This book is required reading for serious students of black liberation, particularly advanced and graduate students. "Groundwork" makes a fine companion to "Freedom North" and "A Nation within a Nation." The Black freedom movement was a national struggle to knock down the barriers to Black equality and development; despite the familiar story, at the grassroots that struggle was not clearly or simply divided between North and South, or between Black Power and Civil Rights. The leading figures in this history defy stereotypes about the character, aims, dynamics and achievements of the freedom struggle.
In reality, many of those leaders were women. These are the stories of grassroots activists in the Black freedom movement who experimented with a wide range of leadership and tactics ranging from Ruth Batson at the cutting edge of the Boston struggle to knock down racial barriers in public schools and Gloria Richardson at the helm of the militant Cambridge Movement against racial domination in Maryland to Septima Clark and the Citizenship Schools in South Carolina as well as Alice Moore and Lillian McGill in the Lowndes County Freedom Organization that sparked the birth of the Black Panther Party in Alabama. After reading this history you will wonder how Gloria Richardson could go from the front page and headlines of the national news in the early 1960s into historical invisibility in most textbooks about Civil Rights.
From coast to coast, distinct local leadership emerged in the Black freedom struggle. In Claiborne County, Mississippi, Charles Evers and Rudy Shields developed two distinctly different styles of leadership and organization. In Milwaukee Father Groppi became the adult advisor to the NAACP Youth Council Commandos, where they fought for the desegregation of schools and open housing. In Newark Harold Wilson, a small merchant, led his community in the fight against police terror and catastrophic urban renewal schemes. Wilson went on to pioneer in the founding of the Committee for A Unified Newark and the Newark Congress of African People. This is also a different tale of the Black Panther Party at the local levels from Oakland, California to the heartland of Kansas City, Omaha Nebraska and Des Moines, Iowa. In Des Moines the Black Panther Party, founded by Mary Rem, fed hungry black and white children in its Free Breakfast programs. Throughout those local movements, we read about the process of self-emancipation, self-discovery, self-definition and self-determination as people were thinking for themselves, making their own analysis and judgments, and fashioning the tools for their own liberation.
Finally, this book is a tribute to the scholarship and intellectual leadership of Professor John Dittmer, author of Black Georgia in the Progressive Era and Local People. As Charles Payne explains, "Professor Dittmer leads by example, not precept. Local People does what it does without talking about what it does." Dittmer's work is "a self-conscious attempt to write a history that reflected some of the intellectual concerns of its participants." "The most important aspect of the book is that it is profoundly respectful, respectful of both the complexity of the people and the politics, and of the possibilities and limitations of historical situations. It is good that younger scholars are building on the modes of analysis exemplified by Local People but it may be even more important that they try to emulate his openness to complexity. ... Of Mr. Dittmer we can say that he has done more than his share to help us understand one of the defining American social movements."
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