Freedom Time

Freedom Time:New Directions in Civil Rights Movement Scholarship Paige A. McGinley (bio) Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. By Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 322 pages. $89.00 (cloth). $29.00 (paper). Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson. By Shana L. Redmond. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 208 pages. $94.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement. By Victoria W. Wolcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 272 pages. $30.00 (cloth). $29.95 (paper). In December 2015, a group of scholars and activists, including Percy Green II, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tef Poe, Jamala Rogers, and George Lipsitz, gathered to discuss the "generations of struggle" in the Black freedom movement, particularly in relation to the Ferguson rebellion in the St. Louis region. Moderated by Elizabeth Hinton and introduced by Walter Johnson, the discussion ranged widely, with Rogers noting that "the connection between the generations is real, and some of the alleged intergenerational tensions are not," and Lipsitz observing that "we ought to understand that for Black people, the issue of generations is different because no group of people on earth has to struggle as much just to have succeeding generations, to create the possibility that there will be another generation at all."1 I introduce this important conversation's meditation on the notion of "generations" because of what might be at stake in describing these three new books as "a new generation" of scholarship—a discarding of the past, a confrontation or overthrow, complete with oedipal overtones. This is not the state of affairs I am attempting to chart. Civil rights movement scholarship has changed in recent decades, of course: firsthand (or nearly so) eyewitness accounts and analysis (by Aldon Morris, Clayborne Carson, Judy Richardson, and others) gave way to works that challenged the spatial and temporal bounds of "the movement" (Martha Biondi, Glenda [End Page 153] Gilmore, Hasan Jeffries, Komozi Woodard) as well as those that emphasized a grassroots organizing tradition (John Dittmer, Charles Payne, Barbara Ransby). And while Julius B. Fleming Jr.'s Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, Shana L. Redmond's Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson, and Victoria W. Wolcott's Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement are profoundly distinct, they each add new dimension and texture to our understanding of Black aesthetic expression and political practice at midcentury. Whether they represent a "new generation" is less important, perhaps, than the new discoveries they make possible, the new ways of assembling the past that they model, and the new space they open up for an engagement with a past and a project that, as Fleming notes, remains "unfinished." The ongoing unfinishedness of past liberation struggles infuses these three works, each of which charts precise and evocative temporalities of struggle. The question of time and the midcentury movement frequently comes up as a set of questions about periodization and designation: Is the civil rights era properly described as the years from the Brown decision (1954) to the passage of the Voting Rights Act (1965)? What kinds of historiographic narratives does a framework of the long civil rights movement make possible or preclude? What is at stake in discussing the midcentury movement as an intensification of or a signal departure from what came before? Is it more appropriate to think of the Black freedom struggle as beginning the moment enslaved Africans touched the soils of the Americas? While not the central concern of the three books considered here, each necessarily reckons with the question of periodization and terminology. But time and temporality are analytic—and affective—categories within each work as well, with Wolcott and Fleming signaling the temporal dimensions of their investigations in their very titles. The phrase "civil rights movement" scarcely appears in Redmond's Everything Man, and not without good reason: whether for reasons of Robeson's communist associations, ill health, or personal choice, Robeson had a tenuous association with the narrowly construed "classical phase" of the movement. And yet he gave shape and sound

Aesthetics · Art · Civil rights · Conversation · Emancipation · Movement (music · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · American Political and Social Dynamics · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies · Religious Studies