Homogenize The Civil Rights Movement

Most urban historians agreed that the Civil Rights Movement is much more complex than it is portrayed as in the dominant narrative. The current understanding of it, as the period from Brown v Board of Education onwards with a focus on national groups and large leaders like MLK Jr., is too restrictive and ignores the many local movements and struggles that preceded it, undermining the importance of the single protestor in the national story. However, there were conflicting opinions in the field about the role that these grassroots movements play. Some argue that they were the origins of what is now called the Civil Rights Movement (CRM), while others claim that they were antecedents of the CRM. As Shannon King argued in his book, the grassroots …show more content…
It is entirely possible for two people to deal with the same issue in separate places, but the context of their struggle changes the issue to reflect the circumstances. In choosing to delocalize the Civil Rights Movement and homogenizing it, proponents of the Long Movement “do not account for the transformations in African Americans’ consciousness and identity.” To Harlemites, “freedom” meant autonomy economically and socially, whereas in the South, it meant acceptance and integration into Southern society . These different definitions also served to highlight the difference in tactics used by both groups of African Americans. Though not a Negro mecca as it was portrayed to be, Harlem was safer and “proffered them [blacks] greater freedom and privilege as patrons than they received elsewhere.” The racism in the North had a distinct flavor that distinguished it from the Southern Jim Crow style. It still existed, but “While blacks in the North were plagued by racial and economic discrimination, prohibitions on rights were not as comprehensive, nor as deadly as in the South.” These different forms of racism, one overt and the other subtle, affected the subsequent movements in different ways by pushing the conflicts in one direction or the other. The power that the blacks in Harlem had as consumers served to increase intraracial conflict as blacks chose to patronize white businesses over black-owned ones, creating discord among the community. In the South, where one was not given a choice of patronage, interracial conflict overshadowed the intraracial conflicts that existed. If one chose to follow the Long Rights Movement hypothesis and claimed that the racism in the North was no different than Southern racism, this distinction would fade to the background as the Movement collapsed regional distinctions. By catering to black Harlemites, white proprietors did not change their perception of blacks, as