For Jobs and Freedom
How Histories of the Civil Rights Movement Resurrected Black Folks’ Economic Demands
The Civil Rights Movement was, until recently, the largest mass social movement in American history. It remains the benchmark upon which contemporary Americans measure how much, or how little, racial progress we’ve made.
This movement has also been one of the most deeply politicized and misunderstood movements in American history. Popular histories of the civil rights movement are often preoccupied with sit-ins, freedom rides, and boycotts. These protests may have generated momentum for civil rights, but they were merely one facet of the Civil Rights Movement.
The struggle for civil rights legislation and the end of de jure segregation often overshadows African Americans’ appeals for economic equality. It also obfuscates the economic racism that outlived the segregated system itself. And remembering Black people’s economic demands is essential to understanding not only the Civil Rights Movement, but also the continuity of American racism and people’s attempts to overcome it.
The Civil Rights Movement profoundly influenced the ways many historians wrote about the history of race in America. By the 1990s, local studies were questioning earlier approaches to African American activism, and centralizing the contributions of local communities and local people. Ultimately, the movement inspired historians to reimagine the leader-centric approach to social movements in American history altogether.
Recent histories of the Civil Rights Movement also remind us that the movement was much longer and more diverse than popular depictions continue to suggest. And they help us see how little elites did to address African Americans’ underlying concerns — namely, economic, not merely political, justice.
There were very few Black Americans in history textbooks before the 1950s. When they appeared at all, they were most often portrayed as passive and inconsequential figures.
In the wake of the protest movements of the 1950s and 60s, academic historians began to reimagine the history of slavery and the history of the segregated South. To be sure, African American scholars had spent the better portion of the early 20th century writing about Black Americans. But it took white academics decades to catch up. With Origins of the New South, published in 1951 as segregation was under legal assault in the courts, C. Vann Woodward became one of the first white historians to emphasize the centrality of racial politics. By the early 1960s, direct-action protest, civil disobedience, and student activism had inspired other white scholars to rethink the romanticized histories of the South that they had learned as schoolchildren.
The movement inspired this new generation of historians (Black and white alike) to focus on the history of Black resistance, including the Civil Rights Movement itself. These works were not without flaw. Many of the studies that emerged in the 1970s were often seduced by sources — television, media accounts, legislation, and political drama drove the history. Steven F. Lawson, the author of an influential 1976 political history, later recognized that depictions of the movement were disproportionately concerned with “legislative and judicial triumphs.”
By the late 1970s and early 80s, however, “new histories” were recounting a richer and more diverse version of American history. These works demonstrated how people other than white men had been active participants in the American democratic experience.
In the 1980s, as conservatives began to chip away at civil rights legislation, especially the Voting Rights Act of 1965, historians found an even greater sense of urgency. It was in this era that social historians started shifting their gaze from the heroes and leaders of the Civil Rights Movement to the rank-and-file activists who gave rise to the monumental legislation of the 1960s.
The continued Republican assault on civil rights legislation (e.g. voting rights, affirmative action remedies, fair housing measures, etc.) throughout the 1980s yielded more scholarship in the 90s that further explored the role local people played in the struggle for voting and economic rights. Historians — many of them former activists themselves — sought to inspire contemporary Americans by showing them how everyday people were essential to the struggle for rights. Relying on oral histories with grassroots activists who had been active in the movement in between the era’s well-known flashpoints, scholars demonstrated how local organizations and activism made the movement “from the ground up.”
By the turn of the century, historians were also elongating their gaze on what came to be known as the “Long Civil Rights Movement.” In many ways, the movement’s legislative achievements had overshadowed its origins in earlier traditions of activism. The “traditional phase” of the movement, spanning from the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1954 to the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, was part of a much larger, and longer, movement of people activating the machinery of their communities to battle Jim Crow on a daily basis. Black Americans fought the rise of lynching in the late 19th century, resisted segregation on modern conveyances in the early 20th century, battled against racist zoning laws of the 1910s, organized labor unions during the Great Depression, attempted to redirect New Deal resources to their communities, and flirted with socialism and communism after the previous strategies failed.
Subsequent histories of the “long civil rights movement” also pushed the boundaries of struggle beyond the South. From the backlash to the Watts Rebellion to counter-protests against Martin Luther King’s fair housing march in Chicago, they demonstrated that the scourge of racism doesn’t respect regional boundaries.
At the same time that historians have adjusted the chronology and geography of the Civil Rights movement, they have also revived the movement’s economic dimension.
Some scholars, for instance, assert that the Civil Rights era began in the early 1940s with “civil rights unionism.” They highlight the organizing of a Black working-class as well as civil rights efforts within interracial labor-based organizations and coalitions. Legal historians, too, have pointed to the ways that economic and labor justice were a central focus of the NAACP in the 1930s and 40s.
A new focus on class and labor in the pre-WWII era has also helped to recharacterize historical scholarship on civil rights litigation, which for decades was portrayed through the lens of public school integration. Scholars have demonstrated that the NAACP — known mostly for its desegregationist efforts — also had a strong focus on labor in the 1940s. The group’s legal efforts were reflected in its membership as well. Although it is known for being predominantly middle-class, the NAACP’s working-class membership increased during this period. Many of these working-class members would go on to organize voting-rights efforts nearly a decade the Voting Rights Act was passed.
Historians have restored economic demands to the center of the movement’s story — from the “don’t buy where you can’t work” campaigns of the 1930s to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Even the Montgomery Improvement Association — the organization behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott — initially demanded that the city hire Black bus drivers. Black citizens represented most riders, yet the bus company excluded them from their workforce.
Recent histories have also explored the economic aspects of the movement’s student activism. When the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee started organizing in the Mississippi Delta region in the early 1960s, it joined an already-established organizing tradition led by local people. For decades, Black folk in the rural South had organized in an environment with limited upward mobility and poor working conditions. Their communities were subject to various forms of violence, some of it targeted at Black businesses and landowners whose financial independence angered local whites.
Black political activism was almost always about community control and the protection of resources. For instance, while it was her testimony at the 1964 Democratic Convention that made national news, Fannie Lou Hamer focused much of her energy on the Freedom Farm Cooperative, which helped Black farmers liberate themselves from economic exploitation by white landowners. Hamer, as well as a long list of women that included Ella Baker and Septima Clark, often acted as “bridge leaders,” centering poor and working-class people as the heart of their organizing efforts.
Despite the academic turn towards the Long Civil Rights Movement, many school children still learn only about sit-ins and street protests. Young people can recount episodes from the struggle to desegregate schools and public accommodations, but other key aspects of the movement are not being taught at all.
This version of civil rights history is framed as a means of fostering good citizenship by focusing on stories of progress. But to focus on the triumph narrative whitewashes the drawn-out struggle against Black poverty that outlasted the struggle for civil rights.
African Americans in the 1960s knew that they “couldn’t eat freedom.” Dollar bills were as important as ballots in the struggle for Black equality. That, at least, was the reality for many Black Americans by the end of the 1960s.
As we think about the Civil Rights Movement and its aftermath — mechanization in the agricultural industry, deindustrialization and divestment in urban areas, gentrification, struggles against environmental racism and exploitation of natural disasters — it is essential that the struggle continues.
This review is part of New Ideas in American History, an initiative from New American History that features essays by historians about some of the most interesting recent books in the field.
