Civil Rights Historiography

The Civil Rights Movement is often thought to begin with a tired Rosa Parks defiantly declining to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She paid the price by going to jail. Her refusal sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which civil rights historians have in the past credited with beginning the modern civil rights movement. Others credit the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education with beginning the movement. Regardless of the event used as the starting point of the moment, everyone can agree that it is an important period in history. In the forty-five years since the modern civil rights movement, several historians have made significant contributions to the study of this era. These historians disagree with one another about many different aspects of the movement, but ultimately they all agree that it was a combination of the leadership of such figures as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, combined with the grassroots organizing done by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the support of a liberal coalition of Northern Whites that made the movement successful; furthermore, all of the authors can agree that no one—not King, Malcolm X, the SNCC, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization—possessed static views during the movement. Each leader, group and organization changed their beliefs as they experienced the struggles, successes and failures of the movement. In his book, Freedom Bound, Robert Weisbrot essentially covers the Civil Rights Movement in its entirety, beginning with the origins of the movement and culminating in the Reagan years. Weisbrot’s “central aim is to relate the civil rights movement to broader currents in American political reform.” He focuses mostly on the tentative alliance between African-Americans and white liberals, which he claims “transformed American race relations during the 1960s, [and] was a source of both power and disillusionment to civil rights advocates.” John F.

Bibliography: Norton & Company, 1990). Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press, 1981). Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York. New York University Press, 2009). American History, Vol. 81 No. 1 (June 1994), 81-118. [ 5 ]. Michael Klarman, “How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis,” Journal of American History, Vol. 81, No. 1 (June 1994), 82. [ 11 ]. David Howard-Pitney, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1950s and 1960s: A Brief History with Documents (Boston. Bedford, 2004), 17. [ 15 ]. Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard UP, 1981), 2-3. [ 20 ]. Peniel E. Joseph, “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History 96:3, (December 2009), 751. [ 25 ]. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York. New York Univeristy Press, 2009), 8.