@Thadmin @kamal uddin khan Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), is hosting an online roundtable on From Rights To Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024) edited by Françoise N. Hamlin (Brown University) and Charles W. McKinney Jr. (Rhodes College). The roundtable begins on Monday, July 14, 2025 and concludes on Friday, July 18, 2025. It will feature essays by Marcia Chatelain (University of Pennsylvania), Brett Gadsden (Northwestern University), Wesley Hogan (Duke University), and Shannon King (Fairfield University). At the conclusion the editors will respond.
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, grass-roots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and dissension—core aspects of movement work—mark them both. Crucially, these moments also engender aggressive, repressive, multi-level 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. McKinney and Hamlin invite the contributors to take up 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.
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, grass-roots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and dissension—core aspects of movement work—mark them both. Crucially, these moments also engender aggressive, repressive, multi-level 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. McKinney and Hamlin invite the contributors to take up 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.
