Summary Of Charles Payne's Top-Down Approach

Challenging a narrative that almost exclusively focuses on the actions of presidents, federal officials, and the most prominent of the nation’s civil rights leaders, Charles Payne devotes his attention to the other side, “the view from the trenches,” to provide us with the bottom-up perspective of the civil rights movement. However, more than just being a mere corrective of a top-down approach, Payne’s essay provides a general critique of a White-centered narrative that conceals much of the movement’s complexity and diversity to fit into the larger storyline of American progress. Focusing on the less well-known leaders and local activists who dedicated their lives to the struggle against racial and social injustice, Payne creates a narrative

that has present and future activism for racial and social justice clearly in mind.

While Payne’s addition is more than overdue, at times he falls into the trap of replacing rather than dismantling notions of moralism by juxtaposing leadership models that operated on different political levels.
In order to understand our contemporary situation, Payne argues, we need to understand the struggles of the past. The latter can only materialize when historians present the story of the civil rights movement in a more comprehensive way by including its most central players—the people on the ground. Payne’s approach thus speaks to the fact that the civil rights revolution was as much, if not even more, a victory of “ordinary” people than it was a concerted negotiation effort between “great men.” For Payne, this is important in several respects: without understanding that the long-term activism on the ground was crucial to initiate and eventually effect change, people get the wrong idea about the ways social and political transformation can be accomplished. Moreover, local actors

were also instrumental in assuring that the hard-won legislation would be implemented in their cities and towns long after the telegenic marches had come to a close. This is another crucial point that is often not sufficiently addressed in top-down narratives, which regularly suggest that the passage of civil rights legislation was the movement’s endpoint, as if these laws were self-enforcing or universally embraced. As such, Payne criticizes not only the scholarly neglect of the grassroots, but also the narrow timeline upon which many scholars rely, because it excludes the activism that preceded and succeeded the short period during which the federal government reluctantly embraced the struggle for full citizenship rights. In addition, Payne’s essay also counters the myth that moral considerations were more convincing than economic ones in changing the attitudes of most Whites. Just as it challenges the common notion that the extreme racist violence that existed in some regions could have been overcome solely through non-violent means.
However, local initiatives alone would never have been able to generate the legislation or legal revision that was necessary to get racial segregation and other discriminatory practices off the books.

While the national government was anything but a reliable partner when it came to the protection of civil rights activists, its cooperation at least ensured that the pro-segregationists could no longer excuse their brutal actions by suggesting that they “enforced” the law while the civil rights activists were breaking it. In the long run, no matter how violent the reactions, the legitimacy and the authority of the victories before the Supreme Court officially vindicated and constitutionally undergirded the activists’ actions. The fact that so many local chapters had formed under the umbrella of the NAACP and the SCLC made them a natural partner for federal negotiations. This does not mean that the whole process could and should have been handled more democratically, or that the national leaders could have directed more of the attention and the acclaim to the tremendous and often extremely dangerous work of local

activists.
The fact that organizations like the NAACP and the SCLC reflected a society-wide gender bias is more than unfortunate, especially if we consider the central role that women played in the movement. However, it also had the “positive” effect that it forced people like Ella Baker to quit and found organizations that would constitute a crucial counterbalance to the sexist and elitist approaches of the established civil rights groups, who, as Baker’s long-time efforts illustrate, were rather unresponsive to reform efforts from within. Even if Ella Baker’s more than well-informed advice had been heard, its impact would very likely not have been the same. The complexity and the diversity of interests and goals among African Americans that Payne illustrates could have not been addressed by a few major organizations.
Moreover, as Payne illustrates at the end of his essay, the role and the activism of central leaders of the movement has been distorted in many accounts. Few top-down narrations explicate the tensions that existed between the politicians and the movement leaders on the national level. However, what they speak to are the realities of every-day-politics: as empowering as the participatory approach of civil rights leaders like Ella Baker and Septima Clark was, at the end, the rules of the U.S. political system required some form of national leadership that could partake in the negotiation process. Let us be clear, this process was far from democratic, nor was it equal, and often it depended on the visual presence of a more radical position or more far-reaching demands to be successful, but there was no real alternative to this process.