Why Renaming The Civil Rights Movement Is Critical For Our American Future
...because it's current name is academic malpractice and kills societal harmony
On Average
…between 1877 and 1950, in the American South, one African American individual was lynched every week. That number is likely to be higher, considering it was derived from verified instances only. That figure does not consider any vigilante murders that happened outside of the region. Historians can safely assume this sum to be closer to 5,000 than it is its current total of roughly 4,000. For context, the War in Afghanistan, which spanned from 2001 to 2021, would need to double it duration to surpass the amount of American lives lost to lynching post-Reconstruction.
In 1948, Mississippi senator James Eastman successfully stopped an anti-lynching bill from becoming federal law. In 1904, his father helmed the mutilation and lynching of one Black man and one Black woman. 600 people gathered to watch their bodies burn. These atrocities drew such bewildering fanfare that lynching postcards rose in popularity throughout the nation.
During the peaceful protest years of 1947 and 1965, white extremists in Birmingham inflicted so much violence on Black Americans that the city was nicknamed Bombingham. Fifty dynamite explosions targeted Black leaders and families throughout these 18 years, making such acts of domestic terrorism a triannual event. Additionally, nearly 2,500 Black Americans were arrested by Bull Connor’s Birmingham police brigade during the summer of 1963.
At a Harlem book signing in the year 1958, Martin Luther King was stabbed with a 7-inch blade. The knife edged so closely to his heart that doctors proclaimed a mere sneeze would have killed the reverend. Assassinations in the Civil Rights Movement claimed the lives of heroic leaders such as Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Medgar Evers, Vernon Dahmer, Sammy Younge Jr, Robert W. Spike, Herbert Lee, the aforementioned King, and a number of other activists.
In 1920, between the 2nd and 3rd of November, Black residents of Ocoee, Florida were either murdered or forced from town to discourage voting. Julius Perry was hanged from a lamp post to intimidate voters. The county sheriff deputized White citizens, allowing them to shoot Black folks and raze entire neighborhoods to the ground. The Black population in the town dropped from 255 down to a total of two. Scores of similar massacres happened throughout the country during the early 1900s, from New Orleans to Knoxville, St. Louis to Springfield.
A Task
Imagine you were an alien. A friendly one, but an alien nonetheless. You’ve been assigned the American division by your alien boss. Your alien boss delegates a specific task to you: to understand American History and present a book on it for other aliens to read. In particular, she (it?) wants you to focus on the turbulence of American life after the Civil War.
Like any good academic, you hit the archives. Names and court cases become familiar. Plessy v. Ferguson. Brown v. Board of Ed. A. Philip Randolph. A W.E.B guy whose last name you can’t pronounce. Even a King.
And just when you think you have it all figured out, you stumble upon some statistics. The Equal Justice Initiative reports the figure on lynchings. Renowned historian Manning Marable concludes that the FBI likely had a hand in orchestrating the murder of Malcolm X. FOIA requests reveal the explicit, inarguable government plot to murder Fred Hampton while he slept. A myriad of databases present an almost incomprehensible number of unlawful arrests.
Then you marry this with the historical context, thinking to yourself, “all of this death, all of this despotic governing…the unjust arrests and beatings, simply because humans with darker melanin protested for the liberties they had been promised.”
After organizing your research, deciphering it through lens ranging from social to racial, economic to cultural, you have to report back to your alien boss with a slideshow presentation on your findings.
But there is a problem. For their reports, the other alien researchers are co-opting the earthling names for their historial assignments. The Age of Enlightenment maintains its title. The Roman Empire is still to be called the Roman Empire. You want to follow suit but stuck in your head, however, is something as unshakable as it is maddening:
“How the fuck did they end of labeling this time period the Civil Rights Movement?”
None Of This Fits
…with the predominant narrative of American History. Power and the lengths the dominant will go to hold onto it remains heliocentric to our story. These efforts are detailed by physical assault that historians have labeled battles and wars, such as union protests in Virden, Blair Mountain, and Colorado and West Virginia state, respectively. The beating of suffragettes in Occoquan Workhouse in 1917 is known as the Night of Terror. And of course, there are the aforementioned racial massacres.
How do we reconcile this systemic, violent oppression with the country’s glorified founding? Consider the Revolutionary War, which birthed our nation as we know it. It is easy to interpret this watershed moment for mankind as a battle for freedoms. You wouldn’t be incorrect in doing so, either. But the concept of power underscores this war.
British aristocrats enjoyed the status and money that mercantilism brought to them. The colonists were not only a source of unearned income, but they were something less-than when compared to their overseas counterparts. Hence the inability to influence tax rates, tariffs and other legal decrees emanating from England. Indubitably, the yeoman work of colonists and their state-induced political silence was precisely the soil in which British power was allowed to blossom.
We know the story. Paul Revere. George Washington on an icy river. Militia groups fighting like dogs. So on and so forth. The colonists and Founding Fathers heeded Ben Franklin’s advice of “hanging together” and earned their chance to establish a government upholding the Declaration’s proclamation that “all men are created equal” and deserving of “certain unalienable Rights” such as “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But what happened next?
Our founders limited such freedoms to land-owners of a specific gender and skin color. Contextualists argue that the decisions of the founders and those soon after only reflect the cultural milieu of the era. Yet, this argument conveniently ignores the women and slaves who protested against the gender and racial expectations of the time. It presupposes that if a cultural milieu exists it did so because it won a competition of ideas, despite the term competition implying a significant dissident faction.
Yes, the founders were honoring a cultural milieu, but the oppression of both the women and Africans which characterized it directly reflects their intent. In other words, the founders were not dutifully honoring the demands of culture they lived apart from, rather, they were the central drivers of it.
Regardless, the men who governed America following its birth have perpetually found themselves fighting to maintain their power and status. Legal and literal battles of feminists, immigrants, workers and the enslaved litter American History. For every Nat Turner there was to be found a group of lawmakers and white folks hellbent on subduing him. For every Susan B. Anthony, a U.S marshall waiting to arrest her the instant she attempted to vote. For each King, a Hoover. You get the picture.
But Back To Our Alien
Determined to invent a new name for the Civil Rights Movement, our friend contacts a colleague; one studying the Revolutionary War. He decides that the name is accurate enough to keep, seeing as how the way in which it introduced Liberalism to the global populace was indeed revolutionary. Fine.
Unsatisfied still, the alien goes to a buddy assigned with researching the Civil War. “Hey, why did they name it that?” “Well, when one nation fights internally amongst itself, the term humans ascribe to it is civil war. It fits.”
“Yeah, but I did some digging, too. Sure, it’s literally a civil war, but does that best represent what happened? I mean, shouldn’t any alien be able to read the name of that war and know precisely what is was about?”
“Good point,” utters the buddy alien. “I mean, when over 600,000 people die over the issue of freeing slaves, maybe the name should reflect that.”
What’s In A Name, Anyways?
Everything.
There are two reasons to be furious that the Civil Rights Movement retains its name. First, it is a dereliction of academic duty. Any scholar, professional or autodidactic, those with morning show TV slots or those nestled snugly away in their ivory towers, are simply incorrect if they believe this era to be aptly named. Furthermore, those responsible for it should be embarrassed.
When considering not only the scope of violence but the heinous nature of the very acts themselves, there is no way one could incorporate the era with a word used to describe bowels and cut fastballs.
Before I explain why (and move on to my second point) we must ask ourselves the same question the alien did. What title best reflects the period? What is most accurate? Movement is simply not the word.
White folks unlawfully murdered Black folks and in doing so violated a most sacred American concept of due process, often so with state-sanctioning. There was not a Black person alive who had not heard of someone who was lynched or knew someone personally who was. Nor a white person, as the lynching postcards ensured.
The impact this has on a psyche - the way in which you traverse your everyday world, from trips to the grocery store to where you seat yourself at a movie theater - is almost impossible to comprehend. As much as hope, it was fear which catalyzed Black Americans to fight for their liberties. The alternative could have been death. Castration. Conflagration. Torture. An open casket funeral rattling the nation.
Does Movement best represent this time? Does it indicate to the learner not only the stakes of this fight but the sheer destruction of one side of it? Does it lend itself to the governmental element of this period? The innumerable city commissioners, sheriffs, governors and FBI agents who ordered public servants to assault, detain, and even kill those practicing non-violence?
Does Movement convey a White Supremacist organization with an ideology mirroring the eliminationist eugenics of Karl Pearson? When 30,000 people meet together to plot bombings, lynchings and assassinations with the explicit intent of oppressing a race they share a country with, we call that domestic terrorism. Movement does not suffice.
Second, the impact of this nomenclature is still reverberating throughout the nation. Pseudointellectual and conservative man-boy Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA proves why.
Scooped by Wired, Kirk plans to discredit and downright attack the legacy of the Civil Rights Act this upcoming Martin Luther King Day. He was quoted during a massive conference as uttering “I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I’ve thought about it…We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.” His rationale? By forcing forcing White folks to consider all races when making private decisions, the Civil Rights Act - which was when the federal government codified the end of segregation - suppresses freedom of speech.
These comments were a prelude to Kirk’s verbal assault on Dr. King, something he also referenced in his public comments. But how does the name of an era relate to Mr. Kirk’s comments?
Kirk’s perspective on race in America is rooted in an insufficient, inaccurate knowledge of King’s era, although it may not be his fault. Think back to when you were in grammar school, first learning of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Era. You were likely instructed that he was a heroic figure who led protests so Black folks could be treated with the same respect White folks were. No mention of the violence, you were too young.
In middle school and high school, however, learning the Truth about the period would not be inappropriate, and I say that in my capacity as both an educator and, by degree, a professional historian. Perhaps you were shown videos and photos of fire hoses being let loose on protestors. Or maybe a few of you saw the picture of Emmett Till’s mangled face.
It is more likely, however, that none of you read FBI documents revealing how they pressured King into suicide. You weren’t taught the staggering figures relating to wide scale lynchings. You read the lyrics to Strange Fruit but not in its proper context, which if done correctly unveils the entire orchard of vigilante murder, not a single apple.
You read about the Birmingham four as though it were a singular instance, even though it represents only two percent of the bombings that occurred in the city. You never heard the name Gary Rowe; an FBI informant from the Klan who was accused of plotting the bombing and a figure whom the bureau knew had an affinity for dynamite and beating Black folks.
Kirk and a nation of citizens is unaware of this deathly frightening atmosphere for Blacks. Part of this is a cognitive problem. Human minds have little capacity for comprehending large scale anything, let alone murder and destruction. But this is also an educational issue. We’ve been taught the facts as though there’s a rush. When done so, the defining moments are presented as escapes from the norm, when in reality, they define the norm.
Changing the nomenclature of the Civil Rights Movement is imperative. Doing so will have an undeniable impact on whoever hears or reads its new name. Imagine if you were in third grade, learning about The Fight Against Racial Tyranny for the first time. Or in 6th grade studying The Racial Revolutionary War. Or junior year, where Mr. Holmes titled his lecture The War Against Racial Freedom.
Linguistics matters. Nuance matters. Semantics matter. Those titles do more than transmit the scale of violence, they refer to it as state-sanctioned; two immutable facts of the period which are as vital to conceptualizing it as they are under acknowledged.
Learning these titles is akin to providing a cement foundation for students to therein build their historical house upon. Our foundation today is cracked with ever widening holes. The title Civil Rights Movement allows the Charlie Kirks of the world the wiggle room necessary for its dismantling and subsequent rebrand as something antithetical to American liberty.
The name allows for the Lt. Governor (and 2024 GOP gubernatorial frontrunner) Mark Robinson to proclaim that “so many freedoms were lost during the civil rights movement.” No, Mr. Robinson, so many Black Lives were lost during the movement - something a name like The Fight Against Racial Tyranny preempts anyone from either forgetting or not prioritizing.
Sources
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Manning Marable)
King: A Life (Jonathan Eig)
Federal Bureau of Investigation: The Ku Klux Klan