Moral Faith and the Legacy of John Lewis's Political Vision of “Good Trouble”

The late congressman John Lewis spent most of his political life engaging Black Power's commitment to economic and political freedom through a political vocabulary that aligned with his deeply held beliefs in nonviolence, human rights activism, and moral faith. The tension between the Black radical left and establishment Black politics dates back to Lewis's clash with elite Black leaders over the content of his prepared address for the 1963 March on Washington. The address provides a glimpse into Lewis's complicated political legacy. The youngest speaker at the March, Lewis faced the daunting task of both representing the political philosophy of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and meeting the expectations of established civil rights leaders. Negotiating the political interests of the organizers of the March alongside the demands of SNCC foreshadowed the congressman's political vocation: a lifetime of civil rights advocacy through a politics of respectability and Black Power's political philosophy of freedom and economic transformation. Lewis's political legacy is complicated; and yet, it was fueled by an unabashed commitment to Black freedom struggles, human rights activism, and racial reconciliation.

New Black Power

In 1966, the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee stood in Mississippi and raised a call, “What do we want?” A resounding response poured from hundreds of voices, “Black Power!” (Jeffries 171). This was the first time that the two words came together as a public rallying cry, a punctuating symbol in political struggles in the United States. In the decades after Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) led that chant in Mississippi, the slogan “Black Power” became an activist mantra throughout the Black Diaspora....

Incarceration as Liberation

This chapter details the inward-facing purposes of civil disobedience by revisiting the student-led campaign of “jail, no bail” pioneered by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). It argues that accepting arrest was a practice of “comparative freedom,” through which activists reframed the experience of incarceration as one of liberation. The point of “jail, no bail”—withholding bail money and voluntarily staying in jail—was not to signal fidelity to law, stabilize state authority, or contain the unruly potential of dissent. Rather, through “jail, no bail” student activists transformed an experience defined by fear, stigma, and vulnerability into an enactment of courage, dignity, and freedom. Accepting arrest was thus a means of withholding collective and individual cooperation from illegitimate power, and thereby refusing the rituals of submission and domination that defined Jim Crow.

Hamer, Fannie Lou

Fannie Lou Hamer was a civil rights activist working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She dedicated her life to community organizing and the fight for human and civil rights. Hamer was also the co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Junebug Productions and Roadside Theater

Junebug/Jack is a joint theatrical production of Junebug Productions of New Orleans and the Roadside Theater of Whitesburg, Kentucky, professional, community-based theaters whose mission is to speak for the historically marginalized and exploited communities in which they are located. Junebug Productions was founded in 1963 under the name Southern Free Theater as part of the cultural wing of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the influential civil rights organization. Roadside Theater was founded in 1975 as a component of Appalshop, a media production company in the Kentucky coalfields that was begun as a youth job-training program in film and a way for Appalachian people to take control of their own story. Junebug and Roadside began performing in each other’s communities in response to an increase in Ku Klux Klan activity in 1981. The companies have also partnered with grassroots theatrical groups such as Teatro Pregones from the Bronx (1993–2018) and, independently, with traditional artists from Native American communities and theater ensembles from the Czech Republic and elsewhere....

Attica South

This chapter narrates the moment when mass incarceration cast more and more African Americans into prison during the decade of the 1970s. As such, the chapter illustrates how the onset of mass incarceration swept onto southern prison plantations a younger generation who not only had witnessed 1960s era civil rights protest, but several of whom were active veterans of the Vietnam War, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers, and local Black Power groups. This chapter offers a reconceptualization of Black masculinity as African American men in both Texas and Louisiana’s Angola responded to the prison’s sexual violence with a communitarian-grounded defense of one another and the sanctity of their bodies. Chapter 6 offers the simultaneous narrative of African American politicians elected in the wake of the civil rights movement who sought prison reform, alongside radical black political organizing against the prison plantation. In response to growing fears that “Attica” might come South, Texas prison administrators doubled down on the southern trusty system and looked to “get tough” on civil rights agitation by bringing in new leadership with experience in quelling Black radicalism and civil rights suits.

Youth and Women Lead

Diane Nash, Bob Moses, and The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) routed an oppressive system that had existed for nearly a century. In just five years, between 1960 and 1965, young activists—most Black, some not—dismantled large parts of legalized segregation, a system widely known as Jim Crow. They set up voting rights, community organizing, and nonviolent direct action in the very places in which segregation was most deeply rooted—Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. Ella Baker, possibly the greatest champion of American democratic politics that no one outside of certain circles has ever heard about—was a lodestar for SNCC’s group-centered leadership. Baker resisted the typical mode of individual heroics. Her legacy not only pervades the story of SNCC but also becomes visible in many of the movements that followed the civil rights/Black Power era.

On the Freedom Side

As Wesley C. Hogan sees it, the future of democracy belongs to young people. While today's generation of leaders confronts a daunting array of existential challenges, increasingly it is young people in the United States and around the world who are finding new ways of belonging, collaboration, and survival. That reality forms the backbone of this book, as Hogan documents and assesses young people's interventions in the American fight for democracy and its ideals. Beginning with reflections on the inspiring example of Ella Baker and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, Hogan profiles youth-led organizations and their recent work. Examples include Southerners on New Ground (SONG) in the NAFTA era; Oakland's Ella Baker Center and its fight against the school-to-prison pipeline; the Dreamers who are fighting for immigration reform; the Movement for Black Lives that is demanding a reinvestment in youth of color and an end to police violence against people of color; and the International Indigenous Youth Council, water protectors at Standing Rock who fought to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline and protect sovereign control of Indigenous lands. As Hogan reveals, the legacy of Ella Baker and the civil rights movement has often been carried forward by young people at the margins of power and wealth in U.S. society. This book foregrounds their voices and gathers their inventions--not in a comprehensive survey, but as an activist mix tape--with lively, fresh perspectives on the promise of twenty-first-century U.S. democracy.