Françoise N. Hamlin & Charles W. McKinney 
From Rights to Lives 
The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle

Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #Black Lives Matter 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.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: “From Rights to Lives: History Matters” by Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. Mc Kinney Jr.



Chapter 1: “‘Sincerely, Your Grandparents’ Hands’: Elucidating Similarities between the Trayvon Martin Generation of #Black Lives Matter and the Emmett Till Generation of the Civil Rights Movement” by Charity Clay



Chapter 2: “Continuity and Change: The Spirituality of Liberation in the Black Lives Matter Movement” by Christophe D. Ringer



Chapter 3: “Good Cops?” by Peter Pihos



Chapter 4: “‘We May Have to Defend Ourselves’: Black Women and Campaigns against Police Sexual Violence during the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter Eras” by Althea Legal-Miller



Chapter 5: “Revolts of the Black Athletes: Race, Sport, and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter” by Scott N. Brooks and Aram Goudsouzian



Chapter 6: “The Search for Truth and Justice: A Diasporic Black Freedom Struggle” by Kishauna Soljour



Chapter 7: “The Ambivalence of Activist Photography: July 10, 2016” by David V. Mason



Chapter 8: “When the Cultural Revolution Comes: Anthem Making in the Era of BLM” by Mickell Carter​



Postscript: “Miraculous, Magnificent, and Messy”: Rights, Lives, and the Movement in Real Time” by Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. Mc Kinney Jr.



Contributor Bios

Über den Autor

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. Mc Kinney 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.