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SOHP Home > News
SOHP Plans New "The Long Civil Rights Movement" Research
Initiative
The Southern Oral History Program has launched
a major new research initiative to document the “long civil
rights movement,” the critical decades that followed what
has come to be seen as the classic southern phase of the civil rights
movement. That phase, enshrined in popular memory as the movement
from Montgomery to Memphis, has been richly, and rightfully, memorialized
in an outpouring of books, museum exhibits, historical sites, and
films. These commemorative efforts, however, tend to treat the freedom
movement as if it ended in the mid-1960s with the defeat of legal
segregation (the movement’s substantive culmination) and Martin
Luther King’s assassination (the movement’s tragic and
symbolic end).
Yet it is at precisely this point that the South embarked on decades
of change rivaling in scope and impact the transformation that took
place during the tumultuous 1960s. In these years, the South established
the terms of desegregation and contended with the meaning of racial
equality and economic justice. Equally important, the scope of “the
movement” grew, as civil rights struggles spawned other social
justice
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Race was a vital factor in both regional and national political realignments in the post-1960s period.
Perhaps no aspect of the South's struggle with race relations after the 1960s aroused more public attention than school desegregation, a focus of the SOHP's new inititiative. |
movements even as powerful political and structural forces
forestalled more far-reaching change. The result P and the world
in which we live today P is rife with the contradictory outcomes
of this history: de jure integration alongside persistent de facto
segregation; economic and political advancement for some previously
disenfranchised groups but significant inequality for others; and
regional economic growth combined with high rates of poverty and
environmental degradation. On these and other measures of societal
well being, the fault lines are not only of race but also of class
and gender.
The history of this most recent South lies within the living memory
of several generations of Southerners, yet we have not captured
their reflections on these sweeping changes, nor have we subjected
them to the historical scrutiny they deserve. These memories persist
nevertheless, affecting the way we live in the present and shaping
the choices we make about the future. This lack of understanding
of our recent past impoverishes public discourse, undermines civic
engagement and investment in public institutions, and truncates
our ability to devise remedies for the inequalities that surround
us. Such are the consequences of moving through what philosopher
Walter Benjamin termed “the storm of progress” without
understanding or accounting for the past. By documenting the long
civil rights movement, we seek to recover a hidden history of the
most challenging elements of the civil rights movement, trace the
movement’s ongoing legacy, and account for the forces that
have undermined the dream of a just and inclusive South.
In order to capture the complexity of the post-1960s South, our
project examines three distinct but overlapping dimensions of the
long civil rights movement. The trajectory of the struggle for racial
justice in the South will be one dimension of the project. We will
pick up the story where many current histories and popular understanding
leave off, namely with the passage of landmark anti-discrimination
legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act
of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Often seen as the culmination
of civil rights agitation, these laws can also be taken as the starting
point for a history of implementation, contestation, and transformation
in the struggle for racial equality and justice, one that stretches
into our own time. (Sociologist Orlando Patterson aptly calls this
history “the ordeal of integration.”) Since the 1960s,
ordinary black and white southerners have set out, willingly and
unwillingly, to build integrated institutions; in effect, to build
a new society on the ruins of the old. We seek to document this
transformation and to probe the subjective experience of integration
– its achievements and limitations, the benefits that have
accrued and the price that has been paid, and the legacy of what
might have been.
A second dimension of the project takes off from Bernice Johnson
Reagon’s evocative description of the civil rights movement
as the “borning struggle” that provided inspiration,
tactics, and personnel for many of the social justice movements
that followed, among them the struggle for inclusion, equality and
justice of other racial and ethnic groups; the Black Power movement;
labor organizing and union democracy campaigns; the women’s
movement; and significant elements of the anti-war movement, environmentalism,
and the counterculture. We seek to document the generative role
of the civil rights movement in launching and shaping movements
whose major manifestations lie not in the 1960s but in the 1970s,
80s, and beyond. We will trace these continuities and connections,
but we will also account for the fissures that have limited the
development of a unified progressive agenda.
The third dimension of the project concerns the forces of reaction
and resistance that arose in response to these social justice movements
and that often constituted social movements in their own right.
A full history of the long civil rights movement and the post-1960s
South cannot be told without accounting for the forces that shaped
and ultimately blunted the promise of racial, sexual, and economic
equality. In this component of the project, we will probe the roots
and mechanisms of resistance, drawing attention both to their institutional
manifestations and their expression in daily life. This is the dense
web of action and reaction we seek to sort through so as to trace
how the South traveled from the movement of the 1960s to the present,
and to document how much and in what ways the South has changed
in the wake of the 1960s. Our long civil rights movement project
aims at an ambitious set of goals. We plan to:
• create new first-person
source material on the recent South for use by future generations
of students, scholars, and citizens;
• foster new scholarship and creative nonfiction writing
that promotes a reckoning with the past and a spirit of historically
informed civic engagement;
• enrich UNC’s southern studies courses and involve
students in research on the South in which they live and whose
future they will inherit;
• encourage public history projects, such as exhibits and
performances, aimed at affecting how Southerners remember the
past and make decisions about the future;
• enliven public school curricula.
We are now piloting the North Carolina portion
of this project under the auspices of our “Listening for a Change” initiative, funded by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.
In the coming years, we will launch a southwide initiative. We are
interested in hearing your ideas, and especially interested in hearing
from potential contributors, as we envision a broadly collaborative,
interdisciplinary, and multifaceted study of the post-1960s South.
For more information, contact SOHP associate director Joe Mosnier
at (919) 962-5931 or mosnier@unc.edu.
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