Robert W. Widell Jr.Birmingham and the Long Black Freedom Struggle

Robert W. Widell Jr.'s Birmingham and the Long Black Freedom Struggle understands itself to be an account of the continuation through the late 1960s and 1970s of the city's much better known civil rights uprising of 1963. It focuses on four local movements: a campaign to open formerly white jobs at the American Cast Iron Pipe Company (ACIPCO) to black employees; the efforts of welfare rights activists to emphasize the grievances of Birmingham's black female welfare recipients; the attempts of black cooks and housekeepers in the city's hospitals and nursing homes to form a union; and the activities of Birmingham's small group of disciples of the Black Panther Party, the Alabama Liberation Front. Widell's telling of these stories derives primarily from police surveillance documents, supplemented by interviews and court records. Each of the stories is intrinsically interesting, and together they usefully supplement our knowledge of the period. The difficulty with the book derives from Widell's embedding of his accounts in a conceptual framework that depicts them as what he calls a “third phase” of the civil rights movement. It is clear that Widell conceives of the classic civil rights movement as a far-reaching mobilization of the black masses, and he wants to believe—almost in defiance of his own evidence—that the four poignant and stunted struggles he has uncovered constitute a continuation of that mobilization. Certainly the pervasive consequences of white supremacist iniquity do knit together both the earlier movement and these subsequent struggles. However, the mere fact that they faced similar social injustices does not make the latter the legitimate heir of the former.

Civil rights · Political science · Sociology · Welfare · White (mutation) · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society