Clio's Foot Soldiers

Twentieth-Century U.S. Social Movements and Collective Memory

Lara Leigh Kelland

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781613765838
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Collective memories are key to social movements. Activists draw on a shared history to build identity, create movement cohesion, and focus political purpose. But what happens when marginalized communities do not find their history in dominant narratives? How do they create a useable past to bind their political communities together and challenge their exclusion?In Clio's Foot Soldiers, Lara Leigh Kelland investigates these questions by examining 1960s and 1970s social movements comprised of historically marginalized peoples: Civil Rights, Black Power, Women's and Gay Liberation, and American Indian. These movements sought ownership over their narratives to create historical knowledge reflective of their particular experiences. To accomplish their goals, activists generated new forms of adult education, published movement newspapers, and pursued campus activism and speeches, public history efforts and community organizations. Through alternative means, marginalized communities developed their own historical discourses to mobilize members, define movement goals, and become culturally sovereign. In so doing, they provided a basis for achieving political liberation and changed the landscape of liberal cultural institutions.

Chapter 1

In a Long Line of Protest

The Civil Rights Movement and a New Collective Memory

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.

—Carter Woodson

Within the Civil Rights movement, collective memory served as a new and important tool of community mobilization. Although black intellectuals had been authoring and preserving their history throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most such efforts primarily came from the elite who focused on narratives in support of the project of racial uplift and respectability politics.1 Informal kinds of collective memory existed in community events like festivals and parades, yet a wide-sweeping commitment to the transformative potential of a more full black history emerged only within the struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and early 1960s.2 During this time, community leaders established citizenship and freedom schools across the South to promote voter registration and participation, and as a base for demanding other kinds of equality through the rhetoric of citizenship.

The memory practices brought forth by Civil Rights activists were primarily movement education initiatives that also asserted the right to citizenship for blacks.3 These projects advanced central goals of the movement, namely to empower all black citizens toward realizing cultural, political, and economic parity with whites. Most of these leaders also attended to questions of power within the movement, often actively promoting grassroots leadership and a widespread and multi-authored collective memory. These leaders drew on two main traditions in their collective memory narratives and work. First, they produced narratives that placed their contemporary struggle in the context of racial struggles of the past, making connections between their efforts in the 1950s and 1960s and the resistance of enslaved people, the work of abolitionism, and the struggles for rebuilding the American racial order during the Reconstruction era.4 Second, they drew upon grassroots organizing and popular educational traditions from the labor movement, especially the use of music, to transmit collective memory that challenged mainstream American historical narratives. Both of these traditions manifested in curriculum content and design and approaches to school leadership in the citizenship and freedom schools, and would lay a foundation for popular education taken up later in the Black Power, Gay, and Women’s Liberation movements.

The Legacy of Black Education

For those who sought to change racial relations in the United States, education had long been embraced as a fundamental tool toward that goal. Enslaved blacks, abolitionists, and slaveholders all understood the radicalizing and effective power of literacy, and as a result, reformers embraced education as a central tool in transforming racial politics during the Reconstruction era. Likewise, northern white philanthropists poured money into southern black educational institutions during and after Reconstruction, believing education to be the first step toward economic and social equality. Yet, even as they provided black students with much-needed educational opportunities, black institutions of higher education (which would later become known as historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs) often ended up unintentionally reproducing systems of racial inequality by constructing a separate but equal system that offered black students a significantly inferior education.5

A leading figure in the early-twentieth-century struggle for racial freedom, W. E. B. Du Bois devoted much of his writing and activist efforts toward improving black education. Du Bois placed black education at the forefront of the struggle for racial justice, prioritizing the development of educational opportunities as “the very first step toward the settlement of the Negro problem.”6 Du Bois envisioned that the Talented Tenth of the black race would form a leadership core that would produce solutions to racism, poverty, and equality by virtue of their vision and intellect. The roles of authority and leadership were quite clear for Du Bois—they would flow from “the top downward . . . [as the] Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground.”7 These early black efforts to claim and articulate a proud and useable past certainly predated the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, yet many of the earlier efforts made toward preserving and researching black history embraced a similar social hierarchy as Du Bois’s. In his vision, intellectuals would provide leadership, and such vision and direction could be fostered only through formal schooling and universities.

In the early twentieth century, black intellectuals began to expand the production and dissemination of black history. The 1910s were a particularly rich decade for such work, with Arthur Schomburg founding the Negro Society for Historical Research in 1911 and Carter Woodson establishing the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915. Shortly thereafter, in 1916, Woodson began publishing the Journal of Negro History as an outlet for scholarly research on the black past. Schomburg, born in Puerto Rico in 1874, immigrated to the United States in 1891. A passionate archivist, he avidly collected documents and art related to the international African diasporic experience. In 1926, the New York Public Library purchased Schomburg’s extensive collection and named him the director of the Harlem library branch, where the collection was made available to the public.8 Woodson was born to formerly enslaved parents in New Canton, Virginia, in 1875, and grew up poor, attending school sporadically during childhood. Woodson began his formal education at the age of twenty, finally earning a PhD from Harvard at the age of thirty-seven, only the second African American to ever do so. During the latter half of his career, Woodson turned away from scholarly and elite projects, choosing instead to work on a more popular promotion of the black past, founding Negro History Week in 1926, an annual event aimed at the cultivation of collective memory in black communities.9

Although intellectuals played a key role in the cultivation of black history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, widespread popular forms of collective memory flourished as well. First commemorating the end of the Atlantic slave trade, then emancipation at the end of the Civil War, black Americans celebrated their freedom widely through parades and rallies. Speeches given at freedom festivals throughout the nineteenth century, during both the antebellum and post-Emancipation eras, harkened to individuals and events that underscored Christian values and promoted respectability for black citizens. In addition to their efforts to create a proud public culture for black Americans, organizers explicitly linked the need for shared history to the process of identity-building. In these more popular efforts, forgetting the slave past became as important as remembering other aspects of collective historical experience.10 By diminishing the significance of enslaved experience to black history, intellectuals articulated a past that was built on cultural achievement and individual laudable attributes rather than on more dishonorable experiences of subjugation and shame. While these isolated efforts contributed toward the early development of black collective memory and the work of Schomburg and Woodson provided an important base to all of the black history efforts that emerged later in the century, a well-developed and wide-reaching national black history narrative would emerge a few decades later, as part of the efforts of Civil Rights activists.

Citizenship Schools and the Highlander Folk School

Although founded by white southerners, the Highlander Folk School was perhaps the most significant institutional home for the early cultivation of black collective memory. Myles Horton and Don West founded the Highlander Folk School in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains near Monteagle, Tennessee, in 1932, in order to address deep poverty and inequality in the Appalachian region through adult education. Inspired in part by the Danish Folk School movement, Horton and West aimed to empower and mobilize both black and white impoverished communities by providing free educational resources for residents. Beyond providing much-needed educational opportunities and cultural conservation efforts, Highlander worked closely with labor organizations and local people to build coalitions among coal miners, woodcutters, textile workers, and farmers in the area as part of a small but committed tradition of southern progressivism.11 In 1937, the school allied with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which inspired other labor organizations to engage the school’s workshops for union leadership training. During the 1940s, the school’s racially integrated workshops began to attract negative attention, as state and federal agencies began to redbait Highlander leadership, charging them with running a “Communist training school.”12 After an overnight raid by the state of Tennessee in 1961 that closed Highlander and revoked its charter, the school reopened shortly after as the Highlander Research and Education Center, first in Knoxville, then in 1972 moving to New Market, Tennessee.

Throughout the school’s history, Highlander staff cultivated grassroots leadership within their programs. In the early 1950s, the school initiated a three-year Community Leadership Training Project in Alabama and Tennessee, an initiative that an experienced school staffperson hoped would give community leaders “a better understanding of the nature of a democratic society and the individual’s role as a citizen.”13 Built on the tenet that a vision for the future needed to come from within a community, Highlander experimented with various models for civic action and leadership training during the 1940s and 1950s. During this time, Highlander staff struggled to find an appropriately hands-off role in regard to local issues.14 Through the development of the citizenship school model, Highlander would greatly improve on these issues, in part due to the pivotal role that adult educators and Civil Rights activists Esau Jenkins, Bernice Robinson, and Septima Clark played in the development of the program.

The Civil Rights era was a rich one for Highlander, as the citizenship schools proved to be the most successful programmatic manifestation of Highlander’s values. Initially conceived as a project to increase voter registration by preparing adults for the literacy tests that kept southern blacks from being able to vote, citizenship schools became a springboard for other educational efforts. Although the staff had always desired that the school be a racially integrated space, it wasn’t until 1942 that Highlander held its first mixed event, after which Highlander more fully committed to multiracial organizing. In 1953, staff shifted the school’s direction away from poverty in general toward racial justice by focusing on school desegregation workshops. When the Supreme Court handed down the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954, Highlander had already fostered conversations to prepare activists for the process.15 Additionally, Highlander itself, with its populist and socialist ethos, was also invested in cultivating oppositional collective memory. The popularity of the workshops led to an unprecedented growth in the number of participants, and as a result, activists like Septima Clark and Esau Jenkins travelled to Highlander to take part in their training programs.

Septima Poinsette Clark was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1898. Trained as a teacher, she first worked as a teaching principal in 1916 at a small rural school on Johns Island. There she developed a deep connection to the community and nurtured a commitment to working for racial and economic justice. In 1947, Clark moved back to Charleston to teach in the public school system where she worked until 1956, when state law banned school employees from engaging in Civil Rights activism.16 Firmly committed to the movement, Clark chose to leave her position and took up organizing work on a full-time basis. Clark had learned of the integrated workshops at the Highlander Folk School in 1952 when she went to a meeting on childhood education at the black YWCA in Charleston. In June of 1954, Clark wrote a letter to Myles Horton, requesting a scholarship to an upcoming “Workshop on Segregation,” as she wanted to “organize a group from various clubs to use the training” offered by Highlander. Clark introduced herself in her application as a well-positioned community leader, noting that she held “offices in three interracial groups,” a position from which she could marshal “their support to work out a program for the community.”17 Horton immediately granted her a full scholarship via telegram a mere three days after she posted the letter in Charleston. Clark went to Highlander on two occasions during the summer of 1954; at the first she met Rosa Parks, and at the latter she introduced Johns Island resident Esau Jenkins to Highlander so that he could participate in a workshop on the United Nations. At this second event, the idea for the first citizenship school circulated between black community leaders Clark and Jenkins and the white Highlander staff. Throughout the development of the schools, grassroots leadership was at the heart of the initiative and, indeed, a central part of its success.

From the beginning, the schools emerged from local efforts to obtain educational resources. Jenkins was born on Johns Island in 1910 and spent the majority of his life there, connecting with Clark first as her student, then as a collaborator. As an adult, Jenkins supplemented his farming income by running a transportation business between Charleston and the island. In this capacity, Jenkins acted as an informal tutor for Johns Island residents, helping them to pass the state’s literacy tests as he shuttled residents during the forty-five-minute drive to and from their jobs in Charleston. According to Clark, Jenkins had single-handedly registered two hundred people to vote between 1948 and 1954, voters who then used their newly enriched citizenship to ask for improved roads, schools, and school buses.18 The popularity of these “classes” led him to envision a more formal educational environment that could better address the widespread illiteracy in the coastal islands and facilitate political agency for the residents.19 In 1956, Jenkins, Clark, and Horton initiated the first formal class and planted a seed for grassroots education that would become the model for movement education across the South.

As conversations progressed around the development of a program on Johns Island, Highlander staff initially deferred to Jenkins and Clark in dealing with local response and promoting the school.20 After the initial groundwork for the school was laid, Highlander staff became more engaged in developing the program, working closely with Clark and Jenkins to get the school off the ground. To this end, Miles Horton and his wife Zilphia began a yearlong series of visits in 1954 to the first citizenship school on Johns Island as planning was underway to purchase a buildi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments xi
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index