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Introduction
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Introduction Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard Nowhere in America were the prospects for a black protest movement less encouraging. Despite the intensity of this white opposition, the Mississippi movement became the strongest and most far-reaching in the South. . . . Several explanations account for the character of the Mississippi movement. First, and foremost, were the local people themselves. —John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi The crowds that filled church mass meetings in Birmingham; the somber procession marching over the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the road to Selma; the stoic formation of Black Panthers in their berets and black leather, rapt and standing at attention; the determined picket line of sanitation workers in Memphis carrying signs reading, “I Am A Man”1 —all these are familiar images. Yet the people remain unknown, documented in myriad photographs and videos of the Black Freedom movement and, to some extent, heroicized for their roles in the struggle but unexplored, stripped of their political programs, their well-planned strategies, and their intellectual visions. Such iconography have often obscured the groundbreaking work of local people across the country who challenged the racial caste system in the United States. These local people drove the Black Freedom movement: they organized it, imagined it, mobilized and cultivated it; they did the daily work that made the struggle possible and endured the drudgery and retaliation, fear and anticipation, joy and comradeship that building a movement entails. This volume seeks to return our gaze to these local activists, to look at grassroots struggles for racial justice and the people who organized them throughout the country from to . In places as diverse as Des Moines, Iowa, and Brooklyn, New York, Charleston, South Carolina, and Cincinnati, Ohio, these struggles were protracted, often spanning decades, and prolific, springing up in towns and cities throughout the nation. This collection highlights thirteen local movements and the surprising similarities and sharp differences among them in tactic and direction, focus and origin. By exposing the local roots of tactics and ideologies such as nationalism , socialism, confrontational direct action, internationalism, and selfdefense , the authors show how grassroots activists not only acted but theorized for themselves and tailored global ideas to suit their local circumstances . Local people, as many of these scholars demonstrate, were at the center of deliberation, and it was this melding of theory and action that built a movement for black liberation. They arrived at political positions step by step, as the result of the successes and failures of previous actions, the particular issues facing their communities, and their own politicization . We use the term local people broadly but not loosely. For our purposes local does not mean provincial; it is not meant to contrast people who struggled with local issues with those who took on national or international matters. Indeed, community activists often saw the national import behind the local issues they faced and linked their immediate struggles with national and international concerns. Local people is not a racial code word. While many of the community leaders detailed in this book are black, these local struggles included whites, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. Nor is local people a class signifier meant to distinguish real working-class activists from their middle-class “Uncle Tom” counterparts . Indeed, Groundwork is populated with a range of black leadership, from field hands to independent entrepreneurs, from teachers to high school students to people who made their money through the informal economy. Finally, while the term is fundamentally about struggles that come out of a particular place, local does not solely refer to geographic origins; some local activists were not born and raised in the place they organized even though that locality was considered their home by them and by others who lived there. Nor are we suggesting that the experience of growing up in a community within a family whose roots stretched back through this community naturally translated into a clearly defined philosophy or plan of action for how to mobilize for political change. For the j e a n n e t h e o h a r i s a n d k o m o z i w o o d a r d [54.163.62.42] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:56 GMT) local men and women who built these movements had to join their longstanding knowledges of their communities with a process of strategic analysis and sustained reflection and reassessment. By local people, then, we mean a political...