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Eric Arnesen “Reconsidering the Long Civil Rights Movement”

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Eric Arnesen “Reconsidering the Long Civil Rights Movement” April 2009 • Historically Speaking 31 CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORIOGRAPHY: TWO PERSPECTIVES The following two essays are adapted from papers given at the Historical Society’s June 2008 conference at the Johns Hopkins University. RECONSIDERING THE “LONG CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT”* Eric Arnesen or historians and general readers interested by highlighting the considerable ferment in race re- progressive, and truer story” of civil rights.3 There in the civil rights movement’s past, these lations during the 1930s and 1940s . ...The are many historians who agree with her. The no- are indeed the best of times. Every month, ‘backing up’ of the movement represents an ad- tion of a “long civil rights movement” has clearly F 2 it seems, new books roll off the presses of uni- vance in scholarship.” These are views that are caught on. The theme this year at Harvard’s versity and trade publishing houses, while academic now widely shared. Charles Warren Center for Studies in American journals and television documentaries present spe- Not surprisingly, scholars who argue for a History is “Race-Making and Law-Making in the cialized or general interpretations to their respec- reconceptualization of civil rights chronology ex- Long Civil Rights Movement”; there are now tive audiences. For a number of years since its press a discomfort with the Eyes on the Prize or courses on “the long civil rights movement” at initial release in 1987, the PBS universities, and the seal of ap- documentary Eyes on the Prize es- proval of foundation money has tablished the narrative of the Does the communist Left deserve the credit guaranteed the concept a long shelf movement between 1955 and life. The Andrew W. Mellon Foun- 1965, a narrative that prevailed that long civil rights movement proponents dation recently awarded the Univer- more in the broader culture than bestow upon it? And are they correct in iden- sity of North Carolina Press and in the academy. Today, for the se- UNC a three-year $937,000 grant rious readers of history, if not tifying the communist Left-labor alliance as for a project, “Publishing the Long necessarily the general public, that Civil Rights Movement,” that will narrative has, to some extent, be- the very heart of the mid-century movement? embrace “print and digital publica- come more complex and certainly tions” and foster “interdisciplinary far richer. Studies of prominent civil rights scholarship.”4 and obscure movement leaders, local organizations, “Montgomery to Memphis” narrative that brought In the academy, the notion of the “long civil high politics and public policy, black power, urban knowledge of the movement to a generation of rights movement” has become a widely accepted violence, anti-movement repression, and individual PBS viewers and students. That narrative, they sug- and rather unquestioned one, subject to little de- communities fill shelf after shelf. Keeping up with gest, misrepresents the movement, cutting it off bate or theoretical scrutiny. Despite, or, rather, be- the outflow of new literature is a full-time job for from its very roots with the wrongheaded implica- cause of the consensus that has quickly emerged scholars committed to comprehensive reading in tion that protests against racial inequality only over the concept, a brief pause here to consider this field. began in 1955. An aside: I was perhaps naively its analytical underpinnings and historiographical Perhaps the most significant development in startled when I made reference to the Eyes on the consequences seems in order. In what follows, I recent years has been historians’ insistence that the Prize series to the students in my U.S. history sur- raise several questions about the “long civil rights civil rights movement did not spring into being out vey class just over a year ago. As it turned out, none movement” in the hope of sparking an overdue of nothingness in either 1954 or 1955. They now of my students had heard of the series, much less conversation. advance the notion of the “long civil rights move- seen it (even though PBS recently rebroadcast it For instance, what, precisely, is a movement? ment” to capture the history of the movement before and released a new DVD set for in-school use). So A generation ago, Nelson Lichtenstein and Robert the movement (that is, prior to its so-called “classi- much for narrative hegemony. My lament is: If Korstad noted that the venerable labor historian cal” stage), a movement in its own right that can- only. I suppose I’d be satisfied if my students had, E.P. Thompson once observed that “most social not be reduced simply to that of “prelude” or in fact, absorbed the chronologically misleading movements have a life cycle of about six years,” a “seedtime” for what was to follow. In Steven Law- Eyes framework. At least it would be . some- period constituting a “window of opportunity” son’s view, the new “consensus view” is that the thing. But the critics’ larger point remains: for all during which they make their impact.5 The classi- movement “did not suddenly spring up in 1954 or of their visual power and moral storytelling, the cal phase of the modern civil rights movement 1955.”1 New scholarship, Glenn Feldman has re- Eyes documentaries do not link the Montgomery- generally fits this description: after its initial splash cently written, offers an “ongoing challenge to tra- and-beyond movement to strands of protest that during the Montgomery boycott, civil rights ac- ditional periodization of the civil rights movement preceded it. tivism fermented largely below the surface until the One of the most prominent proponents of student sit-ins erupted in 1960. For all of their the “long movement,” Jacqueline Dowd Hall, has programmatic and stylistic differences, the multi- insisted that the “story of a ‘long civil rights move- ple groups of the early 1960s—Student Nonvio- * I would like to thank Alex Lichtenstein, David Chappell, Katrin Schultheiss, and Lawrence Glickman for their criticisms of an earlier ment’ that took root in the liberal and radical mi- lent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern draft of this essay. lieu of the late 1930s” is a “more robust, more Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Congress 32 Historically Speaking • April 2009 of Racial Equality (CORE), etc.—shared an activist great outpouring of the freedom movement” by have something else in mind: namely, a civil rights orientation and determination to topple the racial serving as “human bridges between the past and activism strongly inflected by the organized Left status quo. But by the time President Lyndon the future.” They taught him that there was “a sig- and/or a Left-labor civil rights alliance, with “Left” Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the nificant history behind what we called ‘The Move- in this instance being defined as membership in movement had irreparably fragmented, its agendas ment,’ a long time of surging toward freedom.”7 the Communist Party or participation in its orbit. and leaders increasingly at odds. Indeed, Harding ended his study with the Recon- In Gilmore’s view, much credit goes unabashedly The “long” movement proponents tend to do struction era. He reflected upon the “brutal, mag- to American communists, black and white, who away with Thompson’s temporal restrictions by nificent struggle, reaching over more than three “redefined the debate over white supremacy and collapsing chronological boundaries, blurring the centuries, over thousands of miles, from the sun- hastened its end.” It was the communists “who differences between very different organizations, burned coasts of the homeland to the cold and stood up to say that black and white people should approaches, and strategies, and reducing the het- dreary trenches near...FortWagner.” Tracing the organize together, eat together, go to school to- erogeneity of black protest politics into a chrono- “freedom struggle of black people in this country, gether, and marry each other if they chose.” Re- logically expansive phenomenon known as the beginning before there was a country,” he sought jecting all compromise, party members were a “black freedom movement.” Take, for instance, the to convey its “long, continuous movement, flowing “catalyst for change and...aforce that moved claims of Glenda Gilmore, the Yale historian Socialists and liberals to action,” particularly during whose Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights the Popular Front years in the late 1930s.9 She is appeared late last year. Gilmore locates the origins hardly alone in so arguing. of civil rights in the 1920s. Like Hall, she seeks to For Gilmore, Hall, and others, the Great De- overturn the “simplified story broadcast across the pression and the 1940s gave rise to “a powerful nation on black-and-white televisions” in the social movement sparked by the alchemy of la- 1950s, a story that has the movement starting borites, civil rights activists, progressive New Deal- “when it burst into white people’s living rooms, ers, and black and white radicals, some of whom brought to them by white media.” That movement were associated with the Communist party,” in may have been new to white folks, but, she adds, Hall’s words. This movement was not “just a pre- “African Americans knew better,” for in the “three cursor of the modern civil rights movement,” she decades that followed World War I, black South- concludes. “It was its decisive first phase.” erners and their allies relentlessly battled Jim Referred to as “civil rights unionism” or the Crow.”6 “Black Popular Front” by its historians, this al- Was this, in fact, the case? Did African Amer- liance of progressives was based in leftist trade icans know better? Did they “relentlessly” battle “Scottsboro Boys” in jail at Birmingham, undated. Langston unions and led or influenced by the Communist Jim Crow after World War I? A small number of Hughes papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Bei- Party and its allies.
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