On Fire

Five Civil Rights Sit-Ins and the Rhetoric of Protest

Sean Patrick O'Rourke, Lesli K. Pace, Sean Patrick O'Rourke, Lesli K. Pace, Lesli K. Pace, Sean Patrick O'Rourke

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781643361611
• eBook ISBN: 9781643361628
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The social, political, and legal struggles that made up the American civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century produced and refined a wide range of rhetorical strategies and tactics. Arguably the most astonishing and certainly the least understood are the sit-in protests that swept the nation at the beginning of the 1960s. A companion to Like Wildfire: The Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Sit-Ins, this concentrated collection of essays examines the origins and rhetorical methods of five distinct civil rights sit-ins of 1960.

For students of rhetoric, protest, and sociopolitical movements, this volume demonstrates how we can read the sit-ins by using diverse rhetorical lenses as essentially persuasive conflicts in which participants invented and deployed arguments and actions in attempts to change segregated communities and the attitudes, traditions, and policies that maintained segregation.

Table of contents

• Cover
• ON FIRE
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Five Civil Rights Sit-Ins and the Rhetoric of Protest
• Reading Bodies, Reading Books: A Rhetorical History of the 1960 Greenville, South Carolina, Sit-Ins
• Nothing New for Easter: Rhetoric, Collective Action, and the Louisville Sit-In Movement
• The Charlotte, North Carolina, and Rock Hill, South Carolina, Sit-Ins: Constitutive Publics and the Role of Audience
• Visual Narratives, Christian Rhetoric, and Kairos: The New Orleans Woolworth’s Sit-In
• Afterword: The Embers that Remain
• Selected Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index