From Rights to Lives

FranÇoise N. Hamlin is the Royce Family Associate Professor of Teaching Excellence in Africana Studies & History at Brown University. She is the author of the award-winning Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II, coeditor of the anthology These Truly Are The Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on Citizenship and War, and editor and annotator of the republication of The Struggle of Struggles by activist Vera Pigee.Charles W. McKinney Jr. is chair of Africana Studies and associate professor of history at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina, and coeditor of An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee.

• Introduction: “Rights and Lives: History Matters” by FranÇoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.Chapter 1. “Sincerely, Grandma’s Hands: Elucidating Similarities between the Trayvon Martin Generation of #BlackLivesMatter and the Emmett Till Generation of the Civil Rights Movement” by Charity ClayChapter 2. “Continuity and Change: The Spirituality of Liberation in the Black Lives Matter Movement” by Christophe RingerChapter 3. “Good Cops?” by Peter PihosChapter 4. “‘We May Have to Defend Ourselves’: Black Women and Campaigns against Police Sexual Violence during the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter Eras” by Althea Legal-MillerChapter 5. “Revolts of the Black Athletes: Race, Sport, and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter” by Scott Brooks and Aram GoudsouzianChapter 6. “The Search for Truth & Justice: A Diasporic Black Freedom Struggle” by Kishauna SoljourChapter 7. “The Ambivalence of Activist Photography—July 10, 2016” by David MasonChapter 8. “When the Cultural Revolution Comes: Anthem Making in the Era of BLM” by Mickell Carter​Coda: “[title]” by FranÇoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr.Author Bios

FranÇoise N. Hamlin and Charles W. McKinney Jr. have assembled an impressive collection of scholars that put the Civil Rights Movement and the #BlackLivesMatter Movement in conversation to tease out more nuanced and underrepresented aspects of both movements. The scholarship presented in From Rights to Lives is fresh, timely, and a necessary intervention in understanding the ever-evolving movement for Black lives and liberation."—Regina N. Bradley, author of Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South"Urgent and necessary, From Rights to Lives is, like the hashtag that inspired a movement, a critical tool for freedom dreaming. There are vital continuities in the cross-disciplinary conversation Hamlin and McKinney have curated here that will reshape how we talk about Black protest and activism for a long time to come."—Scott Poulson-Bryant, author of HUNG: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America"This timely and updated exploration of 'the long civil rights movement' is an urgently needed volume. Comparisons between facets of Black Lives Matter and the antecedent Civil Rights/Black Power movements open new areas for scholarly examination. The essays move back and forth between contemporary and earlier eras of Black activism and invite fresh thinking about the Black Freedom Struggle."—Dennis C. Dickerson, author of Militant Mediator: Whitney M. Young Jr.