Abstract
The historiography of the civil rights struggle has changed dramatically over the past quarter of a century. Early histories that appeared prior to the 1980s concentrated primarily on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the familiar Montgomery to Memphis narrative of his life.1 Since the 1980s, a number of studies examining the civil rights movement at local and state levels have questioned the usefulness and accuracy of the King-centric Montgomery to Memphis narrative as the sole way of understanding the civil rights movement. These studies have made it clear that civil rights struggles already existed in many of the communities that King and the organization of which he was the president, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), ran civil rights campaigns in during the 1960s. Moreover, those struggles continued long after King and the SCLC had left those communities. Civil rights activism also thrived in many places that King and the SCLC never visited.2
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Notes
See, for example, Lawrence D. Reddick, Crusader Without Violence: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959)
Lerone Bennett, Jr., What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1964)
William Robert Miller, Martin Luther King, Jr.: His Life, Martyrdom and Meaning for the World (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968)
David L. Lewis, King: A Critical Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970)
Jim Bishop, The Days of Martin Luther King (New York:. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971).
William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle For Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)
Robert J. Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985)
David R. Colburn, Racial Change and Community Crisis: St. Augustine, Florida, 1877–1980 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)
John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle For Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994)
Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
Glenn T. Eskew, But For Birmingham: The local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)
Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995)
Stephen G. N. Tuck, Beyond Atlanta: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Georgia, 1940–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001)
John A. Kirk, Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in little Rock, Arkansas, 1940–1970 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).
On women’s activism in the movement see Vicki Crawford, Jacqueline Rouse, and Barbara Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1990)
Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)
Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith, eds., Gender in the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999) reprinted (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004)
Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
On the role of violence and armed self-defense, see Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) and
Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)
on international dimensions see Michael L. Krenn, ed., Race and US Foreign Policy During the Cold War (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998)
Michael L. Krenn, Black Diplomacy: African Americans and the State Department, 1945–1969 (Armoruk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1999)
Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)
Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)
Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996) and
“Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights and Reaction Against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964,” Journal of American History 82 (Sept. 1995): pp. 551–78
Arnold R Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1983) and
“Massive Resistance in the Urban North: Trumbull Park, Chicago, 1953–1966,” Journal of American History 82 (Sept. 1995), 522–50.
A number of other works have explored similar themes, notably and most recently, Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
On King and the SCLC’s Chicago campaign, see Alan B. Anderson and George W. Pickering, Confonting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986) and
James R. Ralph, Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
On the 1966 civil rights bill see Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long As They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
On black life in early Little Rock, see Paul D. Lack, “An Urban Slave Community: Little Rock, 1831–1862.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 41 (Spring 1982), pp. 258–87
Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: the Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 92–95
John William Graves, Town and Country: Race Relations in an Urban/Rural Context, Arkansas, 1865–1905 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990), chapter 6
Tom Dillard, “Perseverance: Black History in Pulaski County, Arkansas—An Excerpt.” Pulaski County Historical Review 31 (Winter 1983), pp. 62–73.
Ben F. Johnson III, Arkansas in Modern America, 1930–1999 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), pp. 148–61
Martha Walters, “Little Rock Urban Renewal,” Pulaski County Historical Review 24 (March 1976), pp. 12–16
Margaret Arnold, “Little Rock’s Vanishing Black Communities,” Arkansas Times, June 1978, pp. 36–43
and Stuart Eurman, “Consolidating Cities: An Urban Fiction,” Pulaski County Historical Review 42 (Spring 1994), pp. 19–22.
For further discussion on Blossom’s school policy and the 1957 Little Rock school crisis see John A. Kirk, “Massive Resistance and Minimum Compliance: The Origins of the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis,” in Clive Webb, ed., Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Georg C. Iggers, “Arkansas Professor: The NAACP and the Grass Roots,” p. 286, in Wilson Record and Jane Cassels Record, eds., Little Rock, U.S.A. (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1960)
On Brown II and its aftermath, see J. Harvie Wilkinson III, From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Lntegration: 1954–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 61–95.
Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), chapter 14.
Wiley A. Branton, “Little Rock Revisited: Desegregation to Resegregation,” Journal of Negro Education 52 (Summer 1983), p. 253.
Tony Freyer, The Little Rock Crisis: A Constitutional Lnterpretation (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), pp. 56–58.
Virgil T. Blossom, Lt Has Happened Here (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), pp. 19–21.
Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1962), p. 59.
see also C. Fred Williams, “Class: The Central Issue in the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 56 (Autumn 1997), pp. 341–44
Karen Anderson, “The Little Rock School Desegregation Crisis: Moderation and Social Conflict,” Journal of Southern History 70 (August 2004), pp. 603–36
Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), chapter 12.
Roy Reed, Faubus: The Life and Times of an American Prodigal (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997), pp. 196–97
Robert Sherrill, Gothic Politics in the Deep South (New York: Ballantine Books, 1969), pp. 105–6.
On the Mothers League, see Graeme Cope, “A Thorn in the Side’?: The Mothers’ League of Central High School and the Little Rock Desegregation Crisis of 1957,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 57 (Summer 1998), pp. 160–90.
Neil R. McMillen, “The White Citizens Council and Resistance to School Desegregation in Arkansas,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 30 (Summer 1971), p. 104
Corrine Silverman, The Little Rock Story (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1958), pp. 6–7.
Howard Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) argues that segregation emerged as an alternative to separation and exclusion during that period.
Elizabeth Jacoway, “Taken By Surprise: Little Rock Business Leaders and Desegregation,” p. 21, in Elizabeth Jacoway and David R. Colburn, eds., Southern Businessmen and Desegregation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).
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© 2011 Manning Marable and Elizabeth Kai Hinton
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Kirk, J.A. (2011). Housing, Urban Development, and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the Post-Civil Rights Era South. In: Marable, M., Hinton, E.K. (eds) The New Black History. The Critical Black Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230338043_2
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