ABOUT THIS BOOK

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, grassroots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and dissension—core aspects of movement work—mark them both. Crucially, these moments also engender aggressive, repressive, multilevel 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. The book’s contributors explore 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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

"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— -

"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— -

"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.— -

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.

Charity Clay

Christophe D. Ringer

Peter Pihos

Althea Legal-Miller

Scott N. Brooks and Aram Goudsouzian

Kishauna Soljour

David V. Mason

Mickell Carter

Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.