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by Françoise N. Hamlin (Editor)
Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress. They also share mass-based movement activities, policy/legislative advocacy, grassroots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and dissension-core aspects of movement work-mark them both. Crucially, these moments also engender aggressive, repressive, multilevel responses to these assertions of Black humanity.
From Rights to Lives critically engages the dynamic relationship between these two moments of liberatory possibility on the Black Freedom Struggle timeline. The book's contributors explore what we can learn when we place these moments of struggle in dialogue with each other. They grapple with how our understanding of the postwar moment shapes our analysis of #BLM and wherein lie the discontinuities, in order to glean lessons for future moments of insurgency.Author Biography
Françoise N. Hamlin is the Royce Family Associate Professor of Teaching Excellence in Africana Studies & History at Brown University. She is the author of the award-winning Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II, coeditor of the anthology These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on Citizenship and War, and editor and annotator of the republication of The Struggle of Struggles by activist Vera Pigee.
Charles W. McKinney Jr. is chair of Africana studies and associate professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina, and coeditor of An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee.
