Doug McAdam provides an historical sociology of the birth of Freedom Summer. He takes a look at the people who elected to, first, apply to participate in the project, and then those who actually chose to go. He examines their what characteristics distinguishes those individuals from the ones who decided not to go. (His big schtick here was that people who ended up signing on for Freedom Summer were idealistic youths, according to their essays. They lived a relatively peaceful, staid existence, believing that the US was the greatest. Then, they had their eyes opened. They were shocked and upset by what they learned. This was not what they thought the US was about. In turn, they became radicalized as they interacted with Southern blacks and confronted their own racism and that of White defenders of Jim Crow. He also talks about how important the (damn damn can't think of the name of them) Freedom Schools were to radicalizing people.
He then traces the Freedom Summer struggles, the splits and divisions that broke out. (e.g., the well-known feminist struggle against being asked to serve coffee and being treated as nothing more than sexual objects for men to compete over) He looks at how the Free Speech movement was spawned by Freedom Summer, how the splits in that earlier time period would develop to characterize the sixties (IF i'm remembering this correctly) .
He then asks, "What happened?" why did it all seem to end. Where did these people go? What did they end up doing with their lives. That part was interesting, too, and I only vaguely recall that section but ISTR that most people stayed involved in some form of movement building, though it was turned inward and much more localized.
While he does a lot of life history work here, he is always careful to examine their lives as C Wright Mills asked us to, seeing their biographies as political narratives shaped by history.
It's a good book and ought to put this conversation on something more a little more solid.
While I don't recall that he's a kool aid drinking follower of the resource mobilization model of social movements (which is the sociological name for what Justin and Carrol have described in the past week), he's not hostile to it and I always saw his book as one that would give life to what is often a rather lifeless literature with an uninspired name.
At 03:02 PM 10/22/2005, Charles Brown wrote:
>Carrol :
>For over a century every single promising mass movement of the left
>(both those that took mostly non-electoral form and those that tried to
>incorporate electoral work) have been absorbed and destroyed by the DP.
>
>^^^
>CB: The Civil Rights movement succeeded in ending Jim Crow, and the Peace
>movement helped end the Viet Nam war. In that sense they were not destroyed.
>I wouldn't say they were exactly absorbed either. I don't see where the
>women's movement has been absorbed.
>
>What are other promising mass movements of the last 50 years ?
>
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