The Civil Rights Era

I have read a bunch of really incredible books in the last year that I gotta recommend if you're interested in learning more deeply about specific pieces of this era:

Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights & Leadership At the Grassroots by Laura Visser-Maessen

This is a biography of Bob Moses, one of the key leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) work in Mississippi. It spends a little time on his early life, but it's mainly focused on 60-64. That's when he was bringing his unique facilitation-over-dictates style to organizing everyday rural people demanding the right to vote in one of the most violent hotbeds of racism in America. In telling the story of Bob's time in Mississippi it tells the story of organizing Mississippi--from voter registration efforts to their effort to take the Democratic Party head on with an alternative institution in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. "They say that we have held a mock election to bring our delegates to Atlantic City. I say that they have held a mock election, we represent the black people of this state." Closest thing to a SNCC How-To you're gonna find.

The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement by Aldon Morris

This taught me so much about how & why the Alabama movement was able to become a national flashpoint after prior similar efforts in the South (ever heard of the Baton Rogue Bus Boycott?) had failed to do so. Morris traces the movement networks that made it possible, makes an honest assessment of the often overstated influence of MLK & the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and reveals tons of lesser known "pre-history" to the so-called "Golden Era" of the movement. If you want to understand how a movement builds that can make history, this is the one.

I've Got the Light of Freedom: Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle by Charles M. Payne

This is a broader historian's overview of the Mississippi movement, from the 30s onward, that is rich with stories of everyday heroism--the teenagers who'd heard about the passage of the Civil Rights Act & decided they were gonna go integrate a movie theater, movement elders like Amzie Moore & Ella Baker who gave sage guidance from their time leading black organizations in the 40s and 50s, and so much more besides. If you want to read a history, this is the one.

Thank you for those recommendations. The Bob Moses book is on my to-read list (as part of a larger 'no, seriously, what is actually wrong with people generally and Americans specifically, and how have people historically coped with the breathtaking depths of our collective psychic damage?' reading project of which civil rights research has been a facet). I read the first 2/3 of Taylor Branch's three-volume MLK biography this year (which is very highly recommended, and which also deemphasizes King's centrality in favor of a broader view of the movement in general), and Moses is an un-/undersung hero.

Part of what I love about that book are the glimpses you get of Bob's skepticism about his own portrayal in history. "I read in books that I was part of the opposition at that meeting. I find that to be interesting."

guys, Ida B. Wells

by the time she was 20 she had dealt with her parents dying of yellow fever, her grandmother dying of a stroke, her sister dying, and had resisted an effort to separate her remaining siblings and send them to foster families by taking a job as a teacher

at age 22 she refused to give up her seat in a first-class ladies' carriage on a train and was dragged away. she sued the railroad herself, won, the case was reversed on appeal. this was 1884!!!!!

i need to read a real bio about her. what a woman.

!

Bryant’s triumphant performance was lauded in the national media for opening the door for Black entertainers on the important Miami Beach nightclub circuit. In many ways, glamor was a velvet hammer that broke significant barriers for entertainers in the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement. “Joyce Bryant got into spaces like the Coconut Grove a decade before me,” famed jazz singer Nancy Wilson told me during our interview about the pioneering entertainer: “Without Joyce, there would have been no me.” Perhaps the most iconic of Wynn Valdes’s gowns for Bryant is the one worn for Jet magazine in their October 1, 1953, cover feature “

https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/articles/2024/03/zelda-wynn-valdes-and-joyce-bryant?fbclid=IwAR23Uwow9j6opEVEl5_VJPskYRgbZHHovydcU-trIEoqPhwe9zGIaPc-v-g

Singer Joyce Bryant and fashion designer Wynn Valdes

It's so great that GOP are reversing all the hard won rights so you can have a perpetual civil rights era just to feel topical. Or involved like.
Or not.

Very sad. In r3ecent years, I would listen to Ms. Dorie Ladner, civil rights, activist, guest on r'n'b, house music and more DJ Lance Reynolds Saturday show on WPFW. She would talk about the past (and the threats on her life in Mississippi) and the present ongoing struggle . She also talked about her fave music, daily life and more. She just died this week. An amazingly courageous and wise person. RIP

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/us/dorie-ladner-dead.html

Very sad. In r3ecent years, I would listen to Ms. Dorie Ladner, civil rights, activist, guest on r'n'b, house music and more DJ Lance Reynolds Saturday show on WPFW. She would talk about the past (and the threats on her life in Mississippi) and the present ongoing struggle . She also talked about her fave music, daily life and more. She just died this week. An amazingly courageous and wise person. RIP

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/us/dorie-ladner-dead.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/03/13/dorie-ladner-civil-rights-dead/

another obit for Dorie Ladner