In the legacy of Drum and Spear Book Store, a Black Owned Bookstore founded by SNCC Veterans, opened in 1968-1974, we would like to continue to support Black Owned Bookstores to include Harriet’s (Philadelphia), Uncle Bobbie’s (Philadelphia), Sankofa (Washington, DC), and Baldwin & Co. (New Orleans, LA).
This momentous work offers a groundbreaking history of the early civil rights movement in the South. Using wide-ranging archival work and extensive interviews with movement participants, Charles Payne uncovers a chapter of American social history forged locally, in places like Greenwood, Mississippi, where countless unsung African Americans risked their lives for the freedom struggle. The leaders were ordinary women and men—sharecroppers, domestics, high school students, beauticians, independent farmers—committed to organizing the civil rights struggle house by house, block by block, relationship by relationship. Payne brilliantly brings to life the tradition of grassroots African American activism, long practiced yet poorly understood.
Payne overturns familiar ideas about community activism in the 1960s. The young organizers who were the engines of change in the state were not following any charismatic national leader. Far from being a complete break with the past, their work was based directly on the work of an older generation of activists, people like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, Aaron Henry. These leaders set the standards of courage against which young organizers judged themselves; they served as models of activism that balanced humanism with militance. While historians have commonly portrayed the movement leadership as male, ministerial, and well-educated, Payne finds that organizers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the most dangerous parts of the South looked for leadership to working-class rural Blacks, and especially to women. Payne also finds that Black churches, typically portrayed as frontrunners in the civil rights struggle, were in fact late supporters of the movement.
Collected here is not only the Passing of Giants but a testament to the tireless devotion of Rev. Daughtry to chronicle the life and legacy of these noted and sometimes unknown personalities. How thankful they are that one of their ilk is still standing and dutifully making sure they are not forgotten. This is part of his calling to the good reverend, much like his commitment to the pulpit, anointing the dearly departed with eulogies, he often delivered or documented. Week after week, year after year, he found time in his busy mission to post an obituary in the Daily Challenge. As you will see, many of these appeared in the paper, and Rev. Daughtry extends his gratitude to the publisher Thomas Watkins for allowing him the space.
Those who could not keep up with his daily accounts of these words of compassion and commiseration are gathered here under several rubrics, and some resonate with particular agencies because the pastor knew them personally. The easy flow of information the minister delivered in No Monopoly on Suffering (Africa World Press, 1997) resumes here, and the individuals profiled, taken collectively, represent a veritable encyclopedia of memory and dedication. Rev. Daughtry has painstakingly researched and gathered data on the departed, several of whom presented a difficult challenge to completely fulfill. Even so, they are included and we hope their families and loved ones can appreciate the effort to make them immortal.
The Reverend Dr. Herbert Daughtry hails from a family which has produced six generations of Black church leaders. Born in Savannah, Georgia, and raised on the streets of Brooklyn, New York and Jersey City, New Jersey, Reverend Daughtry has risen to positions of national and international prominence.
More than 66 years of involvement in church and community, national and international service has earned him the title, “The People’s Pastor.” After serving for 61 years, Dr. Daughtry resigned in 2019 as the National Presiding Minister of The House of the Lord Churches.The Reverend Leah Daughtry, the eldest daughter of the Reverend Dr. Herbert and Karen Daughtry became the National Presiding Minister. However, the Reverend still remains active in the church; local, national, and global affairs. He is presently the Founder and President of the Herbert Daughtry Global Ministries.
Reverend Daughtry’s long career of activism began with the Civil Rights struggles in the late 1950s.
Police Against the Movement shatters one of the most pernicious myths about the 1960s: that the civil rights movement endured police violence without fighting it. Instead, as Joshua Clark Davis shows, activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee confronted police abuses head-on, staging sit-ins at precinct stations, picketing outside department headquarters, and blocking city streets to protest officer misdeeds. In return, organizers found themselves the targets of overwhelming political repression in the form of police surveillance, infiltration by undercover officers, and retaliatory prosecutions aimed at discrediting and derailing their movement.
The history of the civil rights era abounds with accounts of physical brutality by county sheriffs and tales of political intrigue and constitutional violations by FBI agents. Turning our attention to municipal officials in cities and towns across the US—North, South, East, and West—Davis reveals how local police bombarded civil rights organizers with an array of insidious weapons. More than just physical violence, these economic, legal, and reputational attacks were designed to project the illusion of color-blind law enforcement.
The civil rights struggle against police abuses is largely overlooked today, the victim of a willful campaign by local law enforcement to erase their record of repression. By placing activism against state violence at the center of the civil rights story, Police Against the Movement offers critical insight into the power of political resistance in the face of government attacks on protest.
In the 1960s and ’70s, a diverse range of storefronts—including head shops, African American bookstores, feminist businesses, and organic grocers—brought the work of the New Left, Black Power, feminism, environmentalism, and other movements into the marketplace. Through shared ownership, limited growth, and democratic workplaces, these activist entrepreneurs offered alternatives to conventional profit-driven corporate business models. By the middle of the 1970s, thousands of these enterprises operated across the United States—but only a handful survive today. Some, such as Whole Foods Market, have abandoned their quest for collective political change in favor of maximizing profits.
Vividly portraying the struggles, successes, and sacrifices of these unlikely entrepreneurs, From Head Shops to Whole Foods writes a new history of social movements and capitalism by showing how activists embraced small businesses in a way few historians have considered. The book challenges the widespread but mistaken idea that activism and political dissent are inherently antithetical to participation in the marketplace. Joshua Clark Davis uncovers the historical roots of contemporary interest in ethical consumption, social enterprise, buying local, and mission-driven business, while also showing how today’s companies have adopted the language—but not often the mission—of liberation and social change.
Nicknamed both “Mobtown” and “Charm City” and located on the border of the North and South, Baltimore is a city of contradictions. From media depictions in The Wire to the real-life trial of police officers for the murder of Freddie Gray, Baltimore has become a quintessential example of a struggling American city. Yet the truth about Baltimore is far more complicated—and more fascinating.
To help untangle these apparent paradoxes, the editors of Baltimore Revisited have assembled a collection of over thirty experts from inside and outside academia. Together, they reveal that Baltimore has been ground zero for a slew of neoliberal policies, a place where inequality has increased as corporate interests have eagerly privatized public goods and services to maximize profits. But they also uncover how community members resist and reveal a long tradition of Baltimoreans who have fought for social justice.
The essays in this collection take readers on a tour through the city’s diverse neighborhoods, from the Lumbee Indian community in East Baltimore to the crusade for environmental justice in South Baltimore. Baltimore Revisited examines the city’s past, reflects upon the city’s present, and envisions the city’s future.
This eloquent and provocative autobiography, originally published in 1972, records a day by day, sometimes hour by hour, compassionate account of the events that took place in the streets, meetings, churches, jails, and in people’s hearts and minds in the 1960s civil rights movement.
“James Forman’s The Making of Black Revolutionaries is a classic, a personal, no holds barred inside look at the civil rights movement. Written by an insider, it offers an invaluable look at the politics and the personalities that shaped the movement and continue to shape American life.” —Julian Bond
“The Making of Black Revolutionaries was the most ambitious, politically astute, and emotionally engrossing memoir to emerge from the 1960s. Anyone interested in understanding the present state of Black politics should read this outstanding example of engaged historical analysis.” —Clayborne Carson, Stanford University
In this autobiographical chronicle of three decades of black rural and ghetto life and SNCC organizing in the early ’60’s, Forman has achieved an unusual clarity of political exposition and a high degree of self-awareness. Judging from the Black Manifesto demands he helped sponsor against Protestant churches, he could be viewed as an especially imaginative hustler; but this book adds many other dimensions. In the first part, Forman faces degradation, chaos, and desperation with individualistic stamina; in the second part he surveys the civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycott through SNCC’s high point in 1964 and finally its collapse and replacement by the Panthers. Forman’s anti-white rhetoric often belies a narrative honesty which details encounters with racist whites with acknowledgment of the whites’ bind between personal compassion and social compulsion. Forman views World War II as a powerful shaper of black impatience; he participates in Air Force desegregation and deplores the treatment of Okinawan women by both whites and blacks. And then SNCC — portrayed as a real flesh-and-blood political organization with factional disputes, leadership deficiencies, and the theoretical anemia disguised by a “”we-all-are-just-here-to-organize”” ideology. Forman’s sharpest barbs are directed at the NAACP-Urban League — CORE-white liberal coalition which tolerated SNCC only so long as it supported the government’s civil rights policy. He describes how in 1963 the NAACP counseled the Ford Foundation to destroy SNCC, how Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. redbaited SNCC’s Lawyer’s Guild collaborators, how Wayne Morse pleaded for LBJ versus the Mississippi Freedom Democrats. After SNCC folded, so did Forman, tripping to Africa, bugging the churches, undigging the Panthers: he offers little movement prognosis, but his narrative is unexpectedly valuable and his self-accounting sometimes approaches the heights of Richard Wright’s style and compassion. —Kirkus Review
ISBN: 9780295976594 | University of Washington Press
With its radical ideology and effective tactics, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was the cutting edge of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. This sympathetic yet even-handed book records for the first time the complete story of SNCC’s evolution, of its successes and its difficulties in the ongoing struggle to end white repression. At its birth, SNCC was composed of black college students who shared an ideology of moral radicalism. This ideology, with its emphasis on nonviolence, challenged Southern segregation. SNCC students were the earliest civil rights fighters of the Second Reconstruction. They conducted sit-ins at lunch counters, spearheaded the freedom rides, and organized voter registration, which shook white complacency and awakened black political consciousness. In the process, Carson shows, SNCC changed from a group that endorsed white middle-class values to one that questioned the basic assumptions of liberal ideology and raised the fist for black power. Indeed, SNCC’s radical and penetrating analysis of the American power structure reached beyond the black community to help spark wider social protests of the 1960s, such as the anti-Vietnam War movement. Carson’s history of SNCC goes behind the scene to determine why the group’s ideological evolution was accompanied by bitter power struggles within the organization. Using interviews, transcripts of meetings, unpublished position papers, and recently released FBI documents, he reveals how a radical group is subject to enormous, often divisive pressures as it fights the difficult battle for social change.
SNCC: The New Abolitionists influenced a generation of activists struggling for civil rights and seeking to learn from the successes and failures of those who built the fantastically influential Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It is considered an indispensable study of the organization, of the 1960s, and of the process of social change. Includes a new introduction by the author.
The global race revolution of the twentieth century is arguably the central story of modern international history. The end of European empires in what Cold War intellectuals and policy makers christened the “Third World” forces historians to rethink traditional periodizations. Scholars speak of a “pre-Columbian” era before the spread of Western empires overseas; the retreat of those empires logically suggests the arrival of a post-Columbian era. As colonized peoples seized self-rule, ethnic minorities led a parallel fight for equality in the West.
In both cases the basic mission was the same. In the colonized lands creating nations meant delineating “imagined communities” and sovereign states to house them. In the metropoles the fight for civil rights meant redefining existing nationalities to encompass ethnic minorities and to fulfill a long-denied promise of equal citizenship. The chronological coincidence of these struggles, in retrospect, was not mere coincidence. Both hark back to fundamental, constitutive questions of citizenship and nationhood, questions long disallowed under both imperial and segregationist rule. The literature on these intertwined developments – Third World decolonization and American desegregation – has coalesced into a synthesis of international history, one underscoring the millennial importance of the global race revolution.
A surge of African American enrollment and student activism brought Black Studies to many US campuses in the 1960s. Sixty years later, Black Studies programs are taught at more than 1,300 universities worldwide. This book is the first history of how that happened.
Black Studies founder and movement veteran Abdul Alkalimat offers a comprehensive history of the discipline that will become a key reference for generations to come. Structured in three broadly chronological sections – Black Studies as intellectual history; as social movement; and as academic profession – the book demonstrates how Black people themselves established the field long before its institutionalisation in university programmes. At its heart, Black Studies is profoundly political. Black Power, the New Communist Movement, the Black women’s and students’ movements – each step in the journey for Black liberation influenced and was influenced by this revolutionary discipline.
Abdul Alkalimat is a founder of the field of Black Studies and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. A lifelong scholar-activist with a PhD from the University of Chicago, he has lectured, taught and directed academic programs across the US, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe and China. His activism extends from having been chair of the Chicago chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s, to a co-founder of the Black Radical Congress in 1998.
Between 1964 and 1974 Tanzania came to be regarded as a model nation and a leading frontline state in the struggle for African liberation on the continent and beyond. During this time, a number of African American and Caribbean nationalists, leftists, and pan-Africanists traveled to and settled in Tanzania to join the country that many believed to be leading Africa’s liberation struggle. This historical study examines the political landscape of that crucial moment when African American, Caribbean, and Tanzanian histories overlapped, shedding light on the challenges of creating a new nation and the nature of African American and Caribbean participation in Tanzania’s nationalist project.
In examining the pragmatic partnerships and exchanges between socialist Tanzania and activists and organizations associated with the Black Power movements in the United States and the Caribbean, this study argues that the Tanzanian one-party government actively engaged with the diaspora and sought to utilize its political, cultural, labor, and intellectual capital to further its national building agenda, but on its own terms, creating tension within the pan-Africanism movement. An excellent resource for academics and nonacademics alike, this work is the first of its kind, revealing the significance of the radical political and social movements of Tanzania and what it means for us today.
What happened to black youth in the post-civil rights generation? What kind of causes did they rally around and were they even rallying in the first place? After the Rebellion takes a close look at a variety of key civil rights groups across the country over the last 40 years to provide a broad view of black youth and social movement activism. Based on both research from a diverse collection of archives and interviews with youth activists, advocates, and grassroots organizers, this book examines popular mobilization among the generation of activists―principally black students, youth, and young adults―who came of age after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Franklin argues that the political environment in the post-Civil Rights era, along with constraints on social activism, made it particularly difficult for young black activists to start and sustain popular mobilization campaigns.
Building on case studies from around the country―including New York, the Carolinas, California, Louisiana, and Baltimore―After the Rebellion explores the inner workings and end results of activist groups such as the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Student Organization for Black Unity, the Free South Africa Campaign, the New Haven Youth Movement, the Black Student Leadership Network, the Juvenile Justice Reform Movement, and the AFL-CIO’s Union Summer campaign. Franklin demonstrates how youth-based movements and intergenerational campaigns have attempted to circumvent modern constraints, providing insight into how the very inner workings of these organizations have and have not been effective in creating change and involving youth. A powerful work of both historical and political analysis, After the Rebellion provides a vivid explanation of what happened to the militant impulse of young people since the demobilization of the civil rights and black power movements―a discussion with great implications for the study of generational politics, racial and black politics, and social movements.
Undoubtedly the most influential black intellectual of the twentieth century and one of America’s finest historians, W.E.B. DuBois knew that the liberation of the African American people required liberal education and not vocational training. He saw education as a process of teaching certain timeless values: moderation, an avoidance of luxury, a concern for courtesy, a capacity to endure, a nurturing love for beauty. At the same time, DuBois saw education as fundamentally subversive. This was as much a function of the well-established role of education from Plato forward as the realities of the social order under which he lived. He insistently calls for great energy and initiative; for African Americans controlling their own lives and for continued experimentation and innovation, while keeping education’s fundamentally radical nature in view.
Though containing speeches written nearly one-hundred years ago, and on a subject that has seen more stormy debate and demagoguery than almost any other in recent history, The Education of Black People approaches education with a timelessness and timeliness, at once rooted in classical thought that reflects a remarkably fresh and contemporary relevance.
One of the most important African American leaders of the twentieth century and perhaps the most influential woman in the civil rights movement, Ella Baker (1903–1986) was an activist whose remarkable career spanned fifty years and touched thousands of lives. A gifted grassroots organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital behind-the-scenes work that helped power the Black freedom struggle. Making her way in predominantly male circles while maintaining relationships with a vibrant group of women, students, and activists, Baker was a national officer and key figure in the NAACP, a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime mover in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
In this definitive biography, Barbara Ransby chronicles Baker’s long and rich career, revealing her complexity, radical democratic worldview, and enduring influence on group-centered, grassroots activism. Beyond documenting an extraordinary life, Ransby paints a vivid picture of the African American fight for justice and its intersections with other progressive struggles worldwide throughout the twentieth century.
