Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 142140849X ISBN 13: 9781421408491

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013

Synopsis

Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL

Rebellion in Black and White offers a panoramic view of southern student activism in the 1960s. Original scholarly essays demonstrate how southern students promoted desegregation, racial equality, free speech, academic freedom, world peace, gender equity, sexual liberation, Black Power, and the personal freedoms associated with the counterculture of the decade.

Most accounts of the 1960s student movement and the New Left have been northern-centered, focusing on rebellions at the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and others. And yet, students at southern colleges and universities also organized and acted to change race and gender relations and to end the Vietnam War. Southern students took longer to rebel due to the south’s legacy of segregation, its military tradition, and its Bible Belt convictions, but their efforts were just as effective as those in the north. Rebellion in Black and White sheds light on higher education, students, culture, and politics of the American south. Edited by Robert Cohen and David J. Snyder, the book features the work of both seasoned historians and a new generation of scholars offering fresh perspectives on the civil rights movement and many others.

Contributors:

Dan T. Carter
David T. Farber
Jelani Favors
Wesley Hogan
Christopher A. Huff
Nicholas G. Meriwether
Gregg L. Michel
Kelly Morrow
Doug Rossinow
Cleveland L. Sellers Jr.
Gary S. Sprayberry
Marcia G. Synnott
Jeffrey A. Turner
Erica Whittington
Joy Ann Williamson-Lott

About this title

Review:

"Based on the experiences of students in the civil rights movement and a new generation of scholarship and research, Rebellion in Black and White makes for compelling reading as it chronicles those who risked their lives and livelihood to bring down nearly 400 years of enforced repression, who fought the power, challenged the hype, and expanded the meaning and scope of freedom."

(Leon Litwack, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, author of How Free Is Free? The Long Death of Jim Crow)

"Rebellion in Black and White recovers a rich history of protest and activism on southern college campuses in the 1960s and early 1970s and disrupts the framework that has long shaped popular understandings of that era. With essays focusing on various places at particular times during a tumultuous decade, this superbly organized collection captures the diverse and shifting nature of southern student activism―along and across the color line―instantly revising the national contours of the 'rights revolution' of the sixties and inviting fresh questions about the history and its long-term legacies."

(Patricia Sullivan, author of Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement)

"Since living in Atlanta from 1960–62 as a student civil rights activist, I've long retained a haunted feeling about the South... its terrorist and racist history. But there’s something noble about those southerners, mostly black but sometimes white, who stood up so bravely from the Carolinas to the Black Belt. Memory really matters, and our memories of that time forget the regional nature of the insurgency against Jim Crow. This loving history begins to restore the balance, by remembering the role of southern student organizers black and white, whose contribution cannot be measured but whose courage must not be forgotten."

(Tom Hayden, author of The Long Sixties)

"This brilliant, comprehensive collection on southern student activism will require every historian of the ‘long sixties’ finally to take into account the biracial New Left in Dixie, where some of the hardest-fought campus struggles took place. It’s a game-changer not just for historians, but for anyone interested in southern history and the long civil rights movement."

(Van Gosse, author of Rethinking the New Left)

"These essays hold the key to understanding the revolution that challenged American inequality, injustice, and values during the 1960s. These fresh, powerful histories of southern student protest should put to rest the tendency to treat southern civil rights as merely the precursor to the northern new left."

(Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times)

"This collection makes a strong contribution to the prevailing conversation about student activism with its less-told, and often surprising, narratives from the South."

(John Blythe North Carolina Historical Review)

"An excellent starting point for anyone wanting to understand the protests of the 1960s... Essential."

(Choice)

"This quality volume is an excellent foundation for scholars eager to further complicate our understanding of 1960s activism nationally."

(Benjamin Houston Journal of American History)

"This fine volume on southern student activism in the 1960s offers a timely reminder ― several actually ― of a troubled and not so distant past... An impressive range of well-argued, fresh contributions."

(Charles J. Holden Journal of Southern History)

"Taken together, this collection of taut, well-organized essays reveals the contest that the decade of the 1960s was, and its memory remains... This well-balanced collection should contribute in important ways to ongoing efforts to bring greater nuance to narratives of the 1960s, the South, and the nation as a whole."

(David Taft Terry History)

Book Description:

In the 1960s, southern college campuses―both historically black and predominantly white―became powerful centers of student dissent, activism, and protest.

About this edition

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 142140849X
• ISBN 13: 9781421408491
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368
• Editor: Cohen Robert, Snyder David J.