The View from the Trenches
Reading by Charles Payne
In this excerpt from “The View from the Trenches” in Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1968, historian Charles Payne provides key considerations for the curriculum to teach beyond the traditional narrative. He also addresses how the language used to describe the Civil Rights Movement shapes our perceptions of it.
There is also a short excerpt from Hasan Kwame Jeffries’ Learning for Justice Teaching Hard History podcast on the Civil Rights Movement, with an introduction to the term “freedom rights.”
Students protest Prince Edward County public school closings, Farmville, Virginia, July 1963. Courtesy Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries Digital Collections.
Saying that most Americans have been raised on a whitewashed version of movement history is more than a bad pun. To paraphrase Julian Bond of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), U.S. popular and academic culture has been permeated by a master narrative about the movement. The narrative goes something like this:
Traditionally, relationships between the races in the South were oppressive. In 1954, the Supreme Court decided this was wrong. Inspired by the Court, courageous Americans, Black and white, took protest to the street, in the form of sit-ins, bus boycotts, and Freedom Rides. The protest movement, led by the brilliant and eloquent Dr. Martin Luther King, and aided by a sympathetic federal government, most notably the Kennedy brothers and a born-again Lyndon Johnson, was able to make America understand racial discrimination as a moral issue.
Once Americans understood that discrimination was wrong, they quickly moved to remove racial prejudice and discrimination from American life, as evidenced by the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Dr. King was tragically slain in 1968. Fortunately, by that time the country had been changed, changed for the better in some fundamental ways. The movement was a remarkable victory for all Americans. By the 1970s, Southern states where Blacks could not have voted 10 years earlier were sending African Americans to Congress. Inexplicably, just as the civil rights victories were piling up, many Black Americans, under the banner of Black Power, turned their backs on American society.
In its concentration on national institutions and leaders, on discrimination as a moral issue, on the period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s, in its restriction of leadership roles to elite men, on interracial cooperation, in its treatment of the movement as a great victory and of radicalism as irrational, the narrative reflects the typical assumptions of what might be called the naïve, top-down, normative perspective on movement history.
More recently, scholars have been calling for a reconsideration of the traditional narrative. They have raised a number of points:
Placing so much emphasis on national leadership and national institutions minimizes the importance of local struggle and makes it difficult to appreciate the role “ordinary” people played in changing the country and the enormous personal costs that sometimes entailed for them.
It implicitly creates the impression that historical dynamism resides among elites — usually white, usually male, usually educated — and that non-elites lack historical agency. The gender bias of traditional history is especially inappropriate in this case, in that we know that at the local level, women provided a disproportionate share of the leadership in the early 1960s.
Normative social analysis is analysis that emphasizes the primacy of norms and values in shaping the behaviors of individuals or groups. In the master narrative, it shows up in the emphasis on the morality of national leadership, on the church, legal institutions, and interracialism. The movement gets reduced to a “protest” movement. African American activism is sometimes equated with the church, the most normative of institutions.
The danger is that this emphasis may oversimplify the motives of actors, understanding the salience of disruption, of economic and political pressure. The emphasis on the normative character of the Civil Rights Movement is in considerable contrast to the way other movements are portrayed. When we think about the labor movement, for example, we are a good deal less likely to invoke normative explanations. We see that as a struggle over privilege, although each side tried to wrap its cause in the mantle of higher morality.
A top-down perspective can lose any sense of the complexity of the African American community — its class, gender, cultural, regional, and ideological divisions — and how that complexity shaped responses to oppression. One gets a few well-defined leaders and then the undifferentiated masses.
Concentration on the period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s — the Montgomery to Memphis framework — underplays the salience of earlier periods of struggle. All apart from their significance for understanding the modern Civil Rights Movement, those earlier periods of struggle are important in their own right as one of the keys to understanding the evolving self-consciousness of African Americans and the shifting constraints that confronted them.
A top-down perspective presumes that the most appropriate historical markers have to do with legislative/policy changes. This position makes it very difficult to understand the movement as a transforming experience for individuals or as an evolving culture, which in turn makes it very difficult to understand the radicalization of the movement.
A top-down perspective typically implies that the movement can be understood solely through large-scale, dramatic events, thus obscuring the actual social infrastructure that sustained the movement on a day-to-day basis.
It is not an either/or choice. Scholars advocating a more bottom-up approach are not denying the critical importance of national institutions, but they are contending that traditional top-down scholarship has tended to focus on them so exclusively as to make it impossible to understand just how complex the movement really was and how varied the sources of its dynamism were. To understand that, we need more sophisticated work from a variety of perspectives.
Looking Back: Historical Language and Historical Memory
Our understanding of social change, our conceptions of leadership, our understanding of the possibilities of interracial cooperation are all affected by how we remember the movement. Even much of the language that we use to discuss social issues derives from movement days. We think of the movement as a movement for “civil rights” and against “segregation.” Even those seemingly innocuous terms carry their own historical baggage.
“Segregation” became the accepted way to describe the South’s racial system among both Blacks and whites. In its denotative meaning, suggesting separation between Blacks and whites, it is not a very accurate term to describe that system. The system involved plenty of integration; it just had to be on terms acceptable to white people. Indeed, the agricultural economy of the early 20th century South probably afforded a good deal more interracial contact than the modern urban ghetto.
“White supremacy” is a more accurate description of what the system was about. “Segregation” is the way apologists for the South liked to think of it. It implies, “We’re not doing anything to Black people; we just want to keep them separate from us.” It was the most innocent face one could put on that system. When we use the term as a summary term for what was going on in the South, we are unconsciously adopting the preferred euphemism of 19th-century white supremacist leadership.
If “segregation” is a poor way to describe the problem, “integration” may not tell us much about the solution. It is not at all clear what proportion of the Black population was interested in “integration” as a general goal. African Americans have wanted access to the privileges that white people have enjoyed and have been interested in integration as a possible avenue to those privileges, but that view is different from seeing integration as important in and of itself.
Even in the 1950s, it was clear that school integration, while it would potentially put more resources into the education of Black children, also potentially meant the loss of thousands of teaching jobs for Black teachers and the destruction of schools to which Black communities often felt deeply attached, however resource-poor they were. There was also something potentially demeaning in the idea that Black children had to be sitting next to white children to learn.
The first Black children to integrate the schools in a given community often found themselves in a strange position, especially if they were teenagers. While some Black people thought of them as endangering themselves for the greater good of the community, others saw them as turning their backs on that community and what it had to offer. It is probably safest to say that only a segment of the Black community had anything like an ideological commitment to “integration,” while most Black people were willing to give it a try to see if it really did lead to a better life.
We might also ask how “civil rights” came to be commonly used as a summary term for the struggle of African Americans. In the late 1960s, after several civil rights bills had been passed, a certain part of white America seemed not to understand why Black Americans were still angry about their collective status. “You have your civil rights. Now what’s the problem?” In part, the problem was that “civil rights” was always a narrow way to conceptualize the larger struggle. For African Americans, the struggle has always been about forging a decent place for themselves within this society, which has been understood to involve the thorny issues of economic participation and self-assertion as well as civil rights. . . .
One hypothesis, of course, would be that “civil rights” becomes so popular precisely because it is so narrow, precisely because it does not suggest that distribution of privilege is part of the problem.
The “civil rights” language also implies the movement was about Negroes; they were the ones who did not have “civil rights.” From the viewpoint of a Septima Clark or an Ella Baker, the movement was about enriching American democracy, and those in whose name it was made were not the only ones who profited from it. ■
© 2006 Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. Reprinted with permission from Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1968, second edition, ed. Steven F. Lawson and Charles Payne.
“Freedom Rights”
In the introduction to the Learning for Justice Hard History podcast episode on the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries talks about the difference between “freedom rights” and “civil rights.” The episode is from Season Three: The Civil Rights Movement, which is well worth listening to.
African Americans framed their primary goal as freedom for a full century after the Day of Jubilee. In the 1960s, during the height of the modern Civil Rights Movement, this universal aim found expression in the use of the term “freedom” to describe various movement elements.
Volunteers who journeyed South to test compliance with desegregation mandates in interstate travel were Freedom Riders.
The songs played at mass meetings were freedom songs. The singing group founded by SNCC activists was the Freedom Singers.
The literary journal of the movement was Freedomways. Field organizers bedded down in freedom houses. All Black political parties were freedom parties.
Agricultural cooperatives were named freedom farms. Schools designed to empower Black students were known as freedom schools. And the effort undertaken by SNCC activists in 1964 — to break the vice grip that segregationists had on the Magnolia State — was dubbed Freedom Summer.
And yet, when we talk about this moment of struggle, we cast it solely in terms of civil rights, a term that only gained currency in the late 1950s, during the height of the Cold War, when moderate civil rights organizations, such as the NAACP, began using it to deflect and diffuse criticism that pursuing freedom was akin to pursuing Soviet communism.
But at the grassroots level, African Americans continued to talk in terms of freedom. Even more profoundly, they continued to act in ways designed to bring about freedom. And there is no clearer example of this than the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. ■