Reconsidering the Civil Rights Movement

As you begin reading about Freedom Summer, you should begin to think about how McAdam's narrative expands and challenges your understanding of the historical context of these events. The social protests that led up to and followed the summer projects of 1964 to increase voter registration of black Southerners, to start alternative schools for black communities to study citizenship and black history, and to try to bring an end to the violence that white authorities used against black people to try to intimidate them should not be seen as simply events in black history, or events that only changed the South, but as significant social changes that challenged the whole of American society. Their impact was felt across the country and around the world, and should properly and fully be viewed in an international political context. How can we use the idea of an African Diaspora (from an interdisciplinary, African American Studies perspective) as a tool of analysis in understanding these events and changes? Once we apply this framework for understanding to a conventional reading of the Cold War and McCarthyism, how does this period start to look much more complicated?