Annotated Table of Contents
(working draft)
Introduction (see Excerpt field)
Chapter 1: “The Other March”
The chapter begins with the 50th anniversary of the March on
Washington, and focuses on the symbology of Martin Luther King,
Jr., using that as a way to understand the popular definition of
the civil rights movement, what it can and cannot accommodate. In
other words, people, even as they deify King, will accede to the
demand for equality only so far. It is a very narrow, selective
mythology of him that lives on in the popular culture. To that end,
“The Other March” is the replica of the March on Washington that
King planned for 1968 but did not live to oversee. It was to be the
centerpiece of the Poor People’s Campaign, but he was shot a month
before it began. What became of that march, “Resurrection City,”
when thousands of the nation’s poor occupied the national mall in
May of 1968, was a dismal failure, and in many ways time seems to
have stood still in the decades since.
Chapter 2:
This chapter takes place in Raleigh, North Carolina, where there is
an authentic revival of the movement as we normally understand it:
that is to say, rooted in the Baptist church and focused on massive
demonstration and symbolic arrest. I profile William Barber, the
reverend who started and is leading the movement; the question, of
course, is how timeless or malleable of a template is the Martin
Luther King, Jr. model. On days I was there it was willfully
nostalgic: freedom songs were ritually sung, there were sermons
that rooted the demand for equality in health care and voting
rights in the gospel and Constitution. In addition to being
nostalgic, the rally was remarkably powerful as well. “Charismatic
leadership” so often gets a bad rap in movement circles, since it
is believed that it spawns a dependency and creates a vacuum when
the leader departs, but listening to Reverend Barber, being in the
packed church, I was in awe of the power he wielded, the
inspiration he summoned.
My time in Raleigh, incidentally, yielded other observations,
particularly about the eternal tension that exists in the movement
between youth and age, between the impatience, almost recklessness
of one and the circumspection of the other. These will probably be
detailed in the last chapter.
Finally, in this chapter I profile another Baptist minister,
Michael Minor of Hernando, Mississippi, whose church is working to
help thousands of African Americans sign up for health insurance
provided by the Affordable Care Act. Again, the centrality of the
church is stressed, yet Minor is much more of a community organizer
than he is a leader in the sense that Barber is or King was. So his
story serves as a kind of pivot between the Raleigh events and the
Johns Island chapter.
Chapter 3/4:
The region around Charleston, South Carolina was recently
christened “the corridor of shame” by one documentarian because of
the decrepit condition of its public schools. I drive through it,
visit some of the schools and talk to a few teachers; I also visit
with some of the surviving principles of the Briggs v. Elliott
case, the first of five that were eventually packaged into Brown v.
Board of Education, and then move on to Johns Island, South
Carolina, to detail the citizenship schools that were conducted
there in the 1950s. Beginning with only ten students who were
taught basic matters of literacy and citizenship, the schools
eventually spread through the Low Country of South Carolina and
across all of the South. They helped thousands of people register
to vote and, more, to wield a much greater degree of control over
their lives. But almost nobody knows this story, and it is in this
chapter that I examine centrally the way the movement has been
reduced by history and its needs. As I wrote in the original
prospectus:
“The human mind is very uneasy with continua. History must be
broken down into narrative chapters. That is how we receive it: in
units of story, characters engaged dramatically in one setting or
another. Narratives possess by definition a beginning and an end,
ideally joined in such a way as to make a round and felicitous
shape. If you start, for instance, in Montgomery, Alabama with a
bus boycott you may as well end there, a decade later, after a
march of biblical character. When chopped in such a way the civil
rights movement makes for a perfect narrative. Literally perfect:
there is not a single archetype that it lacks. There is the
hero-prophet-martyr in the form of King; there is moral
counterbalance, what looks from a distance like perfect good and
perfect evil; there is suspense, setback, a give-and-tug to fill
the story’s middle; and there is, in the Selma to Montgomery march,
the cathartic and victorious conclusion. A story does not need a
victory, but it must above all things be purposive. Even the most
tragic account should offer some lesson. Otherwise why would we
spend the time? And there is no greater outcome, no quest or
purpose, quite like freedom.”
In the book, this argument unfolds over several pages.
Incidentally, the movement’s foremost historian, Taylor Branch,
recently wrote that the first volume of his trilogy, Parting the
Waters, is dedicated to Septima Clark, one of the planners of the
citizenship schools, as “a personal gesture of tribute mixed with
regret, because I found it impossible within my storytelling rules
to include Septima Clark in proportion to her influence.” As I say,
more on this in the book—but it is a staggering aside.
My visit with David Dennis and a discussion of music are in this
chapter too.
Chapter 5:
Birmingham, the children’s crusade and nonviolence
Chapter 6: “The Promised Land”
This chapter considers the future, considering in particular the
chance that something equivalent to what went on in the 1960s might
happen again. There would need to be a groundswell of young men and
women, and I talk with a few younger activists and some children of
famous movement luminaries. Still, the dominant voices of the
chapter are those of two veterans of SNCC: Bob Moses, whose view of
things is too complex to distill here—the challenge, he told me,
has to do with enlarging the definition of “We the People” from the
preamble to the Constitution—and Bob Zellner. In his last sermon,
in Memphis in April of 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said
“we, as a people, will get to the promised land.” Zellner told me
that he now believes the struggle itself is the promised land, an
idea I plan to test to lead into the book’s ending.
Benjamin Hedin's fiction, essays, and interviews have been published in The New Yorker, Slate, The Nation, The Chicago Tribune, Poets and Writers, Salmagundi, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Radio Silence. He is the editor of Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader, widely regarded as one of the finest collections of music writing. He is the producer and author of the forthcoming documentary "The Blues House," which tells the story of the search for two forgotten blues singers carried out in Mississippi in June of 1964, during some of the most violent days of the civil rights movement. Hedin was born in Paris, France, and raised in North Carolina and Minnesota. He studied music at the College of William and Mary and in the fall of 2002 entered the Graduate Writing Program at The New School in New York City. After earning his M.F.A. in fiction from The New School he started teaching, first at Long Island University and The New School, and later in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. He is the son of Robert Hedin, the award-winning poet and translator.
"Hedin takes us along on his journey, acknowledging his innocence and his (sometimes quite erroneous) assumptions. With equal parts curiosity and humility, he intertwines history and current events with his own thoughtful reflections. After scores of interviews and many thousands of miles clocked on the odometer, he slowly comes to feel that he 'had gotten a glimpse into the heart of things, as if a panel had been lifted and I could see the gears and knobs, all the workings that made the machine go.'"--Elaine Elinson, Truthdig "Fusing the personal with the political, the present with the past, Benjamin Hedin has written a sober, touching elegy for our shared history. In Search of the Movement is needed and essential, and it could not have come at a better time."--Said Sayrafiezadeh, author of Brief Encounters With the Enemy and When Skateboards Will Be Free "A deeply intelligent writer and reporter, Benjamin Hedin repositions the civil rights movement as an ongoing crusade, a moral and political struggle that was seeded in the 1950s and 60s, but continues to develop in complicated, hopeful, and heartbreaking ways. In Search of the Movement is a bold and exploratory book, as much about Hedin's journey--to reconcile an American past with the American present--as anything else. It reads like both a salve and guide for these heady times; I couldn't put it down."--Amanda Petrusich, author of Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records "A journalistic foray into the work of unsung heroes in the civil rights struggle, then and now. In this slender disquisition, journalist, teacher, editor, and documentary film producer Hedin (Studio A: A Bob Dylan Reader, 2004) ponders why the civil rights movement has petered out when so much still needs to be done. The answer, of course, is that it has not ceased--though the changes are often wrought subtly and behind the scenes, as the author ably uncovers through his research. Traditionally, the perimeters of the movement range from Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and Rosa Parks' arrest in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, and end with Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in Memphis in 1968. While Hedin acknowledges the enormous changes that took place within that frame--nonviolent boycotts, sit-ins, marches, and demonstrations ultimately forced the government to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and begin the process of desegregation in schools and other institutions--so much still begs to be done. The evidence is abundant: intractable inequality in education, the killing of unarmed young black men by police forces, and the strictures on voter registration in such conservative states such as North Carolina. Hedin pursues the sadly dwindling members of the so-called Moses Generation--e.g., Robert Moses and David Dennis, former leaders of the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, and Congressman John Lewis, who helped lead the marchers across Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965; and others now deceased and unheralded, such as Charleston native Septima Clark, who pioneered 'citizenship schools' on Johns Island and elsewhere. Hedin champions the work of dogged current organizers like Jessie Tyler of Ruleville, Mississippi, who scours the direly impoverished Delta counties to help people sign up for health care, which the author firmly believes is a civil right. Thoughtful essays on this significant struggle, ongoing and continuous."--Kirkus Reviews "We tend to think of paradigm-shifting history as isolated events of singular importance enacted by powerful individuals. In Civil Rights history, we identify Rosa Parks, the Greensboro Four at the Woolworth's Sit-Ins, or Martin Luther King Jr. at Selma as moments that everything began to change. Benjamin Hedin insists that we remember the hundreds of hours of meetings and planning sessions and forgotten beatings that led to the iconic event. The summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the streets. Or meeting in a church basement."--Brian Lampkin, Co-Owner, Scuppernong Books, Greensboro, NC
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