The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights

177 Pages·2021·8.202 MB·English

by  Thomas C. Holt

THE MOVEMENT

THE MOVEMENT
The African American Struggle
for Civil Rights
Thomas C. Holt
1
1
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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© Thomas C. Holt 2021
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Holt, Thomas C. (Thomas Cleveland), 1942– author.
Title: The movement : the African American struggle for civil rights /
Thomas C. Holt.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020035036 (print) | LCCN 2020035037 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197525791 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197525814 (epub) | ISBN 9780197525821
Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Civil rights—History—20th century. |
Civil rights movements—United States—History—20th century. |
African Americans—Social conditions—To 1964. | African Americans—
Social conditions—1964–1975. | Southern States—Race relations—History—
20th century. | United States—Race relations—History—20th century. |
United States—History—1953–1961. | United States—History—1961–1969.
Classification: LCC E185.61 .H755 2021 (print) | LCC E185.61 (ebook) |
DDC 323.1196/073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035036
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035037
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by LSC Communications, United States of America
In March 1965 thousands of black and white protesters marched from Selma to Montgomery,
Alabama, demanding an end to racial barriers to voting rights.
© 1978 Matt Herron/ Take Stock. #1676432
Dedicated
to
Carrie Lee Price Fitzgerald (1878– 1966),
who lived to see her world transformed
and
to all the Movement martyrs,
who did not

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments | ix
Introduction: Carrie’s Rebellion | 1
1. Before Montgomery | 7
2. Communities Organizing for Change: New South Cities | 29
3. Communities Organizing for Change: The New “Old South” | 51
4. Organizing in the “American Congo”: Mississippi’s Freedom
Summer and Its Aftermath | 69
5. Freedom Movements in the North | 93
6. Legacies: “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle” | 115
NOTES | 121
FURTHER READING | 135
INDEX | 139

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It may seem odd that a very short book should have incurred such a
long list of people to whom I am endebted, but most of these debts
were acquired long before this project was even conceived. Some
are owed to my maternal grandmother Carrie for the stories she
shared during idle moments on our back porch about the history
of the place we inhabited and in other more emotionally charged
moments when she silently modeled for a preadolescent boy how
one might negotiate its hostile terrain with dignity. Others are owed
to my father, whose stories about how our family’s history evolved
in that hostile place and about the different worlds he had seen
far beyond its confining and sometimes confounding boundaries
somehow enabled me to think differently about my own place in the
world. Growing up in a hostile world can make one self- destructive,
but somehow these stories delegitimized its rule and suggested that
building a very different world was possible.
All this prepared me to welcome others into my life whose in-
fluence on this book is even more direct. As I came of age, the
Danville Movement brought Avon Rollins, Matthew Jones, James
Forman, Dottie and Bob Zellner, and Ivanhoe Donaldson to town,
each of whom taught me much about the social movement they had
witnessed taking shape and to which my peers and I were drawn.
Lessons in nonviolent workshops with Ivanhoe (surely the most
ix