SOHP's "The Long Civil Rights Movement: The South Since the 1960s" Research Initiative Moves Ahead

SOHP fieldworkers over the past year have gathered dozens of interviews documenting post-1960s struggles for economic justice. These struggles include a wide range of grassroots efforts to end discrimination in factories and offices, implement pioneering open housing legislation, and defend the Great Society's anti-poverty initiatives. The interviews represent the second phase of the multiyear "Long Civil Rights Movement" project, which seeks to collect reminiscences of the men and women who in the years following the sit-ins and protests of the 1960s fought to keep the doors of equal opportunity open and to extend the civil rights struggle into new arenas. While SOHP researchers have gathered interviews in areas across the South, intensive field work sites include Birmingham, Charlotte, Chapel Hill, New Orleans, and Louisville. An initial round of interviews focused on race and public schools in these same communities, and the final phase will complete the project with interviews explosing gender and the gay rights movement.

Overview of the Long Civil Rights Movement Initiative
In 2003 the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill launched a major new initiative, “The Long Civil Rights Movement: The South Since the 1960s.”

This initiative is organized into three main series, each of which centers on a key arena of post-1960s civil rights struggle: 1) Race and the Public Schools; 2) Economic Justice; 3) Gender and Sexuality. Each series includes more than one hundred interviews.

The Economic Justice Series
In the final years of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr. urged Americans to extend the civil rights struggle to matters of economic justice. His final act of public service—lending support to striking sanitation workers in Memphis—reflected his growing interest in linking questions of race and class. In the years following King’s tragic death in 1968, a diverse range of activists, workers, and public servants continued to press for economic justice in a rapidly changing South. In the post-Civil Rights era, the region attracted new high-tech research and development firms, transformed many of its cities into Sunbelt showcases, and earned a reputation as the nation’s new hot spot of growth. These changes prompted many white northerners to move South for the first time, while many black northerners chose to return “home” in search of educational and economic opportunities once reserved for whites only. Yet these signs of Sunbelt prosperity masked enduring disparities within the population. Much of the rural South remained mired in poverty—poverty that was made worse by the increasing displacement of small-scale farmers and by industrial decline. Those who sought opportunity in the region’s cities often found themselves trapped within persistent cycles of unemployment and underemployment. Even as southern schools desegregated and significant numbers of African Americans joined the ranks of the middle class, the overall housing and employment patterns in southern cities revealed increasing levels of racial stratification.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has given recent exposure to the South’s enduring poverty and racial divisions, prompting many Americans to ask: “How can such conditions still exist in the twenty-first century? Why didn’t the Civil Rights Movement do more to equalize economic conditions?” The Economic Justice Series will provide the deep historical context necessary for answering those questions by recovering the stories of men and women who over the past three decades have confronted and sought to challenge the “unfinished business” of the Civil Rights Movement.

Economic Justice Series: Topics of Focus

1. Economic Re-Structuring and Labor Organization
• post-1960s struggles to desegregate the workplace, including the implementation of affirmative action policies
• the regional loss of industrial jobs and the rise of a service-based economy
• labor organization among workers in the service industry (particularly in the public sector)

2. Housing and Residential Segregation
• efforts to implement the pioneering open housing legislation of the 1960s
• the relationship between Sunbelt suburbanization, residential segregation, and the ongoing struggle to maintain school integration
• the rise of government initiatives for decentralizing the urban poor, including scattered-site public housing
• the impact of decreasing federal appropriations for subsidized housing

3. The Politics of Race, Poverty, and Economic Citizenship
• the efforts of southern activists to sustain the Great Society’s anti-poverty initiatives, including the post-1960s work of Community Action Agencies
• the challenges that a new generation of black elected officials in the South faced in confronting questions of economic justice at a time of recession and governmental retrenchment
• the decline of “welfare rights” as a viable political issue
• the expansion of the black middle-class coupled with the overall persistence of racial income gaps