Gore, Dayo F., Jean Theoharis, and Komozi Woodward, eds. Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009.

Title: Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle

Author: Day F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, eds.

Year of Publication: 2009

Thesis:

Using case studies, many of Black women who are and were well-known during the post-war period and beyond, the authors of this collection of essays shift the interpretation from supporters to key architects of Black radicalism. (4) Unique in their own right, each leader brought an intersectional approach, developing long-term, multivalent strategies that build bridges between groups and focused on "women's equality, anticolonialisms, and the redistribution of wealth." (4) The narrow geography, timeline, and lens on Black women paints them as the "backbone" behind movements, but not as leaders. (9) Grouped arguments:

- Anticommunism did not "destroy the black left." (11) - (see essays 1,3,4)

- Binaries begin to blur between integration/separation, nationalism/socialism, feminism/Black Power (see work on Jackson, Kennedy, Oliver, Huggins) (11)

- Respectable/radical (see Parks (12)

- Welfare rights interlinked with citizenship, "self-determination and self-respect." (see: Johnnie Tillmon - 12)

Restated 2/22: Black women were not the silent and subordinated backbone of the Black radical tradition, but rather the vanguard of it. In looking at Black women within the scope of the Long Black Freedom Struggle, this book traces Black women architects and activists from the 1930s through the 1970s and shows how examining their contributions widens the aperture beyond a male-centered lens focused solely on self-defense and separatism. In fact, examining their work demonstrates how women working within and across spaces put into question long-established binaries of integration/separation, nationalism/socialism, and feminism/Black Power.

Time: 1930-1980

Geography: U.S., Ghana, China

Organization:

Acknowledgments

Introduction

- Vicki Garvin's long career in organizing developing from school teacher to academic to labor organizer to pan-African liberation

- She guided Du Bois, Robeson, Williams, Angelou, Malcom X, etc.

- "Leading Man" approach has done a disservice

- This is a redirection; it re-casts already well-known activists in supporting roles to the leading seats they actually had (3)

- Expands "self-defense and separatism" by bringing the discussion back to post-war era and looking at labor and civil rights, as well. (4)

- Pushes on established timelines (Watts riot, 1965 & Carmichael, 1966) especially b/c they leave out women's roles (7)

- A male-oriented lens hides the fact that Black women "also shared a philosophical commitment to and practice of self-defense and armed resistance." (7)

- Charismatic and public leadership: Lillie Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Denise Oliver (13)

- Focus on infrastructure vs. public persona: Yuri Kochiyama & Rosa Parks (13)

- BPP school demonstrates Black women's commitment to the long-term struggle (14)

- Intersectional analysis by Esther Cooper Jackson dates to 1940. (14)

- That is, Black women's entry into feminist movement is not necessarily as separate, but is overlapping and intersecting, and comes much earlier than white feminist orgs in 1960s (15)

- Florynce Kennedy brings white feminists to Black Power meetings (in order to teach them) (15)

- Chisholm points out Farmer's insistence on masculine leadership (15)

- Authors caution against making women activists monolith - differed politically, LGBTQIA +, ideas about mentorship & motherhood, etc. (16)

- "Black women writing in The Black Woman thus sought to reframe intersectionality to demon- strate the interlocking nature of sexism, racism, economic inequality, and homophobia and push black liberation outside the narrow parameters of a “black family affair.”" (19)

1. "No Small Amount of Change Could Do": Esther Cooper Jackson and the Making of a Black Left Feminist - Erik S. McDuffie

2. What "the Cause" Needs Is a "Brainy and Energetic Woman": A Study of Female Charismatic Leadership in Baltimore - Prudence Cumberbatch

3. From Communist Politics to Black Power: The Visionary Politics and Transnational Solidarities of Victoria "Vicki" Ama Garvin - Dayo F. Gore

4. Shirley Graham Du Bois: Portrait of the Black Woman Artist as a Revolutionary - Gerald Horne and Margaret Stevens

5. "A Life History of Being Rebellious": The Radicalism of Rosa Parks - Jean Theoharis

6. Framing the Panther: Assata Shakur and Black Female Agency - Joy James

7. Revolutionary Women, Revolutionary Education: The Black Panther Party's Oakland Community School - Ericka Huggins and Angela D. LeBlanc-Ernest

8. Must Revolution Be a Family Affiar? Revisiting The Black WOman - Margo Natalie Crawford

9. Retraining the Heartworks: Women in Atlanta's Black Arts Movement - James Smethurst

10. "Women's Liberation or . . . Black Liberation, You're Fighting the Same Enemies": Florynce Kennedy, Black Power, and Feminism - Sherie M. Randolph

11. To Make that Someday Come: Shirley Chisholm's Radical Politics of Possibility - Joshua Guild

12. Denise Oliver and the Young Lords Party: Stretching the Political Boundaries of Struggle - Johanna Fernández

13. Grassroots Leadership and Afro-Asian Solidarities: Yuri Kochiyama's Humanizing Radicalism - Diane C. Fujino

14. "We Do Whatever Becomes Necessary": Johnnie Tillmon, Welfare Rights, and Black Power - Premilla Nadasen

About the Contributors

Index

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Widens the aperture of Black radicalism, focusing on politics, antipoverty, union organizing, education, and self-esteem. (5)

Closely examines women's roles as architects, leaders, and thinkers as well as activists, often uncredited. (5)

Pushes back on the notion of "race over gender," showing how Black women "negotiated race, class, and sexuality within thet black left, Black Power, and women's movements." (6)

Cruse (1967) - Drew a line between Black nationalism & integrationists (7)

Long movement scholarship:

- Tyson -Radio Free Dixie

- Singh - Black is a Country

- Biondi - To Stand and Fight

- Self - American Babylon

- Joseph - Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour

People:

- Robeson

- Williams

- Eard Guiner

"...far too many of these studies simply acknowledge various women as key participants and note the damage of sexism and the relevance of gender politics." (8)

Along the lines of this work:

- Payne - I've Got the Light of Freedom

- Dittmer - Local People

- Ransby - Ella Baker

- Belinda Robnett - How Long? How Long?

- See scholarship on SNCC, as well.

Important perspectives that foreground sexism (limitations of Black women):

- Evans - Personal Politics

- Echols - Daring to Be Bad

- Rosen - The World Split Wide Open

- Breines - The Trouble Between Us

- White - Too Heavy a Load

Perspectives that foreground Black women's politics:

- Springer - Living for the Revolution

- Nelson - Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement

- Franklin/Collier-Thomas - Sisters in hte Struggle

- Roth - Spearate Roads to Feminism

On Anti-poverty organizing:

Rhonda Williams - Politics of Public Housing

Premilla Nadasen - Welfare Warriors

Felicia Kornbluh - The Battle for Welfare Rights

Annelise Orleck - Storming Caesar's Palace

Keywords:

"Dominance through mentioning" (8) - 

22. Apple argues, “Dominance is partly maintained here through compromise and the process of ‘mentioning.’ Here limited and isolated elements of the history and culture of less powerful groups are included in the texts. Thus, for example a small and often separate section is included on ‘the contributions of women’ and ‘minority groups,’ but without any substantive elaboration of the view of the world as seen from their perspective.” Michael Apple, Official Knowledge: Democratic Education in a Conservative Age (New York: Routledge, 2000), 61. 

Second-Wave Feminism

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

"Centering the roles and experiences of women in Black Power organizations, their contributions to the majority-white women's movement and the separate organizations and campaigns black women built allows for a clearer view of black women radicals' political interventions in these spaces." (15-16)

"Taken together, these fourteen essays push us to refocus how we un- derstand the history of the black freedom struggle and to reconceptualize the trajectory and cross-fertilization in radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Centering women in this anthology provides a wider lens on the range of postwar black radicalisms and thus a much-expanded view of postwar U.S. social movement history." (19)

Notes:

Very helpful historiographical essay.

See: Toni Cade Bambara - The Black Woman (1970) (16)

Selection of names to pay attention to (incomplete - see pp.17-):

- Esther Cooper (see early feminist analyses)

- Lillie Carroll Jackson (outwardly working in Baltimore & inwardly on sexism w/in NAACP)

- Juanita Jackson Mitchell (outwardly working in Baltimore & inwardly on sexism w/in NAACP)

- Victoria ("Vicki") Ama Garvin (labor, community organizing, women's movement, international connections - Ghana & China) (see mentorship of Malcom X)

- Shirley Graham Du Bois (Ghana & China) (see mentorship of Malcom X)

- Rosa Parks (longer durée of her activism)

- Assata Shakur (esp. on prisons, women's resistance)

- Toni Cade Bambara (feminism & nationalism working together - see: Smethurst)

- Pearl Cleage (feminism & nationalism working together - see: Smethurst)

- Denise Oliver & Yuri Kochiyama ("ethnic boundaries of black radicalism were porous and permeable" (19))

- Johnnie Tillmon - self-defense, self-determination, welfare rights all inextricably tied together

- 

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986.

Title: Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr., and the Southern Christian Ledership Conference

Author: David J. Garrow

Year of Publication: 1986

Thesis:

MLK is portrayed as a reluctant, guilt-ridden, and accidental icon who would have preferred to have been out of the spotlight but recognized his own death was his cross to bear, so to speak. King's philandering takes center stage as the FBI threatens to publicly dismantle him, meaning his decisions were not always guided by conscience, but a guilty conscience, and Garrow expends much effort in demonstrating this dynamic. 

Time: Mostly 1955-1968

Geography:

Organization:

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Personal papers, FBI surveillance, massive body of oral interviews, 

Historiography:

Keywords:

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

Notes: Won Pulitzer prize

Frazier, Nishani. Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2017.

Title: Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism

Author: Nishani Frazier

Year of Publication: 2017

Thesis:

Demonstrates how CORE was influenced by and influenced the Black Power Movement, highlighting its efforts to desegregate in the 40s, as well as its model of shared community ownership (more nuanced than the Nixon administration's pivoting of Black Power as Black Capitalism).

Time: 1940s-1970s

Geography: Cleveland, OH

Organization:

Preface: The Whiz behind the Curtain
- Describes the author's reluctance to make plain her use of oral history and her own family's history in her work. The confusion was around the way oral history (particularly Black oral history) needs to be explained and justified and can quickly become mired in questions of objectivity.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Things like That Happen in History
- Not an even balance between means/ends
- Roy Innis doesn't encompass BP shift
I. "...highlights early variances in CORE philosophy before it reached a full expression of black power in the mid-1960s" (xxxiii)
1. How CORE Began
- 1942-1945
- origins, nuances, dissonance with FOR (Fellowship of Reconciliation)
- James Farmer - prodigy student @ Howard/Columbia, introduced to FOR (started in 1914 by Christian pacifists. Bayard Rustin also a member. 
- See: "Brotherhood Mobilization Plan"
- See: Jack Spratt coffeehouse sit-in - (Black people reluctant to join with nonviolent protest as centerpiece)
- MOWM features black leadership vs. CORE
- Depression boosts Black self-help in Cleveland
- Also attempts to desegregate the city. See hot dog incident, Euclid beach, etc.
2. Negroes Will Not Be Pacifists
- 1946-1953
- Examines non-conformists w/in CORE "related to self-defense, black nationalist philosophy, and...protest etiquette." (xxxiii)
<--demonstrates a longer tradition of militancy (xxxiii)
3. An Eager Band
- 1962-1964
- shift to black leaders/revival of Cleveland CORE (CORE was mostly white run early on)
4. Lonely Are the Brave
- 1964
- School desegregation
<--local activists can "can influence chapter developments and push it beyond the boundaries set by national office." (xxxiv)
II. Black Power Era (xxxiv)
- CORE moves from local to national & serves as a site of national policy making (xxxiv)
5. New Directions to Black Power
- 1962-1965
- local politics leaning more strongly toward Black Power (xxxiv) 
<---"Chapter 5 represents the fluid dynamics among local, regional, and national events that move all of COE ever closer to black power." (xxxiv)
6. Breaking the Noose
- 1965-1966
- White leadership declines
- Target City Projects (ballot / bullet to elect Carl Stokes)
- Carl Stokes - 1967 - "first black mayor of a major urban city" (xxxiv)
7. Harambee City
8. A Nation under Our Feet
- "Community Self Determination Bill" - goal to establish a "federally backed community development corporation." (xxxiv)
9. Until
Notes
Index
Type:
Methods: Chronological + thematic 
Sources: Uses familiial & oral histories
Historiography:
George Houser - Erasing the Color Line (1951)
James Peck - Cracking the Color Line (1961)
James Farmer - Freedom When? (1965)
Meier & Rudwick - CORE (1973)
James Farmer - Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (1998)
Brian Purnell - Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn (2013)

Keywords: black power populism

"Black power populism encapsulated socialist elements of wealth sharing that forced the American economic system to open its doors to more citizens. From 1966 to 1969, a few CORE leaders fashioned and pushed through an economic project which sought to broaden capitalism and turn one black community into an economic force. They choce the city of Cleveland, Ohio, as the site of this experiment, and named the project Harambee, a Swahili word meaning pull together and connoting the idea of self-help. Harambee's placement in Cleveland was a direct outgrowth of the rise of local CORE members into the national office whose critique of capitalism and advocacy of community control paved the way for Harambee's existence. More than any site, Cleveland represented teh best of black power populist efforts to reshape and empower the black community, and the ways in which it did so form the structure of my mother's CORE." (xxxiii)

Themes: "means" vs. "ends" oriented. Former tied to ideology of nonviolence; latter not (xxx-xxxi)
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:

"My mother, aunts, and uncles were, in fact, authoritative sources of historical knowledge (not just facst) about CORE's black power period. Why should I not tell 'their' story? How could I not tell their story given their influence in CORE's black power era?" (xv)

"Therein lay the difference between how I understood oral history's import versus other historians including Meier and Rudwick. For me, oral history interviews were more than a compilation of facts, data, and proof. I'd seen how the philosophical transformation of CORE to black power worked its way into my mother and famiy's personal, professional, and political lives--long after the organization's demise. Black power was not a failure. Its lessons lived with them and in them long after their CORE died. To understand their experience, you had to do more than speak to them. You had to hear. You had to know. And through it, I came to appreciate a different CORE." (xvi)

Notes:

The preface is a very useful account with references in defense of oral history and particularly when it comes from family. 

Engages with testimonio on p. xvi. - see Walter Ong. See Michael Frisch (shared authority)

Difficult to locate book - not readily in stacks at UO & copy is $40 on Amazon - intro is mostly available there w/pieces of some chapters. aug, 2020) 

See Frazier's website here: HARAMBEE CITY

See podcast interview here: Ep. 12: Black Power Vs. Black Capitalism (W/ Nishani Frazier) by The Next System Podcast | Free Listening on SoundCloud

From interview: Centered not in black nationalism but debate comes through requests for gov't supported community-based projects designed to give Black people access to capitalism.
1. CORE failed to institutionalize the economic reforms
2. Couldn't be economically independent from outside sources of funding.
3. DID, however, figure out how to run an entire economic ecosystem

The Return of Black Political Power: How 1970s History Can Guide New Black Mayors Toward a Radical City

(88) Nishani Frazier: The Sounds of Blackness: Space and Sound Preservation as Oral History Advocacy - YouTube

Excellent presentation & features a rich discussion of the gentrification of sound.

Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Title: But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in Civil Rights.

Author: Glenn Eskew

Year of Publication: 1997

Thesis:

Argues that over attention to continuity in the struggle for Civil and Human Rights have the effect of obscuring indigenous actions linked to and within a national movement, where organizations such as FOR, CORE, SNCC, NAACP, and SLCLC could channel funding, guidance, and national attention along with tension between local and national interests (NAACP as a good example). By focusing on discontinuities in the Movement, Eskew is able to better draw these connections, demonstrating how the SCLC developed as a local response to the national/local tensions between leaders. He also does a remarkable job of demonstrating how the conditions for these initially reformist protests lay squarely within regional political economies (see: diff between analysis of Birmingham & Atlanta).

Time: 1950s-60s

Geography: Birmingham/U.S.

Organization:

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Stalemate

- Describes a jubilant stalemate in which Black protestors had overrun the police's capacity to continue making arrests. (3)

- Bull Connor's violent tactics on a national stage (4)

- *5/2/63 - Children's March - signals a strategy shift (4)

- Regardless Connor sends hoses and dogs after the protestors (6)

- Not a revolution - requests were economic and social reforms (equal access to jobs, pay equality, busing, etc.) despite how white media/people depicted it (7)

- *"Dynamite Hill" is largely where Black professionals lived (8) --> this needs to be a point driven home in lectures - it attaches to Carol Anderson & others' main arguments on white violence & maintaining social & economic inequality.

- Gives a good overview of the economic and racial disparities by profession, split by gender, in the various neighborhoods + description of major industries (9-ish on)

- Outside corporate interests control Birmingham (particularly U.S. Steel), which enforced a lower-than-national-average for white people but lower-than-white-average wage for African Americans (10-11)

- W/M-C lives over the hill, and Black folks disenfranchised, so of 340k ppl, 80k registered, only 40k voting, political power is held in the hands of U.S. steel folks, store owners, & police. (11)

- Lower m/c white groups band together in various groups to influence politics often with conservative or white supremacist bent -- meaning lower m/c and upper m/c whites/elites coincide on racist agendas (11)

- Racial political economy meant Birmingham w/s leaders were less likely to want to negotiate, but local shopkeepers were one area of importance as they were losing $. (12-13)

- Senior Citizens Committee labeled white power structure in Birmingham - these are the principle negotiators (13)

- Comparison w/Atlanta - Coca-Cola local & prefers $ to segregation and uses their clout to influence local policy & push for token reforms (14)

- "With the collapse of industrial paternalism and the rise of the service-consumer economy in the South, African Americans organized indigenous civil rights groups to agitate for full integration into the American system." (14)

- SCLC develops in response to tensions between local movements and NAACP - this is framed as a class conflict (16)

One - The National Movement

Two - Bombingham

Three - Bull's Birmingham

Four - The Local Movement

Five - Businessmen's Reform

Six - Momentum

Seven - Another Albany?

Eight - The Children's Crusade

Nine - But for Birmingham

Epilogue. Ambiguous Resolution

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Type:

Methods:

Sources:

Historiography:

Aldon Morris - "movement centers" (15)

Keywords:

Themes:

Critiques:

Questions:

Quotes:

"But for Birmingham, we would not be here today." - Fred Shuttlesworth (1)

"The use of a discriminatory race wage kept the working class divided along racial lines, with white workers earning more than black workers but both below the national scale. As an outpost in the colonial economy, Birmingham's industrial sector produced raw, unfinished materials using cheap, unskilled labor. Dominated by the iron and steel interests, the chamber of commerce articulated Birmingham's strategic policy, which conformed to the desires of U.S. Steel. No alternative group effectively challenged this rule, although the labor movement, black activists, progressives, and the lower middle class competed over nonstrategic policy, the day-to-day issues addressed through local politics. Birmingham's outside- owned industrial base, its lack of indigenous capital, and its heretofore absence of reformminded businessmen hindered change." (10-11)

"As Time magazine recognized in 1958, Birmingham's white community had nothing to gain from desegregation except competition with black workers over a limited number of low-wage jobs." (12) - Curious about these dynamics now - appears that white supremacist ideology continues to view economic opportunity as a zero-sum game. See footnote 15.

"As long as the city's political economy rested on racial discrimination, legal and extralegal violence resisted challenges to segregation. Thus when civil rights activists took to the streets in the spring of 1963 to break the stalemate in race relations, Birmingham, unlike other southern cities, refused to negotiate. Bull Connor's brutal attempt to suppress the protests logically evolved from Birmingham's industrial heritage with its peculiar socioeconomic and political composition." (12)

On the book's central argument:

"It is increasingly clear that changes in the South's political economy contributed to the collapse of the old racial order.17 It is also apparent that the struggle to create a new racial order in the region involved forces on the local and national levels. To understand the civil rights struggle, one must understand the intersection of the local and national movements. Historians have analyzed the civil rights struggle from the top down and the bottom up. Recent studies have offered a synthesis of the two approaches, but most have obscured the origins of the movement within a cloud of relativism that borders on ahistoricism as scholars search deeper into the past to find continuities in black protest.18 Supporting discontinuity instead, this study analyzes ideology and argues that the civil rights move

ment began when local black activists in the South organized new indigenous protest groups in the 1950s and 1960s that demanded immediate and equal access to the system. 19 Headed by ''race men," or, as King called them, "New Negroes," the local movements marked a departure in black protest as the new leaders appealed to a mass base by refusing to accommodate Jim Crow.20 These local organizations aligned with a national movement that had been fighting for southern race reform for decades from its power base in the North. The two distinctive movements appealed to the federal government for relief through the courts, the halls of Congress, and the chief executive's office. The interplay of these forces combined with the resistance of southern white people marked the emergence of the civil rights movement." (14-15)

On reasons for Brown's issues:

"The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling was the legal precedent that announced the inevitability of desegregation. Yet the president's policy of federalism, which left race reform and the protection of civil rights workers in the hands of local authorities, and the stranglehold in Congress exercised by southern legislators underscored the difficulty of altering race relations from the top down." (17)

Notes: