Charles Eagles: Study Of The Civil Rights Movement

In 2000, Charles Eagles called for a new approach to the study of the civil rights movement. One that would not just include a revision of parts of the existing scholarship, or tropes that have captured the popular imagination, but that would further addresses facets of the movement that have yet to receive the attention they deserve. However, Eagles not merely called for the broadening of the scholarship to further illuminate the complexities of the far from homogenous movement, rather, his essay also pointed at some of the weaknesses of past and present research that stems from the fact that many civil rights historians identify themselves as historian activists, whose scholarship is shaped by the ongoing struggle for social and racial equality.

At times, this has led to a scholarship that tends to gloss over the weaknesses and mistakes activists made along the way, in a larger effort to correct simplistic and distorted narratives of the civil rights past. While Eagles suggested that the activist scholarship was not likely to disappear in the near future, his essay accredited the at that time already ongoing revision of the traditional civil rights narrative, as represented in the readings for today’s class, as all four authors discuss little acknowledged facets of the movement.

Hence, at a time when Steven F. Lawson and Charles M. Payne still argued about whether the view from the nation or the trenches would be the best way to approach the history of the civil rights movement, Robin D.G. Kelley had already examined the long and deep roots of the movement through the lens of working class activism in the South. Given the of necessity mostly hidden character of Black workers’ resistance to White supremacy, Kelley illustrates the richness of unorganized, everyday resistance to a system of racist oppression that obviously restricted the way African Americans could voice their grievances. Adding to Payne’s own research on the importance of grassroots activism, Kelley’s article already foreshadows some

By introducing Malcolm X as the most prominent proponent of early Black Power activism, Joseph calls for a reassessment of the similarities and the differences between civil rights and Black Power activists. Criticizing a scholarship that commonly downplays the activism and the community programs of Black Power advocates, and that tends to remain silent on its distinct philosophical roots, Joseph calls for a revision of historical accounts that presents the Black Power era largely as the ultimate decline of a civil rights coalition that enjoyed broad biracial support. Ending a narrative that juxtaposes the aims and goals of the civil rights and the Black Power movement would allow scholar to identify the overlaps between the two activist traditions, but also to illustrate the lasting impact the politics of Black Power had in the different realms of American