From Rights to Lives , livre ebook

Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress. They also share mass-based movement activities, policy/legislative advocacy, grassroots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and dissension—core aspects of movement work—mark them both. Crucially, these moments also engender aggressive, repressive, multilevel responses to these assertions of Black humanity.

From Rights to Lives critically engages the dynamic relationship between these two moments of liberatory possibility on the Black Freedom Struggle timeline. The book’s contributors explore what we can learn when we place these moments of struggle in dialogue with each other. They grapple with how our understanding of the postwar moment shapes our analysis of #BLM and wherein lie the discontinuities, in order to glean lessons for future moments of insurgency.
Introduction: From Rights to Lives: History Matters
Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.

1. “Sincerely, Your Grandparents’ Hands”: Elucidating Similarities between the Trayvon Martin Generation of #BlackLivesMatter and the Emmett Till Generation of the Civil Rights Movement
Charity Clay

2. Continuity and Change: The Spirituality of Liberation in the Black Lives Matter Movement
Christophe D. Ringer

3. Good Cops?
Peter Pihos

4. “We May Have to Defend Ourselves”: Black Women and Campaigns against Police Sexual Violence during the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter Eras
Althea Legal-Miller

5. Revolts of the Black Athletes: Race, Sport, and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter
Scott N. Brooks and Aram Goudsouzian

6. The Search for Truth and Justice: A Diasporic Black Freedom Struggle
Kishauna Soljour

7. The Ambivalence of Activist Photography: July 10, 2016
David V. Mason

8. When the Cultural Revolution Comes: Anthem Making in the Era of BLM
Mickell Carter​

Postscript: “Miraculous, Magnificent, and Messy”: Rights, Lives, and the Movement in Real Time
Françoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.

Contributor Bios