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C h a p t e r n i n e Civil Rights Wright  Gaines  Baldwin  Walker  King  Clark And Till was hung yesterday,” Ezra Pound (1885–1972) writes in The Pisan Cantos (1948). Pound wrote the line from a prison camp near Pisa where he had been incarcerated after being arrested for his wartime broadcasts in support of Mussolini. The name “Till” may ring a faint bell. A footnote to canto 74 identifies him as “Louis Till, an African-American trainee at the DTC executed on July 2, 1945 . . . Till was the father of Emmet Till, whose cold-blooded murder at age fourteen by two white men in Mississippi sparked the Civil Rights Movement in the South.” What a collision of worlds is here, one implausible enough to inspire wonder at the strange fetchings of Pound’s poetic method, as well as to remind us that as one war ended, another kind of struggle was about to start. Richard Sieburth’s footnote claims perhaps too much, since the murder of Emmet Till is only one of the many possible sparks of the movement we call civil rights. When does something as awesome as the civil rights movement begin? After three centuries of provocations and sparks, how was it that the mid-1950s saw the emergence of the single most dramatic and effective grassroots insurgency in American history? If Taylor Branch is telling the story, the high points include the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott; the 1957 Little Rock crisis over school integration; the 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-ins; the 1961 Freedom Rides; James Meredith’s attempt in 1962 to enroll at Ole Miss; the Birmingham marches—against police dogs and fire hoses—in 1963; the March on Washington later that year; the 1964 Freedom Summer and the passage of the Civil Rights Act; and the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery with its Bloody Sunday on the Pettus Bridge. If Charles Payne is telling the story, the high points begin, as well, with Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus, and then move on to Septima Clark becoming director of the citizenship workshops at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School in 1956; Ella Baker’s assuming direction of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957; Diane Nash’s spearheading the Nashville sit-in movement, in 1960; the arrival later that year of Robert Moses and his voter registration project in Cleveland, Mississippi; Baker’s arranging the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960; the refusal of the Democratic Party 164 Secret Histories to seat Fannie Lou Hamer and her Freedom Party at the 1964 Atlantic City convention ; and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The first version of the civil rights struggle is largely about mobilizing; the second , about organizing. Branch’s account in Parting the Waters (1988) focuses on Martin Luther King Jr. and the fight for integration; Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (1995) looks to figures such as Septima Clark and Robert Moses and the winning of the right to vote. The one struggle unfolded through nonviolent direct action, amplified by dramatic and soul-wrenching photographs; the other depended on the largely invisible labor of reading and teaching and learning to sign one’s name. While standing up to the man worked its revolutionary changes, so did sitting down with a book. And figures from both movements often worked together , their collective efforts resulting in the passage of the most significant change in law since the glory days of the New Deal. The two strands of the movement tested the imaginations of those who made art out of these years, since the challenge was to locate in the tradition of heroic mobilization its concealed doubts and despairs, and to recognize in quiet organizing the necessary and immeasurable presence of vision and courage. Charles Payne probably gets it right when he writes that beyond all the surviving responses to the terrible beauty of that time, “the movement was its own work of art.”   Published in 1945, Richard Wright’s (1908–60) Black Boy tells one story of how a black boy becomes a man. In doing so, it acts as an allegory of the future. The next twenty years were those in which African-American men and women—and children —found, in Wright’s words, the power “to stand up and fight.” This was freedom not given but taken, which is the only way freedom...

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