Middle School Reading Excerpts on Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf
Weaving national narratives from stories of the daily lives and familiar places of local residents, Françoise Hamlin chronicles the slow struggle for blackness freedom through the history of Clarksdale, Mississippi in her book Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after Globe War II. Hamlin paints a full motion-picture show of the boondocks over fifty years, recognizing the accomplishments of its diverse African American customs and strong NAACP branch, and examining the extreme brutality of entrenched ability there. The Clarksdale story defies triumphant narratives of dramatic change, and presents instead a layered, contentious, untidy, and often disappointingly unresolved civil rights movement.
In the following excerpt, Hamlin sets the scene and describes what makes Clarksdale an unusual case in the study of the civil rights movement. (pp 1.iii):
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The claim to fame for Clarksdale, Mississippi, is as the home of the blues. In the first half of the twentieth century, many men, and a few women, gathered at that place to develop the blues every bit a musical form and consume it with pleasure. Due west.C. Handy, Gus Cannon, Charley Patton, Son House, John Lee Hooker, Jack Johnson, Frank Frost, Bessie Smith, Ike Turner, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Robert Johnson, amidst others, carved their mark on the local and national music scene in Clarksdale.[1] Today, the most famous landmark, the Crossroads—where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the devil in exchange for mastery over his music—is proudly demarcated past a decorative pointer of four guitars, with each neck pointing toward the geographical compass points: north and s along Highway 61 (at present 161); e and due west on Route 49. Nevertheless Clarksdale'due south African American history resonates much deeper than the musical melodies emanating from juke joints and the fields. The fact that the blues, a musical form documenting hard life and harder knocks, establish a fertile home hither speaks to the stories of struggle and survival on the ground where it matured.
A fuller history of African Americans in Clarksdale illustrates how a customs organizing during the mass ceremonious rights move institute, chose, or appropriated opportunities in order to survive. These (real, rather than legendary) crossroads existed on diverse planes—across time and place and within personal (an sometimes communal) lives. This metaphor, which Johnson'due south alone meeting conjures, helps us remember the incertitude in the choices, opportunities, and decisions that black people made as they worked for ameliorate futures, highlighting agency and strategic organisation over coast and defeat.
Crossroads at Clarksdale chronicles the blackness liberty struggle in Clarksdale, Mississippi, from 1951 to the mid-1970s. The narrative, withal, spills astern into the 1940s and forrad to the turn of the twenty-start-century. At the national level, while mass movement strategies forced the enactment of desegregation laws and case decisions and took downwards major barriers to equal economical opportunities, the reality of life for about African Americans did not change dramatically. Risky choices led to relatively wearisome alter at the local level, with steady battles for gains, at times in tiny incremental steps.
The larger national portrait of the mass civil rights movement leaves out this local story and the personal narratives and drama that permitted the everyday push button for a more simply society. This partially explains the indifference to the past in today's Clarksdale. During my stay in that location as an exchange pupil at Coahoma Canton High School in the early on 1990s, in a school that was hands 90% African American, inappreciably any blackness history was taught, nothing across specific leaders and inventors. One time in graduate school and specializing in African American history, the one book I found on Clarksdale's history, written in 1982 and published by the city's Carnegie Library, did not reflect history every bit African Americans remembered it. Rather it showed an unrealistic and sanitized version of social harmony and the blues.[2] The youth of Clarksdale, starting with my peers, knew nothing of the history, the struggle, and the sacrifices made by their neighbors and relatives. This book recovers for the offset time those forgotten or discarded memories.
Looking at one place provides a window for analyzing the complication of movements even within the locales. Information technology complicates our understanding of a mas move, or, more accurately, a mass of movements throughout the nation, each peculiar to its locale and population. This portrait uses Clarksdale every bit its canvas.[3] Past keeping this study local, the project conducts a cross-organizational comparison through time, showcasing Clarksdale's residents and the triumphs and tragedies that occurred in that location as they arrived at various crossroads. These accumulative stories nearly the sustained push for substantive change during the mass civil rights movements are a continuation of the black freedom struggle, 1 that is unique to the history of African Americans carrying the legacy of slavery. Themes effectually organizing, victories, persistent problems, and the nature of coalition edifice, past and present, are distilled in this one town'southward story.[four]
As a Delta town, Clarksdale typified many movement sites, all the same for many reasons it is unique. Clarksdale's movement was more homespun than in other Delta towns—the National Clan for the Advocacy of Colored People (NAACP) had its strongest branch there, founded in the early on 1950s past local people. For that reason, other organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCP) did not take equally big a presence as they did in the bordering Sunflower County directly southward, or less than sixty miles away in Greenwood. In Clarksdale itself, in that location were relatively more than possibilities for African Americans because as a larger urban area information technology offered more employment possibilities. For example, Coahoma County Junior Higher and Agricultural Loftier Schoolhouse, locally known as Aggie, became 1 of the get-go institutions of its kind in the state in 1949 when grades 13 and 14 were added to the curriculum to create a black public junior college serving adjacent Delta counties. With a more diverse and better-educated population, Clarksdale generally had an aura of relative progressivism in the Delta—a handful of African Americans could register to vote and a few black businesses and professionals constituted a middle class. Yet violence existed and was used as a deterrent by those upholding Jim Crow.
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From Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War Two, past Françoise N. Hamlin. Copyright © 2012 by the University of North Carolina Printing.
Françoise N. Hamlin is the Hans Rothfels Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Chocolate-brown University. Larn more than and keep up with upcoming events at the book's Facebook page.
- [1] Encounter Palmer, Deep Blues; Weeks, Clarksdale and Coahoma County; and Gioia, Delta Blues.↩
- [ii] See Weeks, Clarksdale and Coahoma County.↩
- [iii] For a range of models of local studies, come across Rhona Y. Williams, Politics of Public Housing; Orleck, Storming Caesar's Palace; and Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights. As well of import is Thornton, Dividing Lines. For organizational histories, the following have been useful: Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement; Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s; Branch, Parting the Waters; and Branch, Pillar of Burn. For groundbreaking work on black activism in Mississippi, see McMillen, Night Journey; Payne, I've got the Light of Freedom; and especially Dittmer, Local People. Crosby'due south A Piffling Taste of Freedom focuses on Claiborne Canton, southward of the Mississippi Delta, primarily through the personality of Charles Evers. Moye'southward Let the People Decide, about Sunflower County, builds on the piece of work of SNCC, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, and Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party politics.↩
- [4] Run across Forest, Development Arrested, for scholarship that extended the origins of the motility backward in time before Brownish existed in the 1960s. For case, meet Dalfiume, "'Forgotten Years' of the Negro Revolution." Nikhil Pal Singh wrote extensively nigh the "long civil rights era" in the 2004 Black Is a State. Recent attention revolves around Jacquelyn Hall'southward essay "The Long Ceremonious Rights Move and the Political Uses of the Past." Responses to Hall's essay include Litwack, "Fight the Power! The Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement"; and Arensen, "Reconsidering the Long Ceremonious Rights Motility."↩
Source: https://uncpressblog.com/2012/06/05/excerpt-crossroads-at-clarksdale-by-francoise-n-hamlin/
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