Online Forum-Urban Rebellions in the 1960s
October 14-17, 2024
Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), is hosting an online forum that considers the legacy of the urban rebellions that occurred throughout the United States in the 1960s. The online forum brings together four scholars who will discuss the multiple ways African Americans displayed resilience despite ongoing oppression in the urban communities they called home.
During the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, activists used marches, boycotts, sit-ins, picketing and other forms of peaceful protest to achieve desegregation and racial equality, protection from state and vigilante white supremacist violence, along with socioeconomic inclusivity through social and legal channels. However, some African Americans rejected nonviolent protest and advocated for Black self-defense and rebellion to combat racial discrimination and oppression. From 1964 through the 1970s, events like the 1963 Ku Klux Klan (KKK) bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four young Black girls, the 1965 arrest of Marquette Frye in Los Angeles, California, the 1968 assassination of civil rights activist Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and a variety of police brutality cases sparked over 250 uprisings nationwide, providing a voice to African Americans who felt victimized, powerless, silenced, and angry about the overt and covert racism, discrimination, and violence that existed in their everyday lives.
The forum provides a snapshot of this history, beginning on Monday, October 14 and concluding on Thursday, October 17, 2024. During the short online forum, Black Perspectives will publish new blog posts every day at 5:00 AM EST. Please follow Black Perspectives (@BlkPerspectives) and AAIHS (@AAIHS) on Twitter/X or @AAIHS (@AAIHS23) on Instagram; like AAIHS on Facebook; or subscribe to our blog for updates. By subscribing to Black Perspectives, each new post will automatically be delivered to your inbox during the week of the forum.
About the Organizer
Menika Dirkson is an Assistant Professor of African American History at Morgan State University. She received her Ph.D. in History from Temple University while her M.A. in History and B.A. in History, Latin American Studies, and Cultural Studies are from Villanova University. She has received grants from the Philadelphia Foundation and Thomas Jefferson University’s Arlen Specter Center for her research on police-Black community relations in Philadelphia following the Civil Rights Era. Dirkson’s research and writing have appeared in articles for the Urban History Association’s The Metropole and the Washington Post. She is the author of the 2024 book, Hope and Struggle in the Policed City: Black Criminalization and Resistance in Philadelphia. You can follow her on Twitter @Philadelphian91.
Featured Contributors
Gerald Horne holds the Moores Professorship of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. Dr. Horne received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and his B.A. from Princeton University. Dr. Horne’s undergraduate courses include the Civil Rights Movement and U.S. History through Film. He also teaches graduate courses in Diplomatic History, Labor History and 20th Century African American History. Dr. Horne is the author of more than thirty books and one hundred scholarly articles and reviews. His books includes The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery, Jim Crow and the Roots of U.S. Fascism and Revolting Capital: Racism and Radicalism in Washington, D.C., 1918-1968. His other projects include a study of U.S. imperialism in Northeast Africa, principally Egypt and Ethiopia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and a similar study concerning U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia during the same period. His research has addressed issues of racism in a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights, international relations and war. He has also written extensively about the film industry. He most recent book is entitled Armed Struggle? Panthers and Communists; Black Nationalists & Liberals in Southern California through the Sixties and Seventies (International Publishers, 2024).
Tyler D. Parry is Associate Professor and Director of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, he received a B.A. in History at UNLV then went toward the Atlantic to obtain a Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina. His research examines slavery in the Americas, cultures within the African diaspora, the legacies of chattel slavery in the 21st century, and the histories of resistance undertaken by oppressed populations. His first book, Jumping the Broom: The Surprising Multicultural Origins of a Black Wedding Ritual, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020 and won the American Folklore Society’s Wayland D. Hand Prize in 2022. He is also co-editor with Robert Greene, II of Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina, published in 2021 by the University of South Carolina Press. He is currently working on two books. The first, co-authored with historian Charlton W. Yingling, examines how colonists and settlers used canines to attack and subordinate Black people who resisted slavery and colonial oppression. The second is a history of policing in the Las Vegas valley that provides a new community-based perspective on the troubling history of police brutality in Sin City, and how community members challenged the legal status quo. Follow him on Twitter/X @ProfTDParry.
Marissa Spear is an independent historian and disabled writer based in Northwest Arkansas. She holds a BA in Health Equity Studies from Goucher College and a Certificate of Professional Achievement in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. Her research interests include the role of health and disability in social movement history and the gendered dynamics of the Black Panther Party and Civil Rights-Black Power era. Her essay on disability in children’s historical literature is forthcoming in An American Girl Anthology: Finding Ourselves in the Pleasant Company Universe from the University Press of Mississippi. Her historical research on the Baltimore branch of the Black Panther Party has appeared or is forthcoming in Journal of Women’s History, Contingent Magazine, Nursing Clio, and All of Us. Follow her on Twitter/X @marissaspear71.
Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan, and is the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (Pantheon Books, 2016). Blood in the Water won the Ridenhour Prize, the J. Willard Hurst Prize, the Public Information Award from the New York Bar Association, the Law and Literature Prize from the New York County Bar Association, the Media for a Just Society Award from the National Council for Crime and Delinquency, and the book also received a rarely-given Honorable Mention for the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association. Blood in the Water was also long listed for the Cundill Prize in History, and was a finalist for the National Book Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Upon its release Blood in the Water was prominently reviewed and profiled in the New York Times in four different sections, and Thompson herself was profiled in the highly-coveted “Talk” section in the New York Times Magazine. Blood in the Water ultimately landed on fourteen “Best of 2016” lists including the New York Times Most Notable Books of 2016 list, and ones published by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, and others. The book also received rave reviews in over 100 top popular publications, and Thompson appeared on over 25 television shows, including PBS Newshour, CBS Sunday Morning and the Daily Show, as well as on over 50 radio programs, including Sirius and NPR.