Capping her term at the helm of the Organization of American Historians, SOHP director Jacquelyn Hall delivered her presidential address on March 27, 2004, at the OAH's 9th annual meeting in Boston. History News Network editor Rick Shenkman called Hall's talk "stunning" and observed that "as one historian commented afterward, she didn't have an enemy in the room."
In her "The Long Civil Rights Movement: Contested Pasts, Contingent Future" address, Hall heralded historians' rejection of a neat compartmentalization of the civil rights movement as a narrow phenomenon dawning with Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott in the mid-1950s and collapsing with the King assassination and urban riots by the late 1960s. Hall heralded the work of historians whose research allows us to locate the roots of the movement at least as early as the 1930s; a black-left-labor alliance in the 1940s, she noted, advanced a critique of racialized capitalism that was far more profound in its implications than the narrower racial equality movement of the Cold War 1950s and 1960s. Calling for careful attention to the simultaneous, multiple dimensions of the social justice struggle, Hall drew attention to the need for new scholarship on the ongoing post-1960s "movement," noting the SOHP's plans to contribute to this investigation through our own "Long Civil Rights Movement" initiative.
We expect to post Jacquelyn Hall's full address here in the near future. In the meantime, read more about the OAH's 97th annual meeting via conferees' postings to the online History News Network, including HNN editor Rick Shenkman's review of Hall's address.
