Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement ed. by Danielle L. McGuire, John Dittmer (review)

BOOK REVIEWS SPRING 2013 93 Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement Danielle L. McGuire and John Dittmer Freedom Rights is a collection of twelve essays intended to represent the diversity of the current scholarship on the modern U.S. civil rights movement. The editors dedicate the book to Steven F. Lawson, crediting the inspiration of his many seminal books and years of graduate teaching and specifically his call in his article “Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement” for a “broader and more interactive model” of the movement (American Historical Review 96 [April 1991], 456-71). Fulfilling that call, these essays demonstrate how historians have enriched our understanding of the struggle for racial equality, presenting an expansive view of the movement and extending the chronology far beyond the older “Montgomery to Memphis” narrative. The story begins with postwar action by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), not in school desegregation or voting rights litigation but in campaigns to fight racial stereotyping in popular culture, and with the Young Women’s Christian Association’s (YWCA) embrace of multiracialism and fight against segregation in its own ranks. Pippa Hollaway, moreover, sees even earlier precedents in her tale of disenfranchised felons’ efforts in the early 1910s and 1920s to have their vote restored. The story is likewise stretched at the other end by essays on Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) enforcement of civil rights law in the 1970s and 1980s, political battles in Alabama at the turn of the new century, and the remaining racial “blight” in the supposedly post-racial era of President Barack Obama. If these essays substantially lengthen the chronology of the movement, they likewise widen its locus. A few of the essays demonstrate the transregional nature of the movement. Krystal D. Frazier, for example, looks at how relationships among families spread out between the Deep South and the urban North affected the young African Americans who came of age at the time of the Emmett Till murder, while Danielle L. McGuire documents the national campaign that coalesced around the North Carolina trial of Joan Little. Other essays focus Danielle L. McGuire and John Dittmer, eds. Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement . Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011. 402 pp. ISBN: 9780813134482 (cloth), $40.00. BOOK REVIEWS 94 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY on how the NAACP, YWCA, and EEOC each in their own way confronted racism on a national level. Jacqueline Castledine introduces the international context in her exploration of African American and South African jazzwomen’s critique of white male supremacy in all its forms. Indeed, only three of the twelve essays tell stories located specifically or narrowly in the South. With an emphasis on gender and sexuality in many of the essays, Freedom Rights also raises the question of who stood at the center of the movement and what it aimed to achieve. Women and issues of family and sexuality play a lead role in eight of the twelve essays. Black women (and some white) are the key actors in the stories of the YWCA’s move toward multiracialism , a black communist family’s endurance during the Cold War, jazz vocalists’ challenge to racism at home and abroad, and the EEOC’s commitment to fighting discrimination in a changing political climate. Moreover, these essays reveal the extent to which activists fought for and understood control over one’s own body and sexuality as a basic right. McGuire highlights this in her description of Joan Little’s trial for murdering her jailor after he forced himself upon her, and the role of that trial in rallying people to protest sexual exploitation of all women. But as Stacy Braukman illustrates in her essay on the Johns Committee in Florida, segregationists likewise focused on and even obsessed over the supposed “perversion”—that is, the nontraditional sexuality—of movement activists. Thus, these essays illustrate how activists conceived of the movement as a struggle for autonomous personhood, and with it bodily integrity and dignity, and how challenges to traditional notions of gender and sexuality threatened white supremacy. As with many anthologies, the essays in this collection are uneven in...