![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Imaginative sources are a rich archival store. Facts may be as slippery as the sources in which they are contained, but to limit the sources we use in building a civil rights historiography is to risk curtailing the reach and interdisciplinary scope of historical scholarship. We need to read imaginative and subjective sources as objects for the study, analysis and explanation of the Civil Rights Movement. In civil rights, as in other historical subjects, there is a privileging of an ‘objective’, detached approach to historiography in which ‘the knower’ is made distinct from what is known, and fact distinct from its imaginative representation. Monteith's essay argues that much can be gained by examining those sources in which the feeling of the movement is explored sensitively and intellectually—or even exploited. Organizers in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Freedom Summer volunteers chose to represent the movement in fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction, and found themselves represented in fiction films. Monteith argues that imagination and emotion should be more closely incorporated into civil rights history writing but attention needs to be paid to genre and style if generically unstable sources are not to be misread as unadorned fact.
Notes
1 Val Gray Ward's untitled review of Sweet Honey in the Rock's eponymous 1976 album in Paid My Dues: Journal of Women and Music, vol. 2, no. 1, Autumn 1977, 34–5. Little was acquitted of the murder in 1979.
2 Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press 1998); Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida 2004).
3 See Keith D. Miller, Voice of Deliverance: The Language of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Its Sources (New York: Free Press 1992); and Richard Lischer, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Word That Moved America (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1995).
4 See Glenford E. Mitchell and William H. Peace III (eds), The Angry Black South (New York: Corinth 1962); Benjamin Muse, The American Negro Revolution: From Nonviolence to Black Power (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1968); Tom P. Brady, Black Monday (Winona, MS: Association of Citizens’ Councils 1955); and James Clark, I Saw Selma Raped (Birmingham, AL: Selma Enterprises 1966).
5 Pauley, quoted in Katherine L. Nasstrom, ‘Beginnings and endings: life stories and the periodization of the Civil Rights Movement’, Journal of American History, vol. 86, no. 2, 1999, 700–11 (705); and in Katherine L. Nasstrom, Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2000), 167.
6 Pat Watters, Down to Now: Reflections on the Southern Civil Rights Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press 1993), 4.
7 Katherine L. Nasstrom, ‘Between memory and history: autobiographies of the Civil Rights Movement and the writing of civil rights history’, Journal of Southern History, vol. 74, no. 2, 2008, 325–64 (329).
8 Richard Schechner, ‘The FST and me’, in Thomas C. Dent, Richard Schechner and Gilbert Moses (eds), The Free Southern Theater by the Free Southern Theater (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1969), 221.
9 John O'Neal, ‘Some current trends among Afro-American artists in the South’, n.d.: Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, John O'Neal Papers, box 34, folder 38, 1.
10 Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns, ‘Introduction’, in Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns (eds), Doing Emotions History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2014), 1–13 (5).
11 Intellectual history is represented in Richard H. King, Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1992). For the impact of the movement in media and film, see Allison Graham, Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2001); Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2011); and my essays on civil rights film and television in Allison Graham and Sharon Monteith (eds), Media, vol. 18 of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, general ed. Charles Reagan Wilson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2011).
12 There is a burgeoning number of civil rights autobiographies and memoirs in what one critic calls ‘the age of the memoir’: William Zinsser, ‘Introduction’, in William Zinsser (ed.), Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1998), 3–22 (3). In 2008, Katherine Nasstrom counted some sixty books published since 1985 (Nasstrom, ‘Between memory and history’). That number has greatly expanded to include, for example, Bob Zellner with Constance Curry, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement (Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books 2008); Tracy Sugarman, We Had Sneakers, They Had Guns: The Kids Who Fought for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press 2009); and Charles E. Cobb, Jr, This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic Books 2014), among many others.
13 Francesca Polletta, ‘Contending stories: narrative in social movements’, Qualitative Sociology, vol. 21, no. 4, 1998, 419–46 (428).
14 Francesca Polletta, ‘Plotting protest: mobilizing stories in the 1960 student sit-ins’, in Joseph E. Davis (ed.), Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements (Albany: State University of New York Press 2002), 31–52 (35).
15 Jeremy Tambling, Dante in Purgatory: States of Affect (Turhout, Belgium: Brepols 2010), 2; Thomas Scheff, Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, and War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1994), 282.
16 Lerone Bennett, Jr, ‘SNCC: rebels with a cause’, Ebony, vol. 20, no. 9, July 1965, 146–52 (147). Bennett was no doubt reworking Howard Zinn's use of the term in a different context. Zinn's The Southern Mystique, ‘a speculative essay based in personal experience’, was published by Knopf in 1964.
17 I mapped some preliminary ideas about activist fiction and Forman's novel in ‘SNCC's stories at the barricades’, in Iwan Morgan and Philip Davis (eds), From Sit-Ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s (Gainesville: University of Florida Press 2012), 97–115.
18 John Horton and Andre T. Baumeister, ‘Literature, philosophy and political theory’, in John Horton and Andre T. Baumeister (eds), Literature and the Political Imagination (London: Routledge 1996), 1–31 (13).
19 David Dante Troutt, The Monkey Suit, and Other Short Fiction on African Americans and Justice (New York: New Press 1998).
20 René Girard, in ‘Discussion’, in Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly (ed.), Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press 1987), 206–32 (228).
21 Robert Penn Warren, ‘Two for SNCC’, Commentary, vol. 39, April 1965, 38–48 (42).
22 James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries [1972] (Seattle: University of Washington Press 1977), 360. The jazz album by Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, Candid 9002 (1960), can also be read in this context.
23 Gene Patterson, ‘A flower for the graves', Atlanta Constitution, 16 September 1963, available online on the Poynter Institute website at http://www.poynter.org/uncategorized/4761/a-flower-for-the-graves (viewed 18 August 2015).
24 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Afterword: the lesson of Rancière’, in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible [2000], trans. from the French by Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum 2004), 69–79 (77).
25 Pierre Bourdieu, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, trans. from the French by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1999); Candace Vogler, ‘Much of madness and more of sin: compassion, for Ligeia’, in Lauren Berlant (ed.), Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (London and New York: Routledge 2004), 29–58; and Candace Vogler, Reasonably Vicious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2002). Multiple studies speak to these ideas across disciplines.
26 Alice Walker, ‘Silver writes’ [1982], in Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (London: Women's Press 1984), 336.
27 Constance Curry, Silver Rights (San Diego, CA: Harvest Books 1996), xxvii.
28 Charles W. Eagles, ‘Toward new histories of the civil rights era’, Journal of Southern History, vol. 66, no. 4, 2000, 815–48 (817).
29 Richard H. King, ‘The civil rights debate’, in Richard Gray and Owen Robinson (eds), A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South (Oxford: Blackwell 2004), 221–37 (235). See also Richard H. King, ‘The discipline of fact/the freedom of fiction?’, Journal of American Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 1991, 171–88.
30 Eagles, ‘Toward new histories of the civil rights era’, 819; Adam Fairclough, ‘Historians and the Civil Rights Movement’, Journal of American Studies, vol. 24, no. 3, 1990, 387–98 (391).
31 Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 198.
32 Norman, quoted in Cheryl Lynn Greenberg (ed.), A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1998), 187, 178.
33 Michael Thelwell, ‘The Organizer’ [1966] in Michael Thelwell, Duties, Pleasures, and Conflicts: Essays in Struggle (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1987), 3–27 (22).
34 Letter from Margaret Long to Julian Bond, n.d. [1965]: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Papers, 1959–1972 (SNCC), microfilm edn (Sanford, NC: Microfilming Corporation of America 1982) (hereafter SNCC Papers), series 1, reel 4, frame 210. The original SNCC Papers are in the King Library and Archive, Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Atlanta, GA.
35 Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists [1964] (Cambridge, MA: South End Press 2002), 273–4.
36 SNCC Staff Meeting June 9–11, 1964, Minutes for June 9: Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, John O'Neal Papers, box 15, folder 31, 5–10.
37 Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, The New Radicals: A Report with Documents (New York: Random House 1966), 115.
38 James McBride Dabbs, Civil Rights in Recent Southern Fiction (Atlanta, GA: Southern Regional Council 1969), 140–1.
39 Ibid., 140.
40 A copy of the 1966 flyer for Flute Publications, Box 109, Touglaoo, Miss, 39174 is in the author's possession.
41 Jane Stembridge, I Play Flute (Tougaloo, MS: Flute Publications 1966), 6–8. ‘Revolution’ has also been published online as ‘The Children’.
42 Carolyn Rodgers, ‘i play flute’, Negro Digest, April 1969, 84–5. Rodgers was a member of the Chicago-based Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) workshop, a collective of writers, historians and community activists.
43 QV (Quo Vadis) Gex, ‘If I were a Jane’, in Echoes From the Gumbo: Writings and Works from the Workshops of FST (New Orleans: Free Southern Theater), December 1968, 55–6: Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, Tom Dent Papers, box 42, folder 18.
44 Rodgers, ‘i play flute’, 85. Rodgers's earliest collections in their espousal of Black Arts Movement tenets were more like bugles playing than flutes (Paper Soul in 1968 and Songs of a Blackbird in 1969) yet she listens to Stembridge's thin flute in a way that Dabbs does not.
45 Lois W. Banner, ‘Biography as history’, American Historical Review, vol. 114, no. 3, 2009, 579–86 (582).
46 For Joyce Brown's poem, see Julian Bond and Andrew Lewis (eds), Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table (New York: Cengage Learning 2000), 653; and ‘Poem by Joyce Brown’, available on the Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement website at www.crmvet.org/poetry/pbrown.htm (viewed 19 August 2015).
47 Chude Pam Allen, ‘To be twenty again’, available on the Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement website at www.crmvet.org/poetry/pchude.htm (viewed 19 August 2015).
48 Tony Badger, ‘Obituary: Sally Belfrage’, Independent, 4 April 1994.
49 Robert P. Moses, ‘Foreword’, in Sally Belfrage, Freedom Summer (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia 1990), ix.
50 Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez (ed.), Letters From Mississippi: Reports From Civil Rights Volunteers and Poetry of the 1964 Freedom Summer (Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press 2007), 228.
51 Jack Nelson, c [1968] (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi 1993), 13, 242.
52 Joseph Lelyveld, Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop (London: Picador 2006), 190.
53 Paul Good, The Trouble I've Seen: White Journalist/Black Movement (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press 1975), 122–3. Good chooses not to alter the passages he wrote in 1964 with the benefit of hindsight.
54 Sauter, quoted in George F. Will, ‘TV news goes for emotions, not minds’, Los Angeles Times, 2 November 1982, C7.
55 Sharon Monteith, SNCC's Stories: Narrative Culture and the Southern Freedom Struggle of the 1960s (Athens: University of Georgia Press forthcoming)..
56 Danny Lyon, quoted in Greenberg (ed.), A Circle of Trust, 37; Laura Axelrod, ‘An interview with Julius Lester’, available on Axelrod's Project 1968 website (begun January 2008) at www.project1968.com/an-interview-with-julius-lester.html (viewed 20 August 2015).
57 Julius Lester, And All Our Wounds Forgiven (New York: Arcade 1994).
58 Alvin Poussaint, in Juan Williams, My Soul Looks Back in Wonder: Voices of the Civil Rights Experience (New York: Sterling 2004), 131.
59 For a reading of the novel, see Sharon Monteith, ‘Revisiting the 1960s in contemporary fiction: “Where do we go from here?”’, in Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith (eds), Gender and the Civil Rights Movement [1999] (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2004), 215–38.
60 Michael Thelwell, quoted in Greenberg (ed.), A Circle of Trust, 202.
61 Stokely Carmichael, quoted in Warren, ‘Two for SNCC’, 48. Warren extended his interviews into long-form journalism and commentary in Robert Penn Warren, Who Speaks for the Negro? [1965] (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2014).
62 Poussaint, in Williams, My Soul Looks Back in Wonder, 132.
63 See, for example, Gérard Genette, Fiction and Diction [1991], trans. from the French by Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1993).
64 Stetson Kennedy, I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan (London: Arco 1954); Stetson Kennedy, The Klan Unmasked (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press 1990).
65 Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, ‘Hoodwinked’, in Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, revd edn (London: Penguin 2006), 231–5.
66 Kennedy, I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan, 9.
67 Stetson Kennedy, Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was [1956] (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press 2011) was a mock tour guide that could not find a publisher in the United States but, with Jean-Paul Sartre's help, was published in France in 1956. In 1973 Southern Exposure magazine would take its name from another of Kennedy's books to celebrate his particular brand of writing ‘that links analysis to action, that tells the truth and makes clear the imperative for change’: Bob Hall, founding editor of Southern Exposure, quoted in Paul Ortiz, ‘Voices: Stetson Kennedy and the pursuit of truth’ (obituary), 30 August 2011, available on the Institute for Southern Studies website at www.southernstudies.org/2011/08/voices-stetson-kennedy-and-the-pursuit-of-truth.html (viewed 20 August 2015).
68 William Bradford Huie, ‘Wolf Whistle’, in William Bradford Huie, Wolf Whistle and Other Stories (New York: Signet 1959), 7–51.
69 Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1983); James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1992), 119, 220.
70 Stephen J. Whitfield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1991), 57, 58.
71 Ibid., 119–20. For a critical appraisal of ‘Wolf Whistle’ as pulp fiction and a ‘screen’ that seemed to preclude any further investigation of Till's murder, see Sharon Monteith, ‘Emmett Till's murder in the melodramatic imagination: William Bradford Huie and Vin Packer in the 1950s', in Christopher Metress and Harriet Pollack (eds), Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 2008), 31–52.
72 Huie, ‘Wolf Whistle’, 41, 26. Till's mother made no mention of Huie in Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (New York: Random House 2003).
73 Whitfield, A Death in the Delta, 121.
74 Stirling Silliphant, quoted in Axel Madsen, William Wyler: The Authorized Biography (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell 1973), 398. Jesse Hill Ford, The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones (Boston: Little, Brown 1965).
75 ‘Writer discusses 6 film properties', New York Times, 10 February 1960, 43. For a reading of Huie's ‘cycle’ of stories, see Christopher Metress, ‘Truth be told: William Bradford Huie's Emmett Till cycle’, Southern Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 4, 2008, 48–75.
76 William Bradford Huie, ‘Wolf Whistle’ screenplay, 21 May 1960, 1: Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, William Bradford Huie Papers, box 37, folder 35.
77 Ibid., 104.
78 Ibid., 200.
79 William Bradford Huie, ‘Wolf Whistle’ unpublished screenplay, 29 June 1960, 100: Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, William Bradford Huie Papers, box 37, folder 352.
80 Huie, quoted in Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 388–9.
81 G. R. Elton, Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1991), 41. See also Sharon Monteith, ‘Exploitation movies and the freedom struggle of the 1960s’, in Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee (eds), American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary (Athens: University of Georgia Press 2011), 194–218.
82 These films are so discomfiting, and so far removed from soft focus movies like The Help (2011), which DreamWorks promoted as ‘timeless and universal’, or The Butler (2013), another Hollywood morality tale in which African Americans continue to feature in service roles, that it is difficult to think of them as belonging to the same genre of civil rights films.
83 Misseduc Foundation, Mississippi Black Paper: Fifty-seven Negro and White Citizens' Testimony of Police Brutality, the Breakdown of Law and Order and the Corruption of Justice in Mississippi (New York: Random House 1965).
84 Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 209.
85 Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2006), 360.
86 I have discussed elsewhere how the civil rights fiction film has signally failed to dramatize the excitement, fear or emotional turmoil involved in movement organizing. See, for example, Sharon Monteith, ‘Civil rights fiction film’, in Julie Armstrong (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Civil Rights Literature (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2015), 123–42.
87 Ivanhoe Donaldson, Greenville Mississippi Office, ‘Weekly Report, 30 October thru 5 November 1963’, 2d: SNCC Papers, series 4, reel 7, frame 110.
88 Jennifer Jensen Wallach, ‘Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact’: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow (Athens: University of Georgia Press 2008), 15.
Additional information
Sharon Monteith is Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Race and Rights, and Director of the Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership. Among many other books, she is most recently the author of American Culture in the 1960s (Edinburgh University Press 2008), co-author and editor of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Media (North Carolina University Press 2011), as well as co-editor of Gender and the Civil Rights Movement (2nd edn, Rutgers University Press 2004) and The Transatlantic Sixties (Verlag Berlin 2013). She edited The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South (2013) and has contributed essays on history, film and media to various collections. She is completing SNCC's Stories: Narrative Culture and the African American Freedom Struggle in the US South for University of Georgia Press, and writing The Civil Rights Movement: A Literary History for Cambridge University Press. She is currently organizing a British Academy-funded conference, Civil Rights Documentary Cinema and the 1960s: Transatlantic Conversations on History, Race and Rights, for May 2016.