Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle

Book excerpt: "A dazzling array of essays that vastly expands our understanding of the role of the media and popular culture in the politics of race. From Andy Griffith to Amiri Baraka, from Leadbelly's blues to "Sweet Sweetback's Baaadassss Song," this is a brilliant and irreplaceable collection."--Timothy B. Tyson, University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power Stimulating and insightful, these essays on the relationship among the media, popular culture, and the postwar African American freedom struggle offer new perspectives on the nature of the Civil Rights Movement and its legacies. At the same time, they suggest how much the struggle itself shaped important trends in American culture and mass media in the 1950s and 1960s. Bringing together a range of voices seldom heard together, this book challenges readers to reconsider the ways in which a simplistic "master narrative" of the Movement has come to dominate popular, and even some scholarly, understandings of the meaning of the freedom struggle. CONTENTS Introduction: Forgotten Wails and Master Narratives: Media, Culture, and Memories of the Modern African American Freedom Struggle, by Brian Ward 1. The Media and the Movement: Looking Back from the Southern Front, by Julian Bond 2. A Media-Made Movement? Black Violence and Nonviolence in the Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement, by Jenny Walker 3. Black-Oriented Radio and the Civil Rights Movement, by Stephen Walsh 4. Reclaiming the South: Civil Rights Films and the New Red Menace, by Allison Graham 5. Hip Like Me: Racial Cross-Dressing in Pop Music Before Elvis, by David Chappell 6. "Climbing the Mountain Top": African American Blues and Gospel Songs from the Civil Rights Years, by Guido van Rijn 7. Free Jazz: Musical Style and Liberationist Ethic, 1956-1965, by Peter Townsend 8. Jazz and Soul, Race and Class, Cultural Nationalists and Black Panthers: A Black Power Debate Revisited, by Brian Ward 9. Villains, Demons, and Social Bandits: White Fear of the Black Cultural Revolution, by William L. Van Deburg 10. "Pimpin' Ain't Easy": Work, Play, and "Lifestylization" of the Black Pimp Figure in Early 1970s America, by Eithne Quinn 11. Mau-Mauing the Filmmakers: Should Black Power Take the Rap for Killing Nat Turner, the Movie? by Scot French 12. "The 1960s Echo On": Images of Martin Luther King Jr. as Deployed by White Writers of Contemporary Fiction, by Sharon Monteith 13. The Power of Martyrdom: The Incorporation of Martin Luther King and His Philosophy into African American Literature, by Trudier Harris Brian Ward, associate professor of American history at the University of Florida, is the author of Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations and coeditor of The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement.