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From Rights to Lives
The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle
Edited by Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.
Series: Black Lives and Liberation
Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress. They also share mass-based movement activities, policy/legislative advocacy, grass-roots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and dissension—core aspects of movement work—mark them both. Crucially, these moments also engender aggressive, repressive, multi-level responses to these assertions of Black Humanity.
From Rights to Lives critically engages the dynamic relationship between these two moments of liberatory possibility on the Black Freedom Struggle timeline. McKinney and Hamlin invite the contributors to take up what we can learn when we place these moments of struggle in dialogue with each other. They grapple with how our understanding of the postwar moment shapes our analysis of #BLM and wherein lie the discontinuities, in order to glean lessons for future moments of insurgency.
From Rights to Lives critically engages the dynamic relationship between these two moments of liberatory possibility on the Black Freedom Struggle timeline. McKinney and Hamlin invite the contributors to take up what we can learn when we place these moments of struggle in dialogue with each other. They grapple with how our understanding of the postwar moment shapes our analysis of #BLM and wherein lie the discontinuities, in order to glean lessons for future moments of insurgency.
Introduction: From Rights to Lives: History Matters
Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.
1. “Sincerely, Your Grandparents’ Hands”: Elucidating Similarities between the Trayvon Martin Generation of #BlackLivesMatter and the Emmett Till Generation of the Civil Rights Movement
Charity Clay
2. Continuity and Change: The Spirituality of Liberation in the Black Lives Matter Movement
Christophe D. Ringer
3. Good Cops?
Peter Pihos
4. “We May Have to Defend Ourselves”: Black Women and Campaigns against Police Sexual Violence during the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter Eras
Althea Legal-Miller
5. Revolts of the Black Athletes: Race, Sport, and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter
Scott N. Brooks and Aram Goudsouzian
6. The Search for Truth and Justice: A Diasporic Black Freedom Struggle
Kishauna Soljour
7. The Ambivalence of Activist Photography: July 10, 2016
David V. Mason
8. When the Cultural Revolution Comes: Anthem Making in the Era of BLM
Mickell Carter
Postscript: “Miraculous, Magnificent, and Messy”: Rights, Lives, and the Movement in Real Time
Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.
Contributor Bios
Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.
1. “Sincerely, Your Grandparents’ Hands”: Elucidating Similarities between the Trayvon Martin Generation of #BlackLivesMatter and the Emmett Till Generation of the Civil Rights Movement
Charity Clay
2. Continuity and Change: The Spirituality of Liberation in the Black Lives Matter Movement
Christophe D. Ringer
3. Good Cops?
Peter Pihos
4. “We May Have to Defend Ourselves”: Black Women and Campaigns against Police Sexual Violence during the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter Eras
Althea Legal-Miller
5. Revolts of the Black Athletes: Race, Sport, and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter
Scott N. Brooks and Aram Goudsouzian
6. The Search for Truth and Justice: A Diasporic Black Freedom Struggle
Kishauna Soljour
7. The Ambivalence of Activist Photography: July 10, 2016
David V. Mason
8. When the Cultural Revolution Comes: Anthem Making in the Era of BLM
Mickell Carter
Postscript: “Miraculous, Magnificent, and Messy”: Rights, Lives, and the Movement in Real Time
Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.
Contributor Bios
Françoise N. Hamlin is the Royce Family Associate Professor of Teaching Excellence in Africana Studies & History at Brown University. She is the author of the award-winning Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II, coeditor of the anthology These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on Citizenship and War, and editor and annotator of the republication of The Struggle of Struggles by activist Vera Pigee.
Charles W. McKinney Jr. is chair of Africana studies and associate professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina, and coeditor of An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee.
"Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr. have assembled an impressive collection of scholars that put the Civil Rights Movement and the #BlackLivesMatter Movement in conversation to tease out more nuanced and underrepresented aspects of both movements. The scholarship presented in From Rights to Lives is fresh, timely, and a necessary intervention in understanding the ever-evolving movement for Black lives and liberation."
—Regina N. Bradley, author of Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South
"Urgent and necessary, From Rights to Lives is, like the hashtag that inspired a movement, a critical tool for freedom dreaming. There are vital continuities in the cross-disciplinary conversation Hamlin and McKinney have curated here that will reshape how we talk about Black protest and activism for a long time to come."
—Scott Poulson-Bryant, author of HUNG: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America
"This timely and updated exploration of 'the long civil rights movement' is an urgently needed volume. Comparisons between facets of Black Lives Matter and the antecedent Civil Rights/Black Power movements open new areas for scholarly examination. The essays move back and forth between contemporary and earlier eras of Black activism and invite fresh thinking about the Black Freedom Struggle."
—Dennis C. Dickerson, author of Militant Mediator: Whitney M. Young Jr.
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