Notes

PREFACE

1. Gary Younge, “Eduardo Galeano: ‘My Greatest Fear Is That We Are All Suffering from Amnesia,” Guardian, July 23, 2013.

2. James Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers,” originally published in the Saturday Review, December 21, 1963.

3. Sam Wineburg and Chauncey Monte-Sano, “‘Famous Americans’: The Changing Pantheon of American Heroes,” Journal of American History 94 (Spring 2008): 1190.

4. Sheldon Appleton, “Martin Luther King in Life . . . and Memory,” Public Perspective (February/March 1995): 12.

5. G. Russell Seay Jr., “A Prophet with Honor?,” in The Domestication of Martin Luther King Jr.: Clarence B. Jones, Right-Wing Conservatism, and the Manipulation of the King Legacy, ed. Lewis Baldwin and Rufus Burrow Jr. (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), 244–47.

6. Civil rights tourism has flourished, often in the South right alongside of Confederate and Civil War tourism. At least fifteen museums have opened since 1990 commemorating civil rights activism. “Introduction” and Glenn Eskew, “New Ideology of Tolerance,” in The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, ed. Renee Romano and Leigh Raiford (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008).

7. See Ian Haney Lopez’s Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) for differences and overlap between postracial and color-blind ideologies.

8. James Oliver Horton, “Slavery in American History: An Uncomfortable National Dialogue,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American History, ed. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 37.

9. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 116.

10. Ibid., 2.

11. Ibid., 152.

12. For instance, in recent debates about Confederate statue removal, there’s finally been discussion of how many of these statues were erected during the civil rights movement as resistance to Black freedom movements. See “Whose Heritage: Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” Southern Poverty Law Center, April 21, 2016.

13. Here I refer to both the transatlantic slave trade, and Native American genocide and settler colonialism.

14. Eskew, “New Ideology of Tolerance,” 29.

15. When asked at the 2008 Democratic National Convention where King would be if he were present, Obama answered honestly—that King would likely be outside the convention center protesting.

16. “Obama, Clinton Speeches in Selma, Alabama,” CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, transcripts, March 4, 2007.

17. White House, “Remarks by the President at the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Marches,” news release, March 7, 2015.

18. The set included Stride Toward Freedom (1958), The Measure of a Man (1959), Strength to Love (1963), Why We Can’t Wait (1964), and Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967).

19. Michelle Alexander brought this framing to national use in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Era of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).

20. Barbara Reynolds, “I Was a Civil Rights Activist in the 1960s. But It’s Hard for Me to Get Behind Black Lives Matter,” Washington Post, August 24, 2015.

21. Jennie Jarvie, “An Uneasy Standoff Between Police and Protesters as Black Lives Matter Returns to the Streets,” Los Angeles Times, July 9, 2016.

22. See Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film before World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

23. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 18–19. Emphasis in original.

24. Donald A. Yerxa, “Postwar: An Interview with Tony Judt,” Historically Speaking 7 (January/February 2006), http://www.bu.edu/historic/hs/judt.html.

25. The first African American honored was a Washington, DC, policeman shot in the line of duty. Indeed, the only two nonpolitical officials before Parks who had lain in honor were policemen. Martin Luther King Jr. was not granted such an honor; J. Edgar Hoover was.

26. Cornel West has similarly referred to the “Santa Clausification” of Martin Luther King Jr. See “Stop the ‘Santa Claus-ification’ of Martin Luther King, Pleads Dr. Cornel West,” Rollingout.com, January 18, 2010.

27. Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), xxv.

28. Nathan Huggins, “The Deforming Mirror of Truth: Slavery and the Master Narrative of American History,” Radical History Review 49 (Winter 1991).

29. This fits with a larger trend in civil rights historiography on the politics of memory. From Organization of American Historians president Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s much-cited article “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005), to Romano and Raiford’s The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, scholars have examined the growing ascendancy of the civil rights movement in American memory. They have analyzed civil rights legacies and Barack Obama’s presidency, including Thomas Sugrue’s Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), Peniel Joseph’s Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama (New York: BasicCivitas, 2010), and Fredrick Harris’s The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

30. See Eric Foner’s masterwork, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, updated ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014); David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) for critiques of the ways the story of Reconstruction came to be remembered and told.

31. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935; New York: Free Press, 1998), 714.

32. Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013); Matthew Delmont and Jeanne Theoharis, “Rethinking Boston’s Busing Crisis,” Special Issue Introduction, Journal of Urban History 43 no. 2 (March 2017); Jeanne Theoharis, “Accidental Matriarchs and Beautiful Helpmates: Gender and the Memorialization of the Civil Rights Movement,” in Local Studies, a National Movement, ed. Emilye Crosby (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Jeanne Theoharis ‘“W-A-L-K-O-U-T!’: High School Students and the Development of Black Power in Los Angeles, 1967-1969,” in Neighborhood Rebels: Local Black Power Activism, ed. Peniel Joseph (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Jeanne Theoharis, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Southern Exceptionalism and the Civil Rights Movement Outside of the South,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Matthew Lassiter and Joe Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Jeanne Theoharis, “Alabama on Avalon’: Rethinking the Watts Uprising and the Character of Black Protest in Los Angeles,” in The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era, ed. Peniel Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006).

33. On the structures of racial inequity built in the twentieth century: Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); and Craig Wilder, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). On the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern struggle: John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Akinyele Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2014), Hasan Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Wesley Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Emilye Crosby, A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Emilye Crosby, ed., Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Faith Holsaert et al., Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Katherine Charron, Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). On the Black freedom movement outside the South: Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodward, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Clarence Taylor, Civil Rights in New York City (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011); Lassiter and Crespino, eds., The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism; Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Heather Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Angela Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007); Suzanne Smith, Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Matthew F. Delmont, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016); Mark Speltz, North of Dixie: Civil Rights Photography Beyond the South (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2016). On Black radicalism and Black Power: Dayo Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Joseph, ed., The Black Power Movement; Joseph, ed., Neighborhood Rebels; Rhonda Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (New York: Routledge, 2015); Donna Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Robyn Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Jakobi Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Brian Purnell, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013). On welfare rights and antipoverty organizing: Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Premilla Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2004); Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); Felicia Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Lisa Levenstein, A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

34. As historian Tracy K’Meyer observes, “For a generation historians have been writing a different story of the Black freedom struggle, one that downplays charismatic leadership, illuminates divisions within the Black community and emphasizes the long, hard, mundane work of organizing that actually brought about change. So why hasn’t this new story affected not only the broader politics [or] . . . even many historians and scholars’ ideas about how to achieve racial justice?” Tracy K’Meyer, “The Stories We Tell,” Journal of Civil and Human Rights (Spring/Summer 2016).

35. “It’s not your grandfather’s civil rights movement” is also being used by some activists to differentiate the patriarchal notions of leadership at play in some parts of the civil rights movement from the more leader-full BLM movement with Black queer women at the center. See “Not Your Grandfather’s Black Freedom Movement: An Interview with BYP100’s Charlene Carruthers,” In These Times, February 8, 2016.

INTRODUCTION: THE POLITICAL USES AND MISUSES OF CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY AND MEMORIALIZATION IN THE PRESENT

1. Appleton, “Martin Luther King in Life . . . and Memory,” 12.

2. As quoted in Seay, “A Prophet with Honor?,” 242.

3. Ibid., 243–44.

4. Francis X. Clines, “Reagan’s Doubts on Dr. King’s Legacy Disclosed,” New York Times, October 22, 1983.

5. As quoted in Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (New York: Crown, 2016), 105.

6. Justin Gomer, “Race and Civil Rights Dramas in Hollywood,” Black Perspectives (blog), March 24, 2017, http://www.aaihs.org/race-and-civil-rights-dramas-in-hollywood/.

7. Glaude, Democracy in Black, 109.

8. “Celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Still Faces Pushback,” New York Times, January 16, 2017.

9. Baldwin and Burrow, The Domestication of Martin Luther King, xix–xxi.

10. Ibid., xix.

11. In 1986, Congress passed Public Law 99–244, designating February 1986 as “National Black (Afro-American) History Month” and noting “the beginning of the sixtieth annual public and private salute to Black History as African American History Month,” Law Library of Congress, July 31, 2015. By the 1930s, according to former Association for the Study of African American Life and History president Daryl Michael Scott, Woodson understood the dangers of the ways that the observance could commodify or trivialize Black history, warning of “the intellectual charlatans, black and white, popping up everywhere seeking to take advantage of the public interest in black history,” “Origins of Black History Month,” Association for the Study of African American Life and History, https://asalh.org/about-us/origins-of-black-history-month/.

12. Christopher Emdin, “For the Folks Who Killed Black History Month . . . and the Rest of Y’all Too,” Beacon Broadside (blog), February 17, 2016.

13. President Bush in a 2010 interview: “I faced a lot of criticism as president . . . that I lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all-time low.” “‘George Bush Doesn’t Care about Black People’: Reflections on Kanye West’s Criticism 10 Years After,” Democracy Now!, August 28, 2015.

14. Transcript of President Bush’s remarks can be found at CNN Live Today, CNN.com, December 1, 2005.

15. “Full Text of Bush’s NAACP Speech,” Denver Post, July 20, 2006.

16. Joseph, Dark Days, Bright Nights, 211.

17. At his first inauguration, President Obama signed a program to Congressman John Lewis: “Because of you, John. Barack Obama.”

18. Dianne Feinstein, “Opening Welcome Remarks at the 2009 Inauguration,” January 20, 2009.

19. “Remarks by the President at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Dedication,” news release, October 16, 2011.

20. Philip Kennicott, “Revisiting King’s Metaphor About a Nation’s Debt,” Washington Post, August 24, 2011.

21. A bust of Martin Luther King Jr., commissioned by Congress in 1982 and unveiled in 1986, appears in the Capitol Rotunda.

22. In contrast, in the Capitol Rotunda, a statue commemorating three suffragists—Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—known now as “The Portrait Monument”—is rendered unfinished to denote the work ahead in the struggle for women’s rights. A gift from the National Women’s Party, the statue was commemorated in 1921 and promptly moved out of sight to the Capitol Crypt (and its feminist inscription “Woman, first denied a soul, then called mindless, now arisen, declared herself an entity to be reckoned” scraped off). James Brooke, “3 Suffragists (in Marble) to Move Up to the Capitol,” New York Times, September 27, 1996.

23. The Justice Department explained: “As enacted in 1965, the first element in the formula was whether, on November 1, 1964, the state or a political subdivision of the state maintained a ‘test or device’ restricting the opportunity to register and vote . . . includ[ing] such requirements as the applicant being able to pass a literacy test, establish that he or she had good moral character, or have another registered voter vouch for his or her qualifications. The second element . . . [was if] less than 50 percent of persons of voting age were registered to vote on November 1, 1964, or that less than 50 percent of persons of voting age voted in the presidential election of November 1964. This resulted in the following states becoming, in their entirety, ‘covered jurisdictions’: Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia. In addition, certain political subdivisions (usually counties) in four other states (Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, and North Carolina) were covered. . . . In 1970, Congress . . . referenced November 1968 as the relevant date for the maintenance of a test or device and the levels of voter registration and electoral participation. This addition to the formula resulted in the partial coverage of ten states, including Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Wyoming. Half of these states (Connecticut, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, and Wyoming) filed successful ‘bailout’ lawsuits. In 1975, the Act’s special provisions . . . were broadened to address voting discrimination against members of ‘language minority groups,’ which were defined as persons who are American Indian, Asian American, Alaskan Natives or of Spanish heritage. . . . includ[ing] the practice of providing any election information, including ballots, only in English in states or political subdivisions where members of a single language minority constituted more than five percent of the citizens of voting age. This third prong of the coverage formula had the effect of covering Alaska, Arizona, and Texas in their entirety, and parts of California, Florida, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, and South Dakota.” In 1982, and then again in 2006, it was renewed for twenty-five years, but the coverage formula was not changed.

24. Shelby County v. Holder, 570 US, http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12–96_6k47.pdf.

25. Gary Younge, The Speech: The Story Behind Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Dream (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013).

26. Eddie Glaude observes the speech framed racial matters “as a momentary stumble on our way to a more perfect union.” Glaude, Democracy in Black, 156.

27. Department of Justice, Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, report, March 4, 2015, 98.

28. The White House also tweeted it, saying, “Today is the 57th Anniversary of the day Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Pic: President Obama on Rosa Parks bus”—thus ensuring that everyone knew this was the Rosa Parks bus.

29. Juana Summers, “Hillary Clinton’s Logo Accidentally Puts Rosa Parks in the Back of the Bus,” Mashable, December 1, 2015.

30. Only four of the eighty that year went to Black people, and the vast majority over the years have gone to white people. The photo had been cropped because it also included rabid social conservative Anita Bryant, Joe DiMaggio, and Victor Borge. Christina Wilkie, “No, Donald Trump Did Not Win a Medal from the NAACP,” Huffington Post, October 23, 2016.

31. Adam Shaw, “Sessions Well-Documented Praise of Rosa Parks Belies Racist Claim,” Fox News Politics, November 18, 2016. Sessions had called for Parks to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999 and attached an amendment to an appropriations bill that gave $1 million to Alabama for the Troy University Montgomery Campus Rosa Parks Library and Museum. This, many commentators alleged, demonstrated that Sessions was not a racist.

32. Snapchat also had filters for other women pioneers like Frida Kahlo and Marie Curie. Thanks to Olivia Pearson for alerting me to this.

33. Rosa Parks’s actions are regularly compared with present-day acts of opposition. In 2000, country singer Larry Gatlin compared Katherine Harris (Florida’s then secretary of state, who helped secure George W. Bush’s election) to Rosa Parks. Rancher Cliven Bundy compared himself to Parks when he refused to pay the federal government grazing fees for using federal lands: “I am doing the same thing Rosa Parks did—I am standing up against bad laws which dehumanize us and destroy our freedom.”

34. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” Atlantic, September 2012.

35. Following public outcry upon George Zimmerman’s acquittal in killing Trayvon Martin, President Obama weighed in on the understandability of Black anger and the fact of American progress: “It doesn’t mean that racism is eliminated. But you know, when I talk to Malia and Sasha and I listen to their friends and I see them interact, they’re better than we are . . . on these issues. And that’s true in every community that I’ve visited all across the country.”

36. David A. Graham, “Donald Trump’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” Atlantic, February 1, 2017.

37. Justin Gomer and Christopher Petrella, “Reagan Used MLK Day to Undermine Racial Justice,” Boston Review, January 15, 2017.

38. Yamiche Alcindor, “In Trump’s Feud with John Lewis, Blacks Perceive a Callous Rival,” New York Times, January 15, 2017.

39. Ari Berman, “The GOP’s Attack on Voting Rights Was the Most Under-Covered Story of 2016,” Nation, November 9, 2016.

40. White House, “Remarks by the President at Howard University Commencement Ceremony,” news release, May 7, 2016, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/05/07/remarks-president-howard-university-commencement-ceremony.

41. See Lee’s For Freedom’s Sake.

42. James Forman, Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 44. “Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks, African American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it” (11).

43. Khalil Gibran Muhammad, “Power and Punishment: Two New Books About Race and Crime,” New York Times, April 14, 2017.

44. Jabari Asim, “Did Cosby Cross the Line?,” Washington Post, May 24, 2004.

45. “Dr. Bill Cosby Speaks at the 50th Anniversary Commemoration of the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court Decision,” Eightcitiesmap.com, http://www.eightcitiesmap.com/transcript_bc.htm.

46. Harris, Price of the Ticket, 100–36.

47. Quoted in ibid., 131.

48. Thomas J. Sugrue, “Stories and Legends,” Nation, June 7, 2010.

49. Charles Cobb, This Nonviolent Stuff Will Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 247.

50. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (March 2005): 1233–35.

51. Romano and Raiford, The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory; Renee Romano, Racial Reckoning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Lassiter and Crespino, The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism; Joseph, The Black Power Movement; Clarence Lang, Black America in the Shadow of the 1960s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015); Baldwin and Burrow, The Domestication of Martin Luther King Jr.; Herbert Kohl and Cynthia Stokes Brown, She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks (New York: New Press, 2007).

52. Reynolds, “I Was a Civil Rights Activist in the 1960s.”

53. Ben Mathis-Lilley, “The Generational Divide Between Ferguson Protesters,” Slate, October 13, 2014.

54. Brianna Ehley, “Huckabee: MLK Would Be ‘Appalled’ by Black Lives Matter Movement,” Politico, August 19, 2010.

55. “Oprah Winfrey’s Comments About Recent Protests and Ferguson Spark Controversy,” People, January 1, 2005.

56. Lauren Victoria Burke, “Everyone Has So Much Grand Advice for #BlackLivesMatter, John Lewis Comments,” Politic365, September 30, 2015.

57. Darren Sands, “Rep. John Lewis: Black Lives Matter Protestors Should Respect Everyone’s Right to Be Heard,” BuzzFeed News, October 30, 2015.

58. Jennie Jarvie, “Why the Gap Between Old and New Black Civil Rights Activists Is Widening,” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2016. According to the article, King biographer David Garrow supported older guard trepidation about Black Lives Matter: “‘The vast majority of protesters don’t have any specific agenda that they’re arguing for.’ . . . Nor, he added, do they seem to know much about civil rights history.”

59. Isaac Singleton, “Dispatch from the Clock Tower,” University News, St. Louis University, October 31, 2014.

60. Peggy McGlone, “‘This Ain’t Yo Mama’s Civil Rights Movement’ T-shirt from Ferguson Donated to Smithsonian Museum,” Washington Post, March 1, 2016.

61. Megan Lasher, “Read the Full Transcript of Jesse Williams’ Powerful Speech on Race at the BET Awards,” Time, June 27, 2016.

62. Cambria Roth, “Harry Belafonte on Activism, Unrest, and the Importance of Making People Squirm,” Portside, October 8, 2015.

63. I am grateful for the research of Terron Davis, who is beginning to document this across the country.

64. Vanessa Williams, “SNCC Defends Black Lives Matter Movement, Which Found a More Receptive Audience at the DNC,” Washington Post, July 29, 2016.

65. Vann Newkirk II, “I’m a Black Lives Matter Activist. Here’s What People Get Wrong About Black Lives Matter,” Vox, December 8, 2015.

66. Parks speech, Box 18, Folder 9, Rosa Parks Collection (RPC), Library of Congress.

CHAPTER ONE: THE LONG MOVEMENT OUTSIDE THE SOUTH

1. Adina Back was one of my first colleague-friends who sought to integrate Northern struggles into our understanding of the era. Because of her untimely death, she did not complete her book, though her work “Exposing the ‘Whole Segregation Myth’: The Harlem Nine and New York City’s School Desegregation Battles” appears in my coedited collection, Freedom North, and another chapter, “‘Parent Power’: Evelina Antonetty, the United Bronx Parents, and the War on Poverty,” in Annelise Orleck’s The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). This chapter draws on those chapters, her dissertation, our conversations, and draft chapters for the book she was working on, in particular an interview she did with Mae Mallory in 2000. Chapters in author’s possession.

2. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness,” address at the Golden Anniversary Conference of the National Urban League, September 6, 1960.

3. Fannie Lou Hamer, “The Special Plight and the Role of Black Women,” in Let Nobody Turn Us Around: An African American Anthology, ed. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).

4. There has been a raft of books and articles in the past fifteen years, including works by Komozi Woodard and myself, Clarence Taylor, Adina Back, Thomas Sugrue, Craig Wilder, Matthew Countryman, Brian Purnell, Patrick Jones, Martha Biondi, Khalil Muhammad, Nishani Frazier, Donna Murch, Josh Sides, Angela Dillard, Suzanne Smith, Rhonda Williams, Lisa Levenstein, Matthew Delmont, Karen Miller, Heather Thompson, Wendell Pritchett, Jack Dougherty, Shannon King, LaShawn Harris, Mark Speltz, and Kenneth Jolly.

5. See Matthew Lassiter’s critique of the de facto/de jure binary “De Facto/De Jure: The Long Shadow of a National Myth” in Lassiter and Crespino, The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism. He writes, “The label of de facto segregation . . . is so wrapped in artificial binaries between South and North . . . that historians should discard it as an analytical and descriptive category and evaluate it instead as a cultural and political construct” (28).

6. See Clarence Taylor’s important biography of Galamison, Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City’s Schools (New York: Lexington Books, 2001).

7. Wilder, A Covenant with Color, 175–217.

8. Ibid. Thanks to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for this citation in the 1938 Underwriters Manual: “If children are living in an area (otherwise favorable) are compelled to attend schools where a majority or a considerable number of the pupils represent a far lower level of society or an incompatible racial element, the neighborhood under consideration will prove far less stable and desirable than if this condition did not exist.”

9. Jonna Perrillo, Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions and Race in the Battle for School Equity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 25.

10. Adina Back, “School Segregation: Naming a Northern Problem,” unpublished chapter in author’s possession.

11. See also Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), for more detailed discussion of Baker’s work with the NAACP nationally and in New York City.

12. See Adina Back dissertation, “Exposing the ‘Whole Segregation Myth,’” in Freedom North, and Adina Back, “School Segregation: Naming a Northern Problem,” and “Taking School Segregation to the Courts,” unpublished chapters in author’s possession. See also Ransby’s Ella Baker.

13. Preliminary statement of the Board of Education Resolution of Action, December 23, 1954, Board of Education Papers, as quoted in Back, “School Segregation: Naming a Northern Problem.”

14. Ellen Cantarow and Susan Gushee, “Ella Baker: Organizing for Civil Rights,” in Moving the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change, ed. Ellen Cantarow (New York: Feminist Press, 1980), 68.

15. As quoted in Back, “School Segregation: Naming a Northern Problem.”

16. Abraham Lederman, “Pulse of the Public: Union Head Takes Issue with Supt. Jansen,” Amsterdam News, July 3, 1954.

17. William Jansen, letter to the editor, Amsterdam News, November 23, 1954.

18. School leaders and local media referred to “problem schools” with large concentrations of Black students as “X” schools.

19. Paul Zuber, “The De-facto Segregation Hoax,” Liberator 3, no. 8 (August 1963), as quoted in Purnell, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings, 171.

20. Lassiter and Crespino, The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, 27.

21. Researchers identified a predominantly “continental white school” as an elementary or junior high school where Black and Puerto Rican students constituted less than 10 percent of the total population, labeling these schools “Group Y.” They characterized a predominantly Black and Puerto Rican elementary school as one in which the Black and Puerto Rican population was 90 percent of the student body, and a Black and Puerto Rican junior high school was one in which the Black and Puerto Rican student body was 85 percent or more of the student body, and labeled these schools “Group X.”

22. PEA Report, 17, as cited by Back, “School Segregation: Naming a Northern Problem.”

23. Ella Baker, interview by Sue Thrasher and Casey Hayden, April 19, 1977, interview 4007, Southern Oral History Program Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 48–49. See also Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 96.

24. Edward Hausner, “Parents Picket City Hall Over Delay in Integration; Parents Demand Integration Here,” New York Times, September 20, 1957.

25. Testimony by Mallory (speaker #38) from the PS #10 PTA at the Board of Education Commission on Integration Public Hearing, January 17, 1957, as quoted in Back, “School Segregation: Naming a Northern Problem.”

26. As quoted in Adina Back, “Taking School Segregation to the Courts,” unpublished chapter in author’s possession. Back interviewed Mallory in 2000 for her book centering on the work of five pioneering Black and Puerto Rican New York activists: Ella Baker, Elaine Bibuld, Mae Mallory, Evelina Antonetty, and Antonia Pantoja.

27. Ibid.

28. “Letters from Prison,” Monroe Defense Committee, circa 1962, quoted in Jeanette Merrill and Rosemary Neidenberg, “Mae Mallory: Unforgettable Freedom Fighter Promoted Self-Defense,” Workers World, February 26, 2009.

29. Ibid.

30. Mae Mallory, interview by Malaika Lumumba, February 27, 1970, Ralph Bunche Oral History Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC, as quoted in Back, “Taking School Segregation to the Courts.”

31. See Adina Back “Exposing the Whole Segregation Myth,” in Freedom North.

32. Back, “Taking School Segregation to the Courts.”

33. Back, “Exposing the Whole Segregation Myth,” 65.

34. Ibid., 80–81.

35. Ashley Farmer, “Mae Mallory: Forgotten Black Power Intellectual,” Black Perspectives (blog), June 3, 2016, http://www.aaihs.org/mae-mallory-forgotten-black-power-intellectual/, and e-mail. FBI files in author’s possession.

36. Quoted in Sugrue, Sweet Land, 193.

37. Joan Cook, “Paul B. Zuber Is Dead at Age 60: Fought Segregated Schools,” New York Times, March 10, 1987.

38. Quoted in Sugrue, Sweet Land, 190.

39. Jennifer de Forest, “The 1958 Harlem School Boycott: Parental Activism and the Struggle for Educational Equity in New York City,” Urban Review 40, no. 1 (March 2008), 37.

40. Quoted in Wilder, A Covenant with Color, 221.

41. Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door.

42. Milton Galamison interview by Robert Penn Warren, June 17, 1964, Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro: An Archival Collection, Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, http://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu/interview/milton-galamison.

43. Taylor, Civil Rights in New York City, 104.

44. Quoted in Back, “Exposing the Whole Segregation Myth,” 71.

45. Ibid., 68.

46. See Delmont, Why Busing Failed, for further evidence and analysis.

47. Tahi Mottl, “Social Conflict and Social Movements: An Exploratory Study of the Black Community of Boston Attempting to Change the Boston Public Schools,” PhD diss., Brandeis University, 1976, 147.

48. New York Age, February 9, 1952, quoted in Back, “Exposing the Whole Segregation Myth.”

49. Clarence Taylor, Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City Teachers Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

50. Matthew Delmont, “Jim Crow Must Go,” Salon, February 3, 2016.

51. Leonard Buder, “Board to Limit Boycott Penalty,” New York Times, February 22, 1964.

52. Fred Powledge, “More Than 10,000 March in Protest on School Pairing,” New York Times, March 13, 1964.

53. Delmont, Why Busing Failed, chapt. 1.

54. Ibid., 49–52.

55. Quoted in Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 50.

56. Matthew Delmont, “When Black Voters Exited Left,” Atlantic, March 31, 2016.

57. Gary Orfield, The Reconstruction of Southern Education: The Schools and the 1964 Civil Rights Act (New York: Wiley, 1969), 151–207.

58. John Kucsera and Gary Orfield, New York State’s Extreme School Segregation: Inequality, Inaction, and a Damaged Future, Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles, March 26, 2014.

59. Renee Graham, “Yes, Boston You Are Racist,” Boston Globe, March 29, 2017.

60. Ruth Batson interview, Civil Rights Documentation Project, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC, 3.

61. Ruth Batson, “Statement to the Boston School Committee,” in The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle, 1954–1990, ed. Clayborne Carson et al. (New York: Penguin, 1991), 598.

62. Ruth Hill, interview by Ellen Jackson, Black Women’s Oral History Project, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

63. Alan Lupo, Liberty’s Chosen Home: The Politics of Violence in Boston (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), 142–43.

64. Ruth Batson, “Presentation on Mental Health and Desegregation,” School Desegregation Conference, November 1, 1978, Box 1, Ruth Batson Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

65. Mel King, Chain of Change: Struggles for Black Community Development (Boston: South End Press, 1981), 33.

66. Batson, “Statement to the Boston School Committee,” 597–98.

67. Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (New York: Bantam, 1991), 589.

68. J. Michael Ross and William M. Berg, “I Respectfully Disagree with the Judge’s Order”: The Boston School Desegregation Controversy (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981), 49.

69. Ruth Batson, A Chronology of the Educational Movement in Boston, manuscript in Ruth Batson’s Papers 2001-M194, Box 1, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University; Hampton and Fayer, Voices of Freedom, 590–91.

70. Batson, Chronology, 48.

71. Ibid., 144.

72. Ibid., 116.

73. “Boston: ‘I am a symbol of resistance’—Hicks,” New York Times, November 5, 1967; Emmett Buell, School Desegregation and Defended Neighborhoods (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1982), 64–65.

74. Batson, Chronology.

75. Ibid., addendum 221a.

76. Ibid., 222.

77. Gerald Gill, “Struggling Yet ‘In Freedom’s Birthplace’: The Civil Rights Movement in Boston, 1955–1965,” unpublished paper courtesy of Lyda Peters, 21.

78. See Tess Bundy, “‘Revolutions Happen Through Young People!’: The Black Student Movement in the Boston Public Schools, 1968–1971,” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 2 (March 1, 2017).

79. Tatiana Cruz, “‘We Took ’Em On’: The Latino Movement for Justice, 1965–1980,” Journal of Urban History 43, no. 2 (March 1, 2017).

80. Robert Dentler and Marvin Scott, Schools on Trial: An Inside Account of the Boston Desegregation Case (Cambridge, MA: ABT Books, 1981), 5.

81. Ibid., 5, 16, 28.

82. George Metcalf, From Little Rock to Boston: The History of School Desegregation (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983), 201.

83. “Southie Fights On,” Time, September 23, 1974.

84. Garrity’s meticulous decision ran 152 pages, withstood numerous appeals, and was given a bar association award the next year. Dentler and Scott, Schools on Trial, 4.

85. Ruth Batson, interview by author, January 16, 1991.

86. “Boston: Echoes of Little Rock,” Newsweek, September 23, 1974.

87. King, Chain of Change, 163.

88. Gerald Ford, news conference transcript, October 9, 1974.

89. Buell, School Desegregation and Defended Neighborhoods, 16. White had made similar comments in a press release that came out before school started.

90. Ronald Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), xi.

91. Most of these earlier historical works on Boston sought to contextualize white resistance to “busing” as a class-based ethnic struggle and largely ignored Black and Latino organizing in the city. These include J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985); Lupo, Liberty’s Chosen Home; Metcalf, From Little Rock to Boston; and Formisano, Boston Against Busing.

92. “Of Thee I Read,” New York Times, August 4, 2016.

93. San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 35 (1973).

94. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 782 (1974).

95. Kucsera and Orfield, New York State’s Extreme School Segregation.

96. Edwin Rios, “More than One in Three Black Students in the South Attend an Intensely Segregated School,” Mother Jones, May 26, 2017.

97. “Top Ten Most Segregated Cities in the US,” Atlanta Black Star, March 14, 2014.

CHAPTER TWO: REVISITING THE UPRISINGS OF THE 1960S AND THE LONG HISTORY OF INJUSTICE AND STRUGGLE THAT PRECEDED THEM

1. Robert Coles, “James Baldwin Back Home,” New York Times, July 31, 1977.

2. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond the Los Angeles Riots: Next Stop: the North,” Saturday Review, November 13, 1965, 33–35, 105.

3. Ibid.

4. King, “The Rising Tide of Racial Consciousness.”

5. “Martin Luther King’s Address to the Mass. State Legislature” Bay State Banner, January 20, 2014.

6. Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt: The Early Years (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 74.

7. Marnesba Tackett, interview by Michael Balter, 1988, Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Special Collections, 75.

8. Ibid., 80.

9. John Caughey, To Kill a Child’s Spirit (Itasca, IL: Peacock Publishers, 1973), 15–16.

10. John and LaRee Caughey, School Segregation on Our Doorstep: The Los Angeles Story (Los Angeles: Quail Books, 1966), 10.

11. Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 228.

12. “‘Happy Slave’ View in Textbooks Scored,” California Eagle, November 15, 1962.

13. Tackett interview; “Greatest Freedom Rally Here Nets Heroes Over $75,000” Los Angeles Sentinel, May 30, 1963.

14. Tackett interview, 128–29.

15. Sides, L.A. City Limits, 163; Tackett interview, 106–7.

16. Caughey, To Kill a Child’s Spirit, 16.

17. Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Equal Education Opportunity, September 12, 1963, Box 164, John Caughey Papers, Department of Special Collections, UCLA.

18. “Los Angeles Choice: End Segregation or Face Mass Action,” California Eagle, June 13, 1963.

19. “Baldwin Tells L.A. Bitter Facts on Bias,” California Eagle, May 16, 1963.

20. “USC Dean Won’t Let Farmer Speak” California Eagle, November 7, 1963.

21. Tackett interview.

22. “School Board Plan ‘Gives Us Nothing’” California Eagle, December 5, 1963.

23. NAACP Branch Files, Reel 4.

24. “Muslim Accuses Officer,” Long Beach Independent, May 5, 1962.

25. Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Penguin, 2011).

26. According to Marable, “Malcolm told Mosque No. 7’s Fruit of Islam that the time had come for retribution . . . and he began to recruit members for an assassination team to target LAPD officers. But the Messenger denied him. ‘Brother, you don’t go to war over a provocation.’ . . . He ordered the entire FOI to stand down. Malcolm was stunned; he acquiesced, but with bitter disappointment.” Marable, Malcolm X, 207–10.

27. Roy Wilkins to Claude Hudson, September 12, 1962, Papers of the NAACP, Selected Branch Files, Part 27, Series D: The West, 1956–1965, Reel 4.

28. Karl Evanzz, The Judas Factor: The Plot to Kill Malcolm X (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

29. Mandalit Del Barco, “Critics Decry Naming of LAPD Building for Ex-Chief,” NPR, April 24, 2009.

30. “Yorty Calls Racial Situation Tense, Asks Federal Help,” Los Angeles Times, 1962.

31. “NAACP Head Blasts Report on Brutality,” California Eagle, January 9, 1964.

32. “Housing Foes Picket King, CRB Banquet,” California Eagle, February 20, 1964.

33. “Hate Picket Thank God for Chief Parker,” California Eagle, May 7, 1964.

34. Kurt Schuparra, Triumph of the Right: The Rise of the California Conservative Movement (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 105.

35. King, “Beyond the Los Angeles Riots.”

36. The Supreme Court declared the proposition unconstitutional in 1967.

37. Celes King, “Black Leadership in Los Angeles,” interview by Bruce Tyler and Robin Kelley, 1988, Oral History Program, Department of Special Collections, University Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

38. Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 300.

39. Kirse Granat May, Golden State, Golden Youth: The California Image in Popular Culture, 1955-1966 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 160. Mayor Sam Yorty had also recently testified to the US Civil Rights Commission that “we have the best race relations in our city of any large city in the United States,” Sides, L.A City Limits, 169.

40. Peniel Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 111.

41. Sides, L.A. City Limits, 175; Celes King, “Black Leadership in Los Angeles.”

42. Horne, Fire This Time, 99.

43. T. M. Tomlinson and David O. Sears, Los Angeles Riot Study: Negro Attitudes Toward the Riot, Report MR-97 (UCLA Institute of Government and Public Affairs, 1967).

44. Alfred Ligon, interview by Ranford Hopkins, 1988, Oral History Program, Department of Special Collections, University Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

45. The interim Kerner Report’s staff summary of 1,500 pages of data and testimony was ruled too controversial (historians Lerone Bennett and Benjamin Quarles worked on the project). When the White House got its hands on the draft, the budget was cut and most of the staff terminated. Mark Krasovic, The Newark Frontier: Community Action in the Great Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 140–43.

46. “Detroiters Poised for Bias March,” Detroit News, June 23, 1963.

47. David Brinkley, Rosa Parks: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2000), 67.

48. Rosa Parks, Civil Rights Documentation Project, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC, 26.

49. Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989).

50. Smith, Dancing in the Street, 34–35.

51. Hampton, Voices of Freedom, 374.

52. General Baker, author interview, October 21, 2009.

53. Smith, Dancing in the Street, 37–40.

54. Ibid., 52; Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 126.

55. Fine, Violence in the Model City, 106.

56. Angela D. Dillard, Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 257; Freedom Now! Newsletter, Folder 2–8, Rosa Parks Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University. Cleage would later change his name to Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman; Richard and Milton Henry would change their names to Imari and Gaidi Obadele.

57. Dillard, Faith in the City, 267.

58. Ibid., 252; Al Cleage, “Nuff to Make You Stop and Think,” Illustrated News, July 22, 1963.

59. Dillard, Faith in the City, 267.

60. “Summary Statement,” December 14-15, 1960, Box III: C65, Folder 5, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress.

61. “Police Gulf Grows” Freedom Now!, October 14, 1964.

62. May 15, 1963, flyer, http://projects.lib.wayne.edu/12thstreetdetroit/exhibits/show/beforeunrest/panel6.

63. Johnson, Race and Remembrance, 56.

64. Elaine Latzman Moon, Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes: An Oral History of Detroit’s African American Community, 1918-1967 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 381.

65. “Youths on the Street Hate, Blame Police,” Michigan Chronicle, August 20, 1966.

66. Nancy Milio, 9226 Kercheval: The Store that Did Not Burn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971), 105.

67. Arthur L. Johnson, Race and Remembrance: A Memoir (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008), 57.

68. In 1966, students walked out of Northern High School protesting the lack of college classes and qualified teachers and called for the removal of the principal and security officer.

69. Hampton, Voices of Freedom, 374.

70. Frank Joyce, “The 1967 Riot or Rebellion?,” Detroit Free Press, July 23, 2016.

71. “Youths on the Street Hate, Blame Police.”

72. Hampton, Voices of Freedom, 391.

73. Smith, Dancing in the Street, 197.

74. “The Administration of Justice in the Wake of the Detroit Civil Disorder of July 1967,” Michigan Law Review 66, no. 7 (May 1968): 1549.

75. Say Burgin “‘The Shame of Our Whole Judicial System’: George Crockett Jr., the New Bethel Shoot-In and the Nation’s Jim Crow Judiciary,” in The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North, ed. Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming).

76. As cited by George Crockett, “Recorder’s Court and the 1967 Civil Disturbance,” Journal of Urban Law 45 (Spring/Summer 1968): 841–47.

77. Ibid., 844, 847.

78. George Crockett, “The Role of a Black Judge,” Journal of Public Law 20 (1971): 394.

79. Earl Selby and Miriam Selby, Odyssey: Journey Through Black America (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971), 66.

80. Ibid.

81. As cited in Smith, Dancing in the Street, 197.

82. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement,” address to the APA, September 1, 1967.

83. “Whatever Happened to Mrs. Rosa Parks,” Ebony, August 1971.

84. John Hersey, The Algiers Motel Incident (New York: Hamilton, 1968), 350.

85. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Other America,” speech, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, March 14, 1968, www.gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech.

CHAPTER THREE: BEYOND THE REDNECK

1. Gary Young, “White History 101,” Nation, February 21, 2007.

2. Thompson argues that “once Americans came to believe that the South finally had modernized, they had little desire to intervene any further on behalf of inmate rights anywhere.” Heather Thompson, “Blinded by a Barbaric South,” in Lassiter and Crespino, The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, 76.

3. The assumption of working-class racism casts racism as a natural response to class anxiety—rather than one that is created, nourished, and reinforced.

4. Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

5. In interviews with Montgomery whites, white researchers sent by Fisk sociologist Preston Valien found widespread paranoia about the boycott but also awe at how Black people were pulling off this organized, months-long boycott. See the Preston and Bonita Valien Papers, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.

6. See Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Purnell, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings; Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

7. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom.

8. Tony Judt, “The Problem of Evil,” New York Review of Books, February 14, 2008.

9. Ira Berlin makes a similar argument about Northern white disregard for Black rights furthering Southern slavery in the early 1800s in The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

10. Karen Miller, Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism in Interwar Detroit (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

11. Ibid., 4.

12. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos and Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010).

13. Carol Anderson, White Rage (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 3. See also Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

14. In one article, Dearborn mayor Orville Hubbard boasted: “Negroes can’t get in here. . . . These people are so anti-colored, much more than you in Alabama.” David Goode, Orvie, the Dictator of Dearborn (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989).

15. Delmont, Why Busing Failed, 54–76.

16. Ibid., 54.

17. Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 6. By the 1970s, according to historian Nancy MacLean, conservatives had largely abandoned a language of “massive resistance,” “states’ rights,” and “anticommunism” for “color-blindness” and formal equality (against “special preferences”)—seeing it as a way to attract more white working- and middle-class people and rehabilitate the appeal of conservatism. Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

18. In some ways, this idea for realignment began with a February 1963 article by the National Review’s editor William Rusher calling for the Republican Party’s realignment by appealing to white Southerners disaffected with the Democratic Party and the civil rights movement. Jeet Heer, “How the Southern Strategy Made Donald Trump Possible,” New Republic, February 18, 2016.

19. Rick Perlstein, “Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous Interview on the Southern Strategy,” Nation, November 13, 2012.

20. Nixon speechwriter Jeffrey Hart called it a “border state” strategy. Nixon’s 1968 campaign ads included photos of urban riots in Northern cities.

21. Noliwe Rooks, Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education (New York: New Press, 2017), 117.

22. As John Ehrlichman later told Harper’s writer Dan Baum, “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. . . . We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black[s], but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” Dan Baum, “Legalize It All,” Harper’s (April 2016).

23. Hampton, Voices of Freedom, 589.

24. Batson, Chronology, 134.

25. Purnell, Fighting Jim Crow, 154–55.

26. As Fredrick Harris shows in The Price of the Ticket, themes of personal responsibility that dominate President Obama’s approach on Black issues marry two discursive traditions: the politics of respectability and the increasing turn in the social sciences to “cultural” explanations of race.

27. Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century US History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

28. St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1945). While Drake and Cayton made clear that limited job, housing, and educational opportunities for Black people in Chicago resulted from political decision and white behavior, the book’s ethnography of Bronzeville still kept one eye trained on Black behavior. The original research for their study was framed around investigating juvenile delinquency, which undeniably affected the ways the ethnography proceeded. Henri Peretz, “The Making of Black Metropolis,” Annals of America Academy of Political and Social Science 595 (September 2004).

29. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (New York: Dryden Press, 1948); Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1944).

30. Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Family Life in a Federal Slum (New York: Aldine Transaction Publications, 1970); Ulf Hannerz, Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); Eliot Lebow, Tally’s Corners: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (New York: Little, Brown, 1967).

31. See Gaston Alonso, “Culture Trap,” in Our Schools Suck: Students Talk to a Segregated Nation on the Failures of Urban Education, ed. Gaston Alonso, Noel Anderson, Celina Su, and Jeanne Theoharis (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

32. Oscar Lewis, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty, San Juan and New York (New York: Random House, 1966). Lewis, who is credited with coining the term “culture of poverty,” had stressed that structural forces produce self-defeating cultural practices, but it was the cultural part of his argument that gained public attention.

33. US Department of Labor Office of Policy Planning and Research, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action [often referred to as the Moynihan Report], March 1965.

34. King, “The Role of the Behavioral Scientist.”

35. According to political scientist Naomi Murakawa, in her study of the liberal 1960s roots of contemporary mass incarceration, “liberals ‘criminalized’ the race problem often toward the end of compelling reform. . . . In this sense, liberal law-and-order agendas flowed from an underlying assumption of racism: racism was an individual whim, an irrationality and therefore racism could be corrected with ‘state-building’ . . . that is, the replacement of personalized power of government officials with codified, standardized and formalized authority.” Thus mandatory minimums in sentencing were pushed partly as a way to get away from the bias of judges—to devastating result. Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 9–11.

36. Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997); Alonso et al., Our Schools Suck.

37. These sorts of cultural approaches also dominated the Obama administration’s initiative, My Brother’s Keeper, which focused on cultural skills and mentoring for Black boys (rather than opening up job and educational opportunities and changing law enforcement strategies and assumptions).

38. As Coates observes: “The bearer of this unfortunate heritage [President Obama] feebly urging ‘positive habits and behavior’ while his country imprisons some ungodly number of black men may well be greeted with applause in some quarters. The black freedom struggle is not about raising a race of hyper-moral super-humans. It is about all people garnering the right to live like the normal humans they are.” Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Black Pathology and the Closing of the American Mind,” Atlantic (March 21, 2014). Obama steadfastly defended the appropriateness of these cultural framings in speeches geared toward Black people: “It’s true that if I’m giving a commencement at Morehouse that I will have a conversation with young black men about taking responsibility as fathers that I probably will not have with the women of Barnard. And I make no apologies for that.” “Obama Defends Respectability Politics Speeches Criticized by Black Progressives,” Slate, May 12, 2015.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MEDIA WAS OFTEN AN OBSTACLE TO THE STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL JUSTICE

1. Malcolm X, “At the Audubon,” December 13, 1964, in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (New York: Grove Press, 1965.).

2. “A Summer Carnival of Riot,” editorial, Los Angeles Times August 13, 1965.

3. “Anarchy Must End,” editorial, Los Angeles Times, August 14, 1965.

4. “A Time for Prayer,” editorial, Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1965; “A City Demands the Answers,” editorial, Los Angeles Times, August 17, 1965.

5. Theodore H. White, “Lessons of Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Times, August 22, 1965.

6. “We Must Speak to Each Other,” editorial, Los Angeles Times, August 29, 1965.

7. Ibid.

8. Christopher Strain, Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia, 2005), 124.

9. W. Arthur Garrity, Papers on the Boston Schools Desegregation Case 1972–1977, University of Massachusetts, Boston.

10. Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 407.

11. Not to mention that, for decades prior to 1955, they had ignored the deep injustice and those who sought to highlight it in the South.

12. Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power Address at UC Berkeley,” October 29, 1966, available at American Rhetoric, www.americanrhetoric.com.

13. Delmont, Why Busing Failed; Mark Speltz, North of Dixie: Civil Rights Photography Beyond the South (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2016).

14. Speltz, North of Dixie, 26.

15. In the avalanche of praise for The Race Beat, few reviewers seemed to notice the authors had not analyzed the ways the press covered the movement in Northern cities to reach their laudatory conclusions of the role of the media in the civil rights movement.

16. “How the Civil Rights Movement Was Covered in Birmingham,” All Things Considered, NPR, June 18, 2013.

17. See “The Boycott’s ‘Success,’” editorial, New York Times, September 15, 1964.

18. A chief complaint of South Bostonians against the Globe was the fact that resistance was happening throughout the city, but they alone were pictured as the bad guys.

19. Christine Rossell’s study of the Boston Globe during desegregation showed that its focus on antidesegregation whites and desegregation-related conflicts led the public to have an overinflated sense of the costs and problems associated with desegregation, and thus the public was more likely to oppose it. Robert Taylor, Desegregation in Boston and Buffalo: The Influence of Local Leaders (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 85.

20. Robert Levey, “‘Busing’—A Non-Word with Racial Emphasis,” Boston Globe, June 6, 1965.

21. Robert Levey, “School Board—NAACP Parley Short, Unhappy,” Boston Globe, August 16, 1963; Robert Levey, “School Report Stirs New Storm,” Boston Globe, April 16, 1965; Anne Kirchheimer, “White Parents Shape Antibusing Campaign,” Boston Globe, November 24, 1974.

22. Batson, Chronology, 264.

23. Robert Reinhold, “More Segregated than Ever,” New York Times, September 30, 1973.

24. “A Balanced Ruling for Boston,” Boston Globe, June 25, 1974.

25. “Racial imbalance” was the Northern term for segregation to describe schools with a student body that was more than 50 percent nonwhite; an all-white school was still considered a racially balanced school. The 1965 Massachusetts Racial Imbalance Act (which the Boston School Committee fought to repeal and then sought to delay in court) applied only to schools that were more than 50 percent nonwhite.

26. “Ready for School Opening,” editorial, Boston Globe, September 6, 1974; “A Fine Beginning,” editorial, Boston Globe, September 13, 1974. The paper ultimately did use the term “desegregation” in its news coverage but provided little historical context.

27. “Opposition to Busing Led by Publicity-Shy ROAR,” Boston Globe, September 27, 1974.

28. Jon Hillson, The Battle of Boston (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977), 89.

29. See Delmont, Why Busing Failed, for a longer exposition of this phenomenon.

30. Two prodesegregation marches at the end of 1974 drew a combined 14,500 people, and a 40,000-person march for desegregation and peace took place in Boston in 1975—yet captured far less attention. For more, see Jeanne Theoharis, “‘I’d Rather Go to School in the South’: How Boston’s School Desegregation Complicates the Civil Rights Paradigm,” in Theoharis and Woodard, Freedom North, 139.

31. Ibid.

32. Benjamin Fine, “Northern Cities Confront the Problem of De Facto Segregation,” New York Times, February 10, 1957.

33. Ibid.

34. “And in New York Schools,” editorial, New York Times, September 4, 1963.

35. Benjamin Fine, “Negro Sues City on School Zoning,” New York Times, July 18, 1957.

36. Robert H. Tertet, “City School Integration,” New York Times, October 22, 1963.

37. “Calm Rights Leader: Milton Arthur Galamison,” New York Times, December 17, 1963; “Boycotting a 600 Level School,” editorial, New York Times, January 21, 1965; “The School Boycott Spreads,” editorial, New York Times, February 11, 1965; Leonard Buder, “New Men for the Board and Some Surprises,” New York Times, July 21, 1968; “Brooklyn Sit-In Bars 2nd Hearing by School Board,” New York Times, December 21, 1966.

38. “Now Schools,” editorial, New York Times, September 8, 1963.

39. “A Boycott Solves Nothing,” editorial, New York Times, January 31, 1964; “No More School Boycotts,” editorial, New York Times, February 3, 1964. Similar accusations of violence occurred over the summer, when Brooklyn CORE began to make plans for a disruptive stall-in around opening day of the World’s Fair. See Purnell, Fighting Jim Crow, 257–72.

40. “A Boycott Solves Nothing,” editorial, New York Times, January 31, 1964.

41. “The School Boycott,” editorial, New York Times, February 4, 1964.

42. Ibid.

43. McCandlish Phillips, “Many Clergymen and Educators Say Boycott Dramatized Negro’s Aspirations,” New York Times, February 4, 1964.

44. Fred Powledge, “More Than 10,000 March in Protest of School Pairing,” New York Times, March 13, 1964.

45. “Now Schools,” New York Times.

46. “The Boycott’s ‘Success,’” editorial New York Times, September 15, 1964.

47. “Birmingham Shut Schools Scheduled for Integration,” New York Times, September 5, 1963; “Standing Up to Wallace” New York Times, September 7, 1963.

48. Brian Purnell, “Drive Awhile for Freedom: Brooklyn CORE’s 1964 Stall-In and Public Discourse on Protest Violence,” in Theoharis and Woodard, Groundwork, 53.

49. “This Helps Civil Rights?,” editorial, New York Times, April 11, 1964.

50. Purnell, Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings, 257–59; Wilder, A Covenant with Color, 236.

51. Joseph Tirella, “A Gun to the Heart of the City?,” Slate, April 22, 2014.

52. Wilder, Covenant with Color, 238.

53. Johnson, Race and Remembrance, 57.

54. Dan Aldridge, interview by Detroit Historical Society, June 22, 2016, http://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/items/show/357.

55. All as quoted in Horne, Fire This Time, 325.

56. Ibid.

57. Hampton, Voices of Freedom, 470.

58. Maya Angelou, A Song Flung Up to Heaven (New York: Virago, 2002), 82–83.

59. Thomas Pynchon, “A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” New York Times Magazine, June 6, 1966.

60. Jack Jones, “The View from Watts Today: Parents and Children Hunger for Knowledge,” Los Angeles Times, July 20, 1967.

61. Peter Levy, “The Media and H. Rap Brown: Friend or Foe of Jim Crow,” in Purnell and Theoharis, The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North.

62. “Walkout: The True Story of the Historic 1968 Chicano Student Walkout in East LA,” Democracy Now (March 29, 2006).

63. Sugrue, Sweet Land, 300.

64. As quoted in Speltz, North of Dixie, 86.

65. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come, 72.

66. James Dao, “40 Years Later Civil Rights Makes Page One,” New York Times, July 13, 2004.

67. Kate Taylor, “Race and Class Collide in a Plan for Two Brooklyn Schools,” New York Times, September 22, 2015.

68. Ujju Aggarwal and Donna Nevel, “Building Justice: School Segregation in NYC Schools Is No Accident,” City Limits, October 24, 2016.

69. “Harlem Schools Are Left to Fail as Those Not Far Away Thrive,” New York Times, January 24, 2017.

70. Farah Stockman, “Still Deciding What Busing Gained and What It Cost,” Boston Globe, June 21, 2014.

71. Meghan Irons, Shelley Murphy, and Jenna Russell, “History Rolled In on a Yellow School Bus,” Boston Globe, September 6, 2014.

72. Farah Stockman, “Did Busing Slow Boston’s Desegregation?,” Boston Globe, August 9, 2015.

73. Farah Stockman published a lengthy story in 2015 in the Globe about Ruth Batson—without any corrective or admission about how the Globe had backgrounded Batson’s work for decades—and framed it as a battle between two women, Batson and Hicks. Farah Stockman, “How a Standoff over Schools Changed the Country,” Boston Globe, December 20, 2015.

74. Doug Smith, “Stunned by the Watts Riots, the L.A. Times Struggled to Make Sense of the Violence,” Los Angeles Times, August 12, 2015.

75. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967; Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 5.

CHAPTER FIVE: BEYOND A BUS SEAT

1. Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, 70.

2. Ruth Hill, Black Women’s Oral History Project from the Schlesinger Library (Westport, CT: Mechler, 1991), 117.

3. Handwritten notes from Highlander, Folder 2-18, Rosa Parks Papers, Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

4. Ella Baker, “Bigger Than a Hamburger,” April 1960, downloaded at http://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/sites/all/files/Bigger%20than%20a%20Hamburger%20-%20Ella%20Baker.pdf.

5. Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart; Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes; Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom.

6. Derek Seidman, “The History of the SNCC Research Department,” Eyes on the Ties, May 2, 2017, https://news.littlesis.org/2017/05/02/the-hidden-history-of-the-sncc-research-department/.

7. Charlie Cobb, This Nonviolent Stuff Will Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic, 2014), 4.

8. “Full Transcript: President Obama’s Speech on the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington,” Washington Post, August 28, 2013.

9. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, xiii.

10. Aisha Harris, “How True Is The Butler?,” Slate, August 15, 2013.

11. See Williams, Concrete Demands.

12. The New York Times called The Butler “a brilliantly truthful film on a subject that is usually shrouded in wishful thinking, mythmongering and outright denial.” A. O. Scott, “Black Man, White House, and History,” New York Times, August 15, 2013.

13. Will Jones, “The Forgotten Radical History of the March on Washington,” Dissent (Spring 2013).

14. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).

15. See Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

16. Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), 23–24.

17. “Jazz Drummer Dies in Electric Chair,” Jet, April 10, 1958.

18. Transcript of a statement King made at a prayer pilgrimage following Reeves’s execution can be found here: http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/Vol04Scans/396_6-Apr-1958_Statement%20Delivered%20-%20Jeremiah%20Reeves.pdf.

19. Mamie Till-Mobley says that Parks told her this when they met in 1989. Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (New York: Random House, 2003), 257.

20. Box 18, Folder 10, RPC.

21. Troy Jackson, Becoming King (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008).

22. Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream,” August 28, 1963, full text available at American Rhetoric.

23. Jones, “Forgotten Radical History.”

24. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons,” From Little Memphis Girl to Mississippi Amazon,” in Hands on the Freedom Plow; Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes.

25. Amy Nathan Wright, “The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, Marks, Mississippi, and the Mule Train,” in Crosby, Civil Rights History from the Ground Up, 110–11.

26. Thomas Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 343.

27. These included the steering committee composed of key Native American, Latino, and poor white leaders including Hank Adams, Robert Fulcher, Corky Gonzalez, Reis Tijerina, Grace Mora Newman, Peggy Terry, Gerena Valentin, and Tillie Walker. Others in attendance included John Lewis, Carl Braden, Myles Horton, Appalachian Volunteers from Kentucky, welfare rights activists, California farmworkers, organized tenants, and the American Friends Service Committee.

28. Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 186.

29. Wright, “The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign,” 110.

30. Ibid., 128.

31. Roland Freeman, The Mule Train: A Journey of Hope Remembered (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 1998), 109.

32. John Kelley, “Before Occupy There Was Resurrection City,” Washington Post, December 2, 2011.

33. Wright, “The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign,” 131–34.

34. As quoted in ibid., 137.

35. Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1988), 207.

36. Mary Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

37. Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 19–24; ibid.

38. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come.

39. Johnnie Tillmon, “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue,” Ms., 1972.

40. Premilla Nadasen “‘We Do Whatever Becomes Necessary’: Johnnie Tillmon, Welfare Rights and Black Power,” in Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, ed. Dayo Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

41. Alejandra Marchevsky, “Forging a Black-Brown Movement: Chicana and Black Women Organizing for Welfare Rights,” in Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Women’s Activism and Feminism in the Movimiento Era, ed. Maylei Blackwell, Maria Cotera, and Dionne Espinosa (Austin: University of Texas Press, forthcoming).

42. Catherine Jermany, interview by Premilla Nadasen, October 11, 2003, quoted in Marchevsky, “Forging a Black-Brown Movement.”

43. “Watts Lame, Blind, Poor Protest Cut in Medical Care,” Jet, October 26, 1967, 16.

44. Quoted in Marchevsky, “Forging a Black-Brown Movement.”

45. Ibid.

46. CWRO broke with NWRO when the NWRO rejected Escalante’s proposal to include Spanish-language services among its key demands.

47. Nadasen, “‘We Do Whatever Becomes Necessary,’” 324.

48. Michael Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 275–76. With origins in a World War II surplus food subsidy program, food stamps commenced as an early 1960s pilot program, became nationwide with the Food Stamp Act of 1964, and expanded in 1977.

49. See Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace; Nadasen, Welfare Warriors; Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights; Levenstein, A Movement without Marches; Alejandra Marchevsky and Jeanne Theoharis, Not Working: Latina Immigrants, Low-Wage Jobs and the Failure of Welfare Reform (New York: New York University Press, 2006).

50. Martin Luther King Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” in A Knock at Midnight (New York: Warner Books, 1998).

51. Laura Visser-Maessen, Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 282.

52. Lorraine Hansberry, unpublished letter to the editor, New York Times, April 23, 1964, in To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (New York: Signet, 1970), 51–52. Thanks to Balthazar Becker for bringing this letter to my attention.

53. See Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads; Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Kimberley Phillips, War! What Is It Good For? Black Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from World War II to Iraq (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

54. Fannie Lou Hamer, “What Have We to Hail?,” speech delivered in Kentucky, summer 1968, in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2011).

55. Stephen Carter, “The Beauty of Julian Bond’s Voice,” Chicago Tribune, August 17, 2015.

56. Julian Bond’s “Vietnam: An Antiwar Comic” (1967) can be downloaded here: http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Exhibits/Bond/Bond_comic_page_01.html.

57. Pamela Pennock, The Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies, and Their Fight Against Imperialism and Racism, 1960s–1980s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 84–86.

58. “Dr. King’s Error,” editorial, New York Times, April 7, 1967; “N.A.A.C.P. Decries Stand of Martin Luther King,” New York Times, April 11, 1967.

59. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence,” speech, Riverside Church, New York City, April, 1967.

60. Roxanne Brown, “Mother of the Movement: Nation Honors Rosa Parks with Birthday Observance,” Ebony, February 1988.

61. Box 19, Folder “General 1956–1964, 1972–1990,” RPC.

62. Riptide Communications, “Diverse Coalition of Americans Speak Out Against War as Solution to Terrorism,” press release, September 17, 2001, printed in Yes! Magazine.

CHAPTER SIX: THE GREAT MAN VIEW OF HISTORY, PART I

1. Quoted in Augustus Hawkins, “Inside Government: The Agonies of Social Change,” Los Angeles Sentinel, March 21, 1968.

2. Angela Davis, International Women’s Day speech, London’s Southbank Centre, March 8, 2017. Video found here: https://www.facebook.com/AFROPUNK/videos/10154505324126623/.

3. Barbara Johns (1935–1961) Jim Crow Stories, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, PBS.

4. Bob Smith, They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1951–1964 (Greensboro: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 27–35.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid, 48.

7. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 48.

8. As quoted in Willy S. Leventhal, ed., The Children Coming On: A Retrospective of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Oral Histories of Boycott Participants (New York: Black Belt Press, 1998), 156–58.

9. Hoose, Claudette Colvin, 88.

10. As quoted in Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart, 32.

11. Workshop with Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, and others, May 27, 1960, Highlander UC 515A, tape 202, part 1, Highlander Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

12. See Branch, Parting the Waters; Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights.

13. Judith Kafka, The History of “Zero Tolerance” in American Public Schools (New York: Palgrave, 2011).

14. Jefferson High School had recently been transferred, with the rest of the Black high schools, from the southern conference to the eastern conference, which included these East LA schools, so the schools were having regular contact through athletics, and the students likely knew each other.

15. Ernesto Chavez, “¡Mi Raza Primero!”: Nationalism, Identity and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966–1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 45.

16. Ian Haney Lopez, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 20.

17. F. Arturo Rosales, Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1997), 190.

18. “Student Disorders Erupt at 4 High Schools; Policeman Hurt,” Los Angeles Times, March 7, 1968. By the early 1930s, most Black students in the city attended Jefferson or Jordan High School; Jefferson did not become all-Black until after World War II.

19. Lawrence Bible, author interview, June 12, 2006.

20. Chavez, “¡Mi Raza Primera!,” 47.

21. Bible interview.

22. Bible interview.

23. Bible continued to encounter these assumptions when he attended UCLA; because he’d attended all-Black Jefferson, which was considered a bad school, they “put you in a category.”

24. Bob Lucas, “Black Boycott Victor,” Los Angeles Sentinel, March 14, 1968.

25. Paul Houston, “3 Negro Officials Take Over at Jefferson High,” Los Angeles Times, March 14, 1968.

26. Robert Long Mauller, “An Analysis of the Conflicts and the Community Relationships in Eight Secondary Schools of the Los Angeles Unified School District, 1967–1969,” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1976, 111. The meeting was adjourned before anyone from the East LA schools got to address the board.

27. Jack McCurdy, “1,000 Walk Out in School Boycott,” Los Angeles Times, March 9, 1968.

28. Bob Lucas, “‘Black’ Boycott Victory,” Los Angeles Sentinel, March 14, 1968.

29. Bible interview.

30. The footage was discovered decades later, during the making of the documentary series Chicano—it had been saved by the news stations but never shown.

31. The decision not to indict members of local Black groups, like the Black Congress, the US Organization, or the United Parents Council, who were supporting Black student protesters, on conspiracy charges similar to those of their Chicano counterparts might have stemmed from the recent assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4. Black community leaders maintained order in the wake of King’s assassination—but officials still feared potential trouble.

32. Dial Torgenerson, “Negro Strike Forces 2-School Shutdown,” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 1969.

33. Bundy, “Revolutions Happen Through Young People!”

34. “Walkout: The True Story of the Historic 1968 Chicano Student Walkout in East L.A.,” Democracy Now!

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE GREAT MAN VIEW OF HISTORY, PART II

1. Described as an “unassuming seamstress” who undertook a “small act of defiance” in Maria Newman, “Thousands Pay Final Respects to Rosa Parks in Detroit,” New York Times, November 2, 2005; an “accidental matriarch” in Michael Janofsky, “Thousands Gather at the Capitol to Remember a Hero,” New York Times, October 31, 2005; as “quiet” and “humble” in “Parks Remembered for Her Courage, Humility,” CNN.com, October 20, 2005; as “humble” in Carlos Osorio, Associated Press, “Thousands Attend Rosa Parks funeral in Detroit,” USA Today, November 2, 2005; and as “quiet” in Peter Slevin, “A Quiet Woman’s Resonant Farewell,” Washington Post, November 2, 2005.

2. Described as the “matriarch of the movement” in “Coretta Scott King Dies,” CNN.com, January 31, 2006, and in Shaila Dewan and Elisabeth Bumiller, “At Mrs. King’s Funeral, a Mix of Elegy and Politics,” New York Times, February 8, 2006; as having “grace and serenity” in Associated Press, “Coretta Scott King Dead at 78,” MSNBC.com, January 31, 2006; as an “avid proselytizer for his vision” in Peter Applebome, “Coretta Scott King, 78, Widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dies,” New York Times, January 31, 2006; as having “poise, grace and enduring dignity” in Larry Copeland, “‘Queen of Black America’ Coretta Scott King Dies at 78,” USA Today, January 31, 2006; as the “closest thing possible to African-American royalty” in Ernie Suggs, “Coretta Scott King 1927–2006,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 31, 2006.

3. Dewan and Bumiller, “At Mrs. King’s Funeral, a Mix of Elegy and Politics.”

4. When MSNBC published my piece on women and the March on Washington around the event’s fiftieth anniversary, it cut the section on the important roles women, including Anna Arnold Hedgeman, had played in the march’s organization and made it just about the sexism.

5. Erin McCann, “Coretta Scott King’s 1986 Statement to the Senate About Jeff Sessions,” New York Times, February 8, 2017.

6. Jordain Carney, “Sanders, Dems Read Coretta Scott King’s Letter After Warren Silenced,” Hill, February 8, 2017.

7. Warren read the letter live on Facebook. It was watched by more than two million people, and news outlets covered it assiduously.

8. Barbara Reynolds, “The Biggest Problem with ‘Selma’ Has Nothing to Do with LBJ or the Oscars,” Washington Post, January 19, 2015.

9. Coretta Scott King, “Address to Antioch Reunion,” Antiochian, June 25, 2004, www.antioch-college.edu/Antiochian/archive/Antiochian_2004fall/reunion/king/.

10. Ibid.

11. “Carson’s Next Volume of MLK Work: 10/98; In King’s Own Words: New Book Explores Courtship, Marriage,” Stanford Report, October 28, 1998, http://news.stanford.edu/news/1998/october28/mlkcarson1028.html.

12. James Baldwin, “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King,” Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 649–50.

13. Jacqueline Trescott, “The New Coretta Scott King: Emerging from the Legacy,” Washington Post, January 15, 1978.

14. “The World of Coretta King: A Word with Trina Grillo,” New Lady, January 1966.

15. Barbara Reynolds, “Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King’s Other Half,” Washington Post, October 21, 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/therootdc/post/coretta-scott-king-martin-luther-kings-other-half/2011/10/20/gIQA2t853L_blog.html.

16. As quoted in Hoose, Claudette Colvin, 80.

17. Derrick Jackson, “The King Who Led on World Peace,” Boston Globe, February 1, 2006.

18. Barbara Reynolds, “The Real Coretta Scott King,” Washington Post, February 4, 2006.

19. Coretta Scott King, My Life with Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 272–73.

20. Ibid., 4.

21. Grillo, New Lady, 37.

22. Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).

23. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights, 313.

24. Stewart Burns, To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Sacred Mission to Save America, 1955–1968 (New York: Harper, 2003), 321.

25. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, 454.

26. Quoted in Vicki Crawford, “Coretta Scott King and the Struggle for Civil and Human Rights: An Enduring Legacy,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 113.

27. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road, 453–54.

28. Ibid., 454.

29. Martha Burk, “Black Women Make History Too: An Interview on Coretta Scott King,” Huffington Post, February 12, 2012.

30. Coretta Scott King, “How Many Men Must Die?,” Life, April 19, 1968.

31. Coretta Scott King, “10 Commandments on Vietnam,” April 27, 1968, available at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/corettascottkingvietnamcommandments.htm.

32. Ibid.

33. Freeman, The Mule Train, 23.

34. Ibid., 109.

35. Barbara Reynolds, “I Am Acting in the Name of Martin Luther King,” Chicago Tribune, January 11, 1976.

36. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights, 358.

37. Ibid., 358.

38. Coretta Scott King, My Life, My Love, My Legacy (New York: Henry Holt., 2017), 189.

39. Reynolds, “I Am Acting in the Name of Martin Luther King.”

40. David Stein, “‘This Nation Has Never Honestly Dealt with the Question of a Peacetime Economy’: Coretta Scott King and the Struggle for a Nonviolent Economy in the 1970s,” Souls, 18, no. 1 (2016).

41. Charlayne Hunter, “Panel of 100 Asks Full Employment,” New York Times, June 15, 1974.

42. Stein, “‘This Nation Has Not Honestly Dealt with the Question of a Peacetime Economy’”; David Stein, “Why Coretta Scott King Fought for a Job Guarantee,” Boston Review, May 17, 2017.

43. Coretta Scott King spoke out against war on January 16, 2003, declaring: “True homeland security should be about protection of liberties.” A partial transcript can be found at www.blink.org.uk/pdescription.asp?key=1549&grp=27.

44. Mubarik Dahir, “Mrs. King’s Legacy of Love,” AlterNet, February 2, 2006. In 1998, she stated, “Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry,” Chicago Defender, April 1, 1998. In 2003, King spoke at the Creating Change Conference, and, in 2004, linked the struggle for gay marriage to the civil rights struggle. “Coretta Scott King Gives Support to Gay Marriage,” USA Today, March 24, 2004.

45. Dyana Berger, “Coretta Scott King Dies at 78,” Washington Blade, February 3, 2006.

46. Ibid.; “Anti-Gay Church to Picket King’s Funeral,” Washington Blade, February 3, 2006.

47. “The World of Coretta King,” 34. Scott King sent Rosa Parks a copy of the article with an inscription reading: “To Mrs. Rosa Parks with love, respect and deep admiration Coretta Scott King.”

48. Jennifer Scanlon, Until There Is Justice: The Life of Anna Arnold Hedgeman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 157–58.

49. Ibid., 158–62.

50. Ibid., 161–62.

51. Dorothy Height, “We Wanted the Voice of a Woman to Be Heard,” in Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement, ed. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 86.

52. Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 288.

53. Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 353.

54. Brittney Cooper, “Black, Queer, Feminist, Erased from History: Meet the Most Important Legal Scholar You’ve Likely Never Heard Of,” Salon, February 18, 2015.

55. Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat, 109.

56. William Powell Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 175.

57. Ibid., 176.

58. Despite pleas from women journalists to join the protest, Randolph and King addressed the gender-segregated National Press Club, which didn’t admit women as members until 1971. Everette Dennis and Robert W. Snyder, eds., Covering Congress (New York: Transaction Press, 1998), 137.

59. Bayard Rustin Papers, Harvard University.

60. Jones, March on Washington, 175.

61. King, My Life, My Love, My Legacy, 114–15.

62. King, My Life with Martin, 237.

63. Peter Levy, “Gloria Richardson and the Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland,” in Theoharis and Woodard, Groundwork, 107.

64. Ibid., 108.

64. Nash was listening to the event on the radio and was surprised to hear her name called. Younge, The Speech, 86.

66. King, My Life, My Love, My Legacy, 115.

67. Charles Euchner, Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 158.

68. Decades later, Julian Bond reported coming into a hotel suite where Rosa Parks and Daisy Bates were ordering room service and “talking about people they knew in the NAACP and how awful these men were. . . . A women’s view, so inside but not really inside. Talking about the guys (John Morsell, Wilkins’s right-hand man) and how mean they were. . . . I thought Daisy Bates and Rosa Parks had very different personalities, and it was interesting that they agreed on them.” Julian Bond, author interview, November 15, 2010.

69. Davis Houck and David Dixon, Women and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009), x.

70. “Civil Rights Pioneer Gloria Richardson, 91, on How Women Were Silenced at the March on Washington,” Democracy Now, August 27, 2013.

71. Jennifer Scanlon, “Where Were the Women in the March on Washington,” New Republic, March 16, 2016.

72. “Civil Rights Pioneer Gloria Richardson,” Democracy Now.

73. Gloria Richardson, “The Energy of the People Passing Through Me,” in Hands on the Freedom Plow, 288.

74. Anna Arnold Hedgeman, The Trumpet Sounds: A Memoir of Negro Leadership (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 189.

75. Krissah Thompson, “Women—Nearly Left Off March on Washington Program—Speaking Up Now,” Washington Post, August 22, 2013.

76. Democracy Now was one of the only news outlets to provide a fuller story of women at the MOW. Gloria Richardson, Democracy Now, August 27, 2013.

CHAPTER EIGHT: EXTREMISTS, TROUBLEMAKERS, AND NATIONAL SECURITY THREATS

1. Gary Younge, “Everybody Loves Mandela,” Nation, June 19, 2013.

2. Box 18, Folders 9 and 10, Rosa Parks Collection, Library of Congress.

3. Box 18, Folder 10, RPC.

4. Box 18, Folder 9, RPC.

5. Box 18, Folder 10, RPC.

6. Box 18, Folder 9, RPC.

7. Box 18, Folder 10, and Box 19, Folder 2, RPC.

8. Box 18, Folder 11; Box 18, Folder 10, RPC.

9. Selby and Selby, Odyssey, 66.

10. Box 18, Folder 9, RPC

11. Box 28, Folder 1, RPC.

12. See Simmons, “From Little Memphis Girl to Mississippi Amazon”; Septima Clark with Cynthia Stokes Brown, Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement (Navarro, CA: Wild Trees Press, 1986); Charron, Freedom’s Teacher; and Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).

13. Septima Clark, Ready from Within, 36–37.

14. Ibid., 37.

15. Ibid., 39.

16. Simmons, “From Little Memphis Girl,” in Hands on the Freedom Plow, 14–19.

17. Holland, From the Mississippi Delta.

18. Sarah van Gelder, “Rev. Sekou on Today’s Civil Rights Leaders,” Yes!, July 22, 2015.

19. Baldwin and Burrow, The Domestication of Martin Luther King, 2–10.

20. Data from the Roper Center for Public Research, quoted in Elahe Izadi, “Black Lives Matter and America’s Long History of Resisting Civil Rights Protest,” Washington Post, April 19, 2016.

21. Fred Powledge, “Polls Show Whites in City Resent Civil Rights Protest,” New York Times, September 21, 1964. This poll took place after a growing civil rights movement in the city, the February 1964 school boycott, and the white counterprotest by Parents and Taxpayers.

22. Izadi, “Black Lives Matter and America’s Long History of Resisting Civil Rights Protest.”

23. Appleton, “Martin Luther King in Life . . . and Memory.”

24. Tom Greenwood, “Grosse Pointe Recalls King’s Emotional Visit in 1968,” Detroit News, March 14, 1968.

25. King, “The Other America.”

26. Jimmy Carter, “Remarks by Former US President Jimmy Carter at Coretta Scott King Funeral,” February 7, 2006, https://www.cartercenter.org/news/documents/doc2295.html. In these remarks, he implicitly drew parallels to post-9/11 eavesdropping.

27. Younge, The Speech.

28. Speltz, North of Dixie, 117.

29. Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960–1972 (New York: Free Press, 1991), 130.

30. Ransby, Ella Baker, 403

31. Dittmer, Local People, 291.

32. As cited in ibid., 292.

33. Ibid., 292–93.

34. Ibid., 293.

35. O’Reilly, Racial Matters, 280.

36. FBI, Special Agent in Charge, Mobile, AL, “Teletype to Director, FBI: Racial Situation, Montgomery, Alabama,” September 8, 1956.

37. See the powerful documentary Home of the Brave.

38. King, My Life, My Love, My Legacy, 159.

39. “FBI Spied on Coretta Scott King, Files Showed,” Los Angeles Times, August 31, 2007.

40. Ibid.

41. Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (New York: Pantheon, 1999).

42. Marable, Malcolm X, 95, 277–78.

43. Zaheer Ali, “What Really Happened to Malcolm X,” CNN, February 17, 2015.

44. Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 2002).

45. Betty Medsger, The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 26.

46. Ibid., 228.

47. Ibid., 231.

48. Ibid., 231.

49. Ibid., 173.

50. Betty Medsger, “In 1971 Muhammad Ali Helped Undermine the FBI’s Illegal Spying on Americans,” The Intercept, June 6, 2016.

51. Victor Mather, “FBI Monitored Muhammad Ali Connections to the Nation of Islam,” New York Times, December 15, 2016.

52. Mike Marqusee, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (New York: Verso, 1999).

53. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, response to Amna Akbar and Jeanne Theoharis, “Islam on Trial,” Boston Review, February 27, 2017.

54. Akbar and Theoharis, “Islam on Trial”; Jeanne Theoharis, “My Student, the Terrorist,” Chronicle Review (April 3, 2011); Human Rights Watch, Illusion of Justice, report, July 21, 2014.

55. Trevor Aaronson, “The Informants,” Mother Jones, September/October 2011; Aviva Stahl, “NYPD Undercover Converted to Islam to Spy on Muslim Students,” Gothamist, October 29, 2015.

56. George Joseph, “NYPD Officers Accessed Black Lives Matters Activists’ Texts, Documents Show,” Guardian, April 4, 2017; Alleen Brown, Will Parrish, and Alice Speri, “Leaked Documents Reveal Security Firms Counterterrorism Tactics at Standing Rock to ‘Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies,’” The Intercept, May 27, 2017; Color of Change and CCR v. Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation, federal lawsuit filed October 20, 2016: Jana Winter and Sharon Weinberger, “The FBI’s New U.S. Terrorist Threat: ‘Black Identity Extremists,’” Foreign Policy (October 6, 2017).

57. Del Quentin Wilber, “Aspiring Agents Learn from Mistakes of FBI’s Shameful Investigation of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2016.

CHAPTER NINE: LEARNING TO PLAY ON LOCKED PIANOS

1. Vincent Harding, “King for the 21st Century Calls Us to Walk with Jesus,” speech, Goshen College, January 21, 2005.

2. Leventhal, The Children Coming On, 13.

3. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 3–39.

4. Extensive correspondence found in Box II: C4, Folder 2, and Box II: C390, Folder 4, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress.

5. Box 4, Folder 13, RPC.

6. Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins, My Story (New York: Puffin Books, 1992), 102.

7. Ibid., 99.

8. Rosa Parks, interview by Steven Millner, in The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955–1956, ed. David Garrow (New York: Carlson, 1989), 556–57.

9. Box 4, Folder 1, Preston and Bonita Valien Papers, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University. The Preston and Bonita Valien Papers at Tulane’s Amistad Research Center provide a remarkable, real-time account of the Montgomery bus boycott. Preston Valien, a professor at Fisk University, sent an interracial team of graduate researchers to Montgomery a month into the boycott, and they were on hand to record the unfolding movement and white reaction to it.

10. Hoose, Twice Toward Justice, 53.

11. Ibid., 129–30.

12. Marisa Chappell, Jenny Hutchinson, and Brian Ward, “‘Dress modestly as if you were going to church’: Respectability, Class and Gender in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and Early Civil Rights Movement,” in Gender in the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith (New York: Routledge, 1999); Gary Younge, “She Would Not Be Moved,” Guardian, December 15, 2000.

13. “Local NAACP Rolls Up Big Membership,” Los Angeles Sentinel, April 12, 1956.

14. Clark, Ready from Within, 33–34.

15. “Keep On Fighting Says Mrs. Parks,” Baltimore Afro-American, May 24, 1958.

16. Box 18, Folder 10, RPC.

17. Emily Rovetch, ed., Like It Is: Arthur E. Thomas Interviews Leaders on Black America (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981), 50.

18. Parks, My Story, 129.

19. Ibid., 134.

20. Patrick L. Cooney, “Martin Luther King and Vernon Johns,” in Cooney, The Life and Times of the Prophet Vernon Johns, Vernon Johns Society website, http://www.vernonjohns.org.

21. Jo Ann Robinson, interview by Steven Millner, in Garrow, The Walking City, 570.

22. Jo Ann Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Robinson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 45.

23. Rosa Parks, interview by Millner, in Garrow, The Walking City, 563.

24. See Boxes 2–4, Valien Papers.

25. Donnie Williams with Wayne Greenshaw, The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2006), 60.

26. Vernon Jarrett, “The Forgotten Heroes of the Montgomery Bus Boycott” series, Chicago Tribune, December 1975.

27. Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (1959; Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 22–23.

28. Davis Houck and David Dixon, Women and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009), 83.

29. King, My Life with Martin, 115.

30. L. C. Fortenberry, “The Sentinel Queries Rosa Parks,” Los Angeles Sentinel, August 17, 1958; Rosa Parks, interview by Academy of Achievement, June 2, 1995.

31. Box 18, Folder 9, RPC.

32. Jarrett, “Forgotten Heroes.”

33. B. J. Simms, interview by Millner, in Garrow, The Walking City, 584.

34. Box 15, Folder 5, RPC.

35. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott, 37.

36. Mary Stanton, Journey Toward Justice: Juliette Hampton Morgan and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); interview with Juliette Morgan, Box 3, Folder 15, Valien Papers.

37. Box 4, Folder 3, Valien Papers.

38. Simms, interview by Millner, in Garrow, The Walking City,, 580.

39. Box 4, Folder 2, Valien Papers.

40. “The 2-Edged Sword,” editorial, Montgomery Advertiser, December 13, 1955; Box 3, Folder 15, Valien Papers.

41. Box 3, Folder 14, Valien Papers.

42. Sarah Coleman, interview, Box 4, Folder 3, Valien Papers.

43. Carolyn Light, Stand Your Ground: America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), 114.

44. “Reminiscences,” Black Women’s Oral History Project, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA, 255; Parks interview, Rosa Parks File, Box 2 File 7, George Metcalf Papers, Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture of the New York Public Library, New York, NY.

45. Box 18, Folder 9, RPC.

46. Box 24, Folders 16 and 17, RPC.

47. Ransby, Ella Baker, 165–67; “16,000 Rally in New York,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 2, 1956.

48. Clark, Ready from Within, 16–17.

49. Rosa Parks, Myles Horton, and E. D. Nixon, radio interview by Studs Terkel, Box 14, Folder 4, Myles Horton Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

50. Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1986), 149.

49. Clark, Ready from Within, 34.

50. Box 22, Folder 22, Highlander Papers.

51. Leventhal, The Children Coming On, 45–46.

52. Parks, Horton, and Nixon, Terkel interview, June 8, 1973, Myles Horton Papers.

53. As quoted in J. Mills Thornton, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 57.

54. Box 4, Folder 3, Valien Papers.

55. Box 4, Folder 1, Valien Papers.

56. Box 18, Folder 10, RPC.

57. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 31.

58. Anne Braden to Virginia Durr, April 19, 1958, Box 2, Folder 3, Virginia Durr Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

59. Branch, Parting the Waters, 148–49.

60. “Alabama Negroes Rally in Church,” article, Box VI, C53, Folder 10, NAACP Papers, Library of Congress.

61. “‘Crime Wave’ in Alabama,” editorial, New York Times, February 24, 1956.

AFTERWORD

1. Baldwin, “A Talk to Teachers.”

2. Parks, My Story, 99.

3. Parks, Civil Rights Documentation Project, 16–17.