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This thesis addresses the use of African American culture as a political weapon in the 1960s civil rights movement. It argues that African American culture was an important weapon for the movement and focuses on how the three major 1960s civil rights organisations - the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Congress of Racial Equality and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference - engaged with cultural forms such as song, theatre, literature and art. It also examines smaller groups, such as the Free Southern Theater, the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, the Black Panther Party and Us, and important individuals such as Guy Carawan, Robert F. Williams, Amiri Baraka and Malcolm X. A particular concern of the thesis is the role that education played in spreading the civil rights movement's message. Although based in historical method, it is also grounded in cultural theory, addressing Antonio Gramsci's conception of hegemony and oppositional culture and incorporating ideas of identity and memory. It presents SNCC's 1964 Summer Project as a central event of the civil rights movement, where the relationship between education, culture and the movement peaked. In doing so, the thesis addresses the periodisation of the movement, suggesting that 1964 be interpreted as the turning point of the movement. Implicit in the thesis is the relationship between the civil rights organisations and the North. The thesis argues that the movement started to look north prior to 1965. It suggests that African American culture proved to be a unifying force between the 'Civil Rights' and 'Black Power' eras and examines events and individuals that straddled both periods. It therefore proposes that the relationship between these historical phenomena be re-examined and that Black Power be reassessed as an outgrowth of the civil rights movement.

This thesis focuses on Hubert Henry Harrison (1883-1927), a Caribbean-born journalist, educator, and community organizer whose historical restoration requires us to expand the frame of Black radicalism in the twentieth century. Harrison was the first Black leader of the Socialist Party of America to articulate a historical materialist analysis of the "Negro question", to organise a Black-led Marxist formation, and to systematically and publicly challenge the party's racial prejudices. In a time of urbanization, migration, lynching, and segregation, he subsequently developed the World War I-era New Negro movement by spearheading its first organisation, newspaper, nation-wide congress, and political party. Harrison pioneered a new form of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, coloured internationalism. He also inaugurated the socio-cultural tradition of street corner speaking in Harlem, which formed the institutional basis for developing a wide-ranging, working-class, community-based, Black modernist intellectual culture. His people-centred and mass-movement-oriented model of leadership catalysed the rise to prominence of Marcus Garvey and the Garvey movement. Meanwhile, Harrison's African identity and epistemology positioned him to establish an African-centred street scholar tradition in Harlem that endures to this day. Despite Harrison's wide-ranging influence on a whole generation of Black leaders from W.E.B. Du Bois to A. Philip Randolph, his impact and legacy have been largely forgotten. As a result, unearthing and recovering Harrison requires us to rethink multiple histories - the white left, the New Negro movement, Garveyism, the "Harlem Renaissance" - which have marginalized him. Harrison figured centrally in all of these social movements, so restoring his angle of vision demonstrates previously invisible connections, conjunctures, and continuities between disparate and often segregated currents of intellectual and political history. It also broadens the spectrum of Black emancipatory possibilities by restoring an example that retains much of its relevance today.