Cette thèse espère contribuer au dépassement du récit dominant qui a longtemps marqué l’historiographie du mouvement des droits civiques. Différents mécanismes de production du consensus, tant externes au mouvement qu’internes, ont contribué à masquer les tensions qui le traversaient et à le délimiter étroitement autour du seul aspect racial. Ce récit unifiait artificiellement la minorité noire en minorant les clivages de classe, de genre, les tensions générationnelles ou spatiales qui préexistaient aux années 1960 et en limitant les objectifs de ces mobilisations à la revendication de l’égalité des droits raciaux. Par ailleurs le maccarthysme et le triomphe du consensus libéral ont marginalisé la gauche noire et relégué les femmes à l’arrière-plan. Marginalisés en tant que forces politiques, les courants radicaux et les femmes ont aussi été d’abord effacés du récit historique. Cette représentation restrictive du mouvement des droits civiques a pu s’intégrer au récit national américain, aux dépens des voix radicales discordantes et du Nationalisme Noir de la période postérieure à 1966. Cependant ces clivages préexistaient : ce travail s’inscrit dans la perspective d’une histoire longue du mouvement des droits civiques qui met l’accent sur les continuités qui, des années 1930 aux années 1970, lient les générations entre elles. Il s’agit alors de dépasser les limites chronologiques traditionnelles et les clivages spatiaux qui opposent un Nord et un Sud essentialisés pour se situer à l’échelle locale, à la hauteur des militants dans la multiplicité des mouvements locaux. Nos sources en majorité autobiographiques, mais aussi photographiques, permettent de rendre compte de l’écart entre les militants locaux et leurs leaders nationaux du New Deal au Black Power. Les autobiographies militantes constituent des contre-récits qui remettent en question le récit dominant et dévoilent les tensions politiques et les projets minoritaires : ceux de la gauche noire, mais aussi les clivages genrés, générationnels ou spatiaux. Les revendications économiques et féministes de même qu’une dimension internationale sont aussi mis en lumière. La photographie de presse participe à cet effacement des clivages, par l’iconisation de figures célèbres. Malgré le maccarthysme, les thèmes et les idées de la gauche noire perdurent pourtant par le biais de l’image. Cette thèse tente de redonner leurs voix aux leaders anonymes du mouvement, à ceux dont les idées ont été masquées ou déformées et qui témoignent de la complexité d’un combat où classe, genre et race sont liés mais aussi en concurrence. / In this dissertation I hope to contribute to the criticism of the dominant narrative that has long been at the center of the historiography of the black liberation movement. Different consensus-building mechanisms, both external and internal to the movement, masked its tensions and tended to delineate it exclusively around race. This narrative artificially unified the black mi-nority by mostly obliterating the movement’s class divisions as well as the gender, generation-al, and spatial tensions, that existed prior to the 1960s, and by limiting its objectives to the demand for legal rights. Furthermore, McCarthyism and the triumph of the liberal consensus marginalized the black left and relegated women to the background while politically radical currents and the demands of women were also erased from the historical narrative. This nar-row vision of the black liberation movement was integrated into the US national narrative at the expense of the discordant voices of radicalization and Black Nationalism of the post-1966 era. This work adopts the perspective of a long civil rights movement by focusing on the con-tinuities that linked various generations, from the 1930s to the 1970s, thus going beyond the traditional and the spatial divides, which oppose an essentialized regional divide between North and South in the dominant narrative to focus instead on the diversity of local movements The sources used focus on autobiographies and on photography, making it possible to account for the differences in point of view between local activists and their national leaders, from the years of the New Deal to the Black Power era. Militant autobiographies constitute counter-narratives that challenge the master narrative and reveal political tensions and minority projects, including those of the black left; they also point to gendered, generational and spatial divides as well as to economic and feminist demands, and they show the international dimen-sion of the black liberation movement. Mainstream photography participated in the erasure of the tensions in the movement through the iconization of famous figures. Still, in spite of McCarthyism, the themes and ideas of the black left are visible through their own images. With such sources, this doctoral dissertation attempts to give voice to the anonymous leaders of the movement, to those whose ideas have been masked or distorted and whose testimony testifies to the complexity of a struggle where class, gender and race both concur and compete.

The ways in which white Americans understand the racial landscape and their own racial identities are not well understood. Through the lens of the racial past, in this study I investigate how memory operates within the white racial frame, the dominant white-centric worldview, to uphold systemic racism and to maintain whites’ collective and individual identities. Through a narrative analysis of original in-depth interviews conducted with 44 ordinary white southerners – lifetime residents of Greensboro, North Carolina – who lived through the legal segregation and civil rights eras, this research demonstrates the interviewees’ contemporary investment in positive notions of the white self and white society. The respondents' autobiographical narratives of life during legal segregation, a time of overt white supremacy, are typified by nostalgia for a childhood era of safety, security, and "good" race relations. Interviewees' narratives of the civil rights era, including nonviolent student sit-in protests for which Greensboro is known and school desegregation, have themes of disruption, danger, and white victimization. Overall, respondents portray Jim Crow segregation as a calm and peaceful time and the civil rights era as chaotic and harmful to whites, at the same time as they acknowledge, to a limited extent, the unfairness of Jim Crow's blatant racial inequalities. In this work I propose the concepts white victimology, white protectionism, and white moral identity. I argue that white victimology – whites' perception, largely imagined, of their own racial victimization – is a major ideological and emotional facet of the white racial frame, whereby whites dismiss the historical and contemporary reality of white racism. My analysis demonstrates that white victimology is a primary way in which whites assert themselves, individually and collectively, as racial innocents and "good" people. In this work I also conceptualize the dynamic of white protectionism, explanatory and rhetorical ways in which whites "rescue" white acquaintances and family members from potential accusations of racism. Ultimately, I argue that whites' investment in perpetuating white dominance and upholding the white racial frame occurs through white moral identity-making, myriad active and subtle ways that whites continue to construct themselves positively and construct people of color, especially black Americans, negatively.

The Nashville Civil Rights Movement was one of the most dynamic local movements of the early 1960s, producing the most capable student leaders of the period 1960 to 1965. Despite such a feat, the historical record has largely overlooked this phenomenon. What circumstances allowed Nashville to produce such a dynamic movement whose youth leadership of John Lewis, Diane Nash, Bernard LaFayette, and James Bevel had no parallel? How was this small cadre able to influence movement developments on local and a national level? In order to address these critical research questions, standard historical methods of inquiry will be employed. These include the use of secondary sources, primarily Civil Rights Movement histories and memoirs, scholarly articles, and dissertations and theses. The primary sources used include public lectures, articles from various periodicals, extant interviews, numerous manuscript collections, and a variety of audio and video recordings. No original interviews were conducted because of the availability of extensive high quality interviews. This dissertation will demonstrate that the Nashville Movement evolved out of the formation of independent Black churches and college that over time became the primary sites of resistance to racial discrimination, starting in the Nineteenth Century. By the late 1950s, Nashville’s Black college attracted the students who became the driving force of a local movement that quickly established itself at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement. Nashville’s forefront status was due to an intentional leadership training program based upon nonviolence. As a result of the training, leaders had a profound impact upon nearly every major movement development up to 1965, including the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the birth of SNCC, the emergence of Black Power, the direction of the SCLC after 1962, the thinking of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Birmingham campaign, and the Selma voting rights campaign. In addition, the Nashville activists helped eliminate fear as an obstacle to Black freedom. These activists also revealed new relationship dynamics between students and adults and merged nonviolent direct action with voter registration, a combination considered incompatible.

This thesis aims to provide a history of African American working class and Leftist activism in Atlanta, Georgia during the early 1970s. It places a series of wildcat strikes within the context of political and social transition, and charges unequal economic conditions and a racially charged discriminatory environment as primary causes. The legacies of both the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left are identified as key contributing factors to this wave of labor unrest. One path taken by former Civil Right activists was to focus on poor peoples’ movements, and one course taken by the 1960s-era New Left activists was to join forces with the working class in an attempt to build a New Communist movement. In Atlanta, these two forces converged and generated a notable force against some of city’s most prominent employers.

The study critically investigated the concept of ―Double Consciousness‖ in selected African-American autobiographies. In view of the latter, W.E.B. Du Bois defined double consciousness as a condition of being both black and American which he perceived as the reason black people were/are being discriminated in America. The study demonstrated that creative works such as Harriet Jacobs‘ Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl: Told by Herself, Frederick Douglass‘ The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois‘ The Souls of Black Folk, Booker T. Washington‘s Up from Slavery, Langston Hughes‘ The Big Sea, Zora Neale Hurston Dust Tracks on a Road, Malcolm X‘s The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Maya Angelou‘s All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes, Cornel West‘s Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud and bell hooks‘ Bone Black affirm double consciousness as well as critiqued the concept, revealing new layers of identities and contested sites of struggle in African-American society. The study used a qualitative method to analyse and argue that there are ideological shifts that manifest in the creative representation of the idea of double consciousness since slavery. Some relevant critical voices were used to support, complicate and question the notion of double consciousness as represented in selected autobiographies. The study argued that there are many identities in the African-American communities which need attention equal to that of race. The study further argued that double consciousness has been modified and by virtue of this, authors suggested multiple forms of consciousness. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

This paper examines the correspondence, manuscripts, and speeches of ex-mental patient activists. I chronicle the activities of the emergent psychiatric survivors movement from its beginnings in the early 1970’s focusing on the work of the Boston based activist, Judi Chamberlin (1944-2010). This paper examines how mental patients in post-war America began to organize in order to have their voices included in the process of their own recovery. I present Chamberlin’s experience as a mental patient as being representative of the “rootlessness” that many post-war women experienced. Chamberlin’s work as an ex-patient activist presented one aspect of the overall struggle on the part of mental patients to claim their place in a wider society. I also pay attention to interdisciplinary scholarly analyses of madness to investigate how discussion of the subject influenced ex-patient activists, as well as whether or not the ex-patients’ narrative reciprocally influenced the scholarly discussion about madness. In the final chapters, I also look at how the successes of this social movement ironically led to the prevalence of today’s diagnostic models of treatment that rely heavily on pharmacological methods and highly regimented evidence-based psychotherapies while still excluding patients’ voices. The voices of mental patients both in the asylum era and today have been excluded from the treatment process.

Adding something new to the understanding of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), which is considered a twentieth-century classic, would be nearly impossible if not for the outlook of new historicism. Through a new historicist analysis of Harper Lee’s literary text parallel to non-fictional texts relating to the American justice system and civil rights, this essay explores how race affects U.S. institutions and society. Lee’s novel is contextualized by delving into the American South of the 1930s, American society and politics in the1960s and the racial landscape in America today, connecting them through the experiences of racial bias within the justice system and the civil rights movement. The essay explores the racial and cultural norms that governed the American justice system at the set time of the story. It analyzes the time of publication and the American society in which the novel made such an impact on the racial debate. Finally, it looks at the impact of the novel and its connection to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the Black Lives Matter movement and readers today. In the spirit of new historicism, the mechanisms of racism and how they affect the population, both the oppressors and the oppressed, is highlighted showing parallels between Lee’s fictional world and American society over time. Through the experiences of the characters, the structures of racism translate to a time and place where the Black Lives Matter movement has infused new life to the civil rights movement worldwide. Looking at retellings of the historical Scottsboro trials, which inspired the story unfolding in To Kill a Mockingbird in light of the justice system, Maycomb county and its inhabitants serves as guides into the racial norms that is ingrained in American society and politics. The results reveal a society where racial segregation is constantly reinforced by legal, economical, and social barriers, despite constitutional efforts to level the playing field for all American citizens.

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