local, national, and international movements against intersecting oppressions, further propelled community growth and institution building. According to Harris, Black women’s engagement with communism to reconstruct the politics of respectability, forging strategies of liberation through new ways of protest that contrasted to the bourgeois ideals of racial uplift.
For the most part, U.S. society frames support for reproductive rights via the pro-choice framework. However, historically, this movement’s singular emphasis on abortion gas mostly served the interests of white upper middle class white women. Furthermore, its legacy of birth control advocacy and forced sterilization emerges out of models of population control rooted in eugenics. The choice framework also conceals the state’s involvement in propagating reproductive sanctions and differentially rewarding various groups’ reproductive practices.
In “Understanding Reproductive Justice: Transforming the Pro-Choice Movement,” Smith College Associate Professor of Women & Gender Loretta J. Ross explains how Black women and other women of color developed a different strategy against reproductive oppression with the reproductive justice paradigm.
Reproductive Justice says that the ability of any woman to determine her own reproductive destiny is linked directly to the conditions in her community—and these conditions are not just a matter of individual choice and access.
- Ross (2006:14)
Ross also explains that proponents of reproductive justice fight for:
- The right to have a child
- The right not to have a child
- The right to parent, the children we have, as well as to control our birthing options, such as midwifery.
This engagement in reproductive rights and social justice, built on the human rights framework and intersectionality, extends the heritage of resistance among women of color, particularly Black women, to coercive and incentivized depopulation policies of the state. For example, the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, based in Atlanta, was founded in 1997 via the merger of sixteen groups funded by the Ford Foundation. Human rights principles and intersectionality were included into the group’s educational initiatives, which included national and regional trainings and seminars. SisterSong, according to Kimala Price, creates a strong collective identity in order to attract individual and organizational members, especially women disenfranchised by the pro-choice social movements.
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