Abstract
The NNCM ebbed in the late 1920s and ended by the mid-1930s, while black student activism changed course, latching onto the commencing Long Civil Rights Movement. However, in the growing historiography of the formative years of the CRM, black students are rarely brought to light. Instead, New Dealers, community activists, populist politicians, Communists, unionists, anti-colonialists, NAACP and NNC members, and labor organizers are some of the groups often situated at the starting line in the late 1930s. Although there has been some notice of black student activism of the 1920s, the traditional historical lines reads [implies? asserts?] that black student protesters were marginal until the sit-in wave of the spring of 1960.1
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Notes
Jacquelyn Down Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Use of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (August 1935), p. 1235.
Johnetta Richards, “Fundamentally Determined: James E. Jackson and Ester Cooper Jackson and the Southern Negro Youth Congress — 1937–1946,” American Communist History 7 (2008), p. 192 (CIM quote); Maurice Gates, “Negro Students Challenge Social Forces,” TC, August 1935; John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. 52–55.
Robert Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass Student Movement, 1929–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Julie S. Doar, “National Council of Negro Youth,” in Organizing Black America: An Encyclopedia of African American Associations, ed. Nina Mjagkij (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2001), p. 392; “Youth Urge Passage of Anti-Poll Tax Law,” ADW, October 3, 1942 (Norman quote).
Robert Cohen, “Student Movements, 1930s,” in Encyclopedia ofthe American Left, eds. Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 799–802; “H. U. Students Join National Antiwar Strike,” AA, May 2, 1936; John H. Johnson, “Along the Youth Front,” CD, May 1, 1937.
August Meier, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1973).
Johnetta Gladys Richards, “The Southern Negro Youth Congress: A History, 1937–1949” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 1987).
Unless otherwise cited, the following section on the NAACP youth councils and college chapters is from Thomas L. Bynum, “‘We Must March Forward!’: Juanita Jackson and the Origins of the NAACP Youth Movement,” Journal of African American History 94 (Fall 2009), pp. 487–508 and “‘Our Fight is For Right’: The NAACP Youth Councils and College Chapters’ Crusade for Civil Rights, 1936–1965” (Ph.D. diss., Georgia State University, 2007).
Arthur L. Johnson, Race and Remembrance: A Memoir (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 2008), pp. 22–25; Laura T. McCarty, Coretta Scott King: A Biography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009), p. 12.
Rawn James Jr., Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), pp. 67–75.
Joy Ann Williamson, Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965–1975 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003) p. 11; Christina Asquith, “For Missing Civil Rights Hero, a Degree at Last,” Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, May 4, 2006, http://diverseeducation.com/article/5827/, accessed November 3, 2011.
Williamson, Black Power on Campus. pp. 11–12; George Henderson, Race and the University: A Memoir (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), p. 75.
Ana Maria Spagna, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), pp. 27–28
Gregory B. Padgett, “The Tallahassee Bus Boycott,” in Sunbelt Revolution: The Historical Progression of the Civil Rights Struggle in the Gulf South, 1866–2000, ed. Samuel C. Hyde Jr. (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003), pp. 190–208.
Joy Ann Williamson, Radicalizing the Ebony Tower: Black Colleges and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi (New York: Teachers College Press, 2008), pp. 39–40.
John Lewis and Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir ofthe Movement (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1998), pp. 74–75.
Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality: 1954–1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), p. 59.
Turner, Sitting In and Speaking Out. pp. 107–110; Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality. pp. 114–115; Frank Lambert, The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights v. States’ Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 116–138.
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© 2012 Ibram H. Rogers
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Kendi, I.X. (2012). “Strike While the Iron Is Hot”: Civil Rights in the Long Black Student Movement. In: The Black Campus Movement. Contemporary Black History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016508_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016508_4
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