From Rights to Lives

The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle

Françoise N. Hamlin, Charles W. McKinney, Françoise N. Hamlin, Charles W. McKinney, Charles W. McKinney, Jr.

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9780826506658
  9780826506665
• eBook ISBN:
  9780826506672
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. From Rights to Lives: History Matters
• 1. “Sincerely, Your Grandparents’ Hands”: Elucidating Similarities between the Trayvon Martin Generation of #BlackLivesMatter and the Emmett Till Generation of the Civil Rights Movement
• 2. Continuity and Change: The Spirituality of Liberation in the Black Lives Matter Movement
• 3. Good Cops?
• 4. “We May Have to Defend Ourselves”: Black Women and Campaigns against Police Sexual Violence during the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter Eras
• 5. Revolts of the Black Athletes: Race, Sport, and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter
• 6. The Search for Truth and Justice: A Diasporic Black Freedom Struggle
• 7. The Ambivalence of Activist Photography: July 10, 2016
• 8. When the Cultural Revolution Comes: Anthem Making in the Era of BLM
• Postscript. “Miraculous, Magnificent, and Messy”: Rights, Lives, and the Movement in Real Time
• Contributors