Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress. They also share mass-based movement activities, policy/legislative advocacy, grass-roots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and dissensioncore aspects of movement workmark them both. Crucially, these moments also engender aggressive, repressive, multi-level responses to these assertions of Black Humanity.
Rights and Lives critically engages the dynamic relationship between these two moments of liberatory possibility on the Black Freedom Struggle timeline. McKinney and Hamlin invite the contributors to take up what we can learn when we place these moments of struggle in dialogue with each other. They grapple with how our understanding of the postwar moment shapes our analysis of #BLM and wherein lie the discontinuities, in order to glean lessons for future moments of insurgency.
Introduction: Rights and Lives: History Matters by FranÇoise N. Hamlin
and Charles W. McKinney Jr.
Chapter
1. Sincerely, Grandmas Hands: Elucidating Similarities between the
Trayvon Martin Generation of #BlackLivesMatter and the Emmett Till Generation
of the Civil Rights Movement by Charity Clay
Chapter
2. Continuity and Change: The Spirituality of Liberation in the
Black Lives Matter Movement by Christophe Ringer
Chapter
3. Good Cops? by Peter Pihos
Chapter
4. We May Have to Defend Ourselves: Black Women and Campaigns
against Police Sexual Violence during the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter
Eras by Althea Legal-Miller
Chapter
5. Revolts of the Black Athletes: Race, Sport, and Activism from the
Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter by Scott Brooks and Aram
Goudsouzian
Chapter
6. The Search for Truth & Justice: A Diasporic Black Freedom
Struggle by Kishauna Soljour
Chapter
7. The Ambivalence of Activist PhotographyJuly 10, 2016 by David
Mason
Chapter
8. When the Cultural Revolution Comes: Anthem Making in the Era of
BLM by Mickell Carter
Coda: [ title] by FranÇoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.
Author Bios
FranÇoise N. Hamlin is the Royce Family Associate Professor of Teaching Excellence in Africana Studies & History at Brown University. She is the author of the award-winning Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II, coeditor of the anthology These Truly Are The Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on Citizenship and War, and editor and annotator of the republication of The Struggle of Struggles by activist Vera Pigee.
Charles W. McKinney Jr. is chair of Africana Studies and associate professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina, and coeditor of An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee.
