Title: But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in Civil Rights.
Author: Glenn Eskew
Year of Publication: 1997
Thesis:
Argues that over attention to continuity in the struggle for Civil and Human Rights have the effect of obscuring indigenous actions linked to and within a national movement, where organizations such as FOR, CORE, SNCC, NAACP, and SLCLC could channel funding, guidance, and national attention along with tension between local and national interests (NAACP as a good example). By focusing on discontinuities in the Movement, Eskew is able to better draw these connections, demonstrating how the SCLC developed as a local response to the national/local tensions between leaders. He also does a remarkable job of demonstrating how the conditions for these initially reformist protests lay squarely within regional political economies (see: diff between analysis of Birmingham & Atlanta).
Time: 1950s-60s
Geography: Birmingham/U.S.
Organization:
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Stalemate
- Describes a jubilant stalemate in which Black protestors had overrun the police's capacity to continue making arrests. (3)
- Bull Connor's violent tactics on a national stage (4)
- *5/2/63 - Children's March - signals a strategy shift (4)
- Regardless Connor sends hoses and dogs after the protestors (6)
- Not a revolution - requests were economic and social reforms (equal access to jobs, pay equality, busing, etc.) despite how white media/people depicted it (7)
- *"Dynamite Hill" is largely where Black professionals lived (8) --> this needs to be a point driven home in lectures - it attaches to Carol Anderson & others' main arguments on white violence & maintaining social & economic inequality.
- Gives a good overview of the economic and racial disparities by profession, split by gender, in the various neighborhoods + description of major industries (9-ish on)
- Outside corporate interests control Birmingham (particularly U.S. Steel), which enforced a lower-than-national-average for white people but lower-than-white-average wage for African Americans (10-11)
- W/M-C lives over the hill, and Black folks disenfranchised, so of 340k ppl, 80k registered, only 40k voting, political power is held in the hands of U.S. steel folks, store owners, & police. (11)
- Lower m/c white groups band together in various groups to influence politics often with conservative or white supremacist bent -- meaning lower m/c and upper m/c whites/elites coincide on racist agendas (11)
- Racial political economy meant Birmingham w/s leaders were less likely to want to negotiate, but local shopkeepers were one area of importance as they were losing $. (12-13)
- Senior Citizens Committee labeled white power structure in Birmingham - these are the principle negotiators (13)
- Comparison w/Atlanta - Coca-Cola local & prefers $ to segregation and uses their clout to influence local policy & push for token reforms (14)
- "With the collapse of industrial paternalism and the rise of the service-consumer economy in the South, African Americans organized indigenous civil rights groups to agitate for full integration into the American system." (14)
- SCLC develops in response to tensions between local movements and NAACP - this is framed as a class conflict (16)
One - The National Movement
Two - Bombingham
Three - Bull's Birmingham
Four - The Local Movement
Five - Businessmen's Reform
Six - Momentum
Seven - Another Albany?
Eight - The Children's Crusade
Nine - But for Birmingham
Epilogue. Ambiguous Resolution
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Aldon Morris - "movement centers" (15)
Keywords:
Themes:
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:
"But for Birmingham, we would not be here today." - Fred Shuttlesworth (1)
"The use of a discriminatory race wage kept the working class divided along racial lines, with white workers earning more than black workers but both below the national scale. As an outpost in the colonial economy, Birmingham's industrial sector produced raw, unfinished materials using cheap, unskilled labor. Dominated by the iron and steel interests, the chamber of commerce articulated Birmingham's strategic policy, which conformed to the desires of U.S. Steel. No alternative group effectively challenged this rule, although the labor movement, black activists, progressives, and the lower middle class competed over nonstrategic policy, the day-to-day issues addressed through local politics. Birmingham's outside- owned industrial base, its lack of indigenous capital, and its heretofore absence of reformminded businessmen hindered change." (10-11)
"As Time magazine recognized in 1958, Birmingham's white community had nothing to gain from desegregation except competition with black workers over a limited number of low-wage jobs." (12) - Curious about these dynamics now - appears that white supremacist ideology continues to view economic opportunity as a zero-sum game. See footnote 15.
"As long as the city's political economy rested on racial discrimination, legal and extralegal violence resisted challenges to segregation. Thus when civil rights activists took to the streets in the spring of 1963 to break the stalemate in race relations, Birmingham, unlike other southern cities, refused to negotiate. Bull Connor's brutal attempt to suppress the protests logically evolved from Birmingham's industrial heritage with its peculiar socioeconomic and political composition." (12)
On the book's central argument:
"It is increasingly clear that changes in the South's political economy contributed to the collapse of the old racial order.17 It is also apparent that the struggle to create a new racial order in the region involved forces on the local and national levels. To understand the civil rights struggle, one must understand the intersection of the local and national movements. Historians have analyzed the civil rights struggle from the top down and the bottom up. Recent studies have offered a synthesis of the two approaches, but most have obscured the origins of the movement within a cloud of relativism that borders on ahistoricism as scholars search deeper into the past to find continuities in black protest.18 Supporting discontinuity instead, this study analyzes ideology and argues that the civil rights move
ment began when local black activists in the South organized new indigenous protest groups in the 1950s and 1960s that demanded immediate and equal access to the system. 19 Headed by ''race men," or, as King called them, "New Negroes," the local movements marked a departure in black protest as the new leaders appealed to a mass base by refusing to accommodate Jim Crow.20 These local organizations aligned with a national movement that had been fighting for southern race reform for decades from its power base in the North. The two distinctive movements appealed to the federal government for relief through the courts, the halls of Congress, and the chief executive's office. The interplay of these forces combined with the resistance of southern white people marked the emergence of the civil rights movement." (14-15)
On reasons for Brown's issues:
"The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling was the legal precedent that announced the inevitability of desegregation. Yet the president's policy of federalism, which left race reform and the protection of civil rights workers in the hands of local authorities, and the stranglehold in Congress exercised by southern legislators underscored the difficulty of altering race relations from the top down." (17)
Notes: