Black Freedom Studies: Re-imagining and Redefining the Fundamentals1

Abstract

A burgeoning body of scholarship over the past decade has begun to reshape popular understandings of the civil rights movement. They have challenged the dominant civil rights story of a nonviolent movement born in the South during the 1950s that emerged triumphant in the early 1960s led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. but then was derailed by the twin forces of Black Power and white backlash when it sought to move North after 1965. By returning and re-asking the fundamental questions of origin, direction, and ideology of the movement, this new scholarship has questioned the most basic aspects of the story: who led and undertook these movements, what the movement was actually about, where it took place, when it happened, and why people engaged in a movement (or what they hoped to change). Their answers – if taken together – begin to show us a different movement: a national black freedom movement populated, shaped, and led by local people in communities across the country that began in the 1940s and 1950s and extended through the 1970s, that married self-defense with nonviolent direct action, radical economic critiques with desegregation protest with international solidarity, that relied on organizing and ground-level theorizing of local problems as well as charisma and national organizations.