Over the last several years, the traditional narrative of the civil rights movement as largely a southern phenomenon, organized primarily by male leaders, that roughly began with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and ended with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has been complicated by studies that root the movement in smaller communities across the country. These local movements had varying agendas and organizational development, geared to the particular circumstances, resources, and regions in which they operated. Local civil rights activists frequently worked in tandem with the national civil rights movement but often functioned autonomously from - and sometimes even at odds with - the national movement. Together, the pathbreaking essays in Groundwork teach us that local civil rights activity was a vibrant component of the larger civil rights movement, and contributed greatly to its national successes. Individually, the pieces offer dramatic new insights about the civil rights movement, such as the fact that a militant black youth organization in Milwaukee was led by a white Catholic priest and in Cambridge, Maryland, by a middle-aged black woman; that a group of middle-class, professional black women spearheaded Jackson, Mississippi's movement for racial justice and made possible the continuation of the Freedom Rides, and that, despite protests from national headquarters, the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality staged a dramatic act of civil disobedience at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. No previous volume has enabled readers to examine several different local movements together, and in so doing, Groundwork forges a far more comprehensive vision of the black freedom movement.
Foreword Introduction"They Told Us Our Kids Were Stupid": Ruth Batson & the Educational Movement in Boston "Drive Awhile for Freedom": Brooklyn CORE's Stall-In & Public Discourses on Protest Violence Message from the Grassroots: The Black Power Experiment in NewarkGloria Richardson & the Civil Rights Movement in CambridgeWe've Come a Long Way: Septima Clark, the Warings, & the Changing Civil Rights Movement Organizing for More Than the Vote: The Political Radicalization of Local People in Lowndes County "God's Appointed Savior": Charles Evers's Use of Local Movements for National Stature Local Women & the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi: Re-visioning Woman power Unlimited The Stirrings of the Modern Civil Rights Movement in Cincinnati"We Cannot Wait for Understanding to Come to Us": Community Activists Respond to Violence at Detroit's Northwestern High School"Not a Color, but an Attitude": Father James Groppi and Black Power Politics in Milwaukee Practical Internationalists: The Story of the Des Moines, Black Panther Party Inside the Panther Revolution: The Black Freedom Movement and the Black Panther Party in OaklandAbout the Contributors
