From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle [Hardcover]

Broadly speaking, the traditionally conceptualized mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement possess some similar qualities. They both represent dynamic, complex moments of possibility and progress. They also share mass-based movement activities, policy/legislative advocacy, grassroots organizing, and targeted media campaigns. Innovation, growth, and dissension—core aspects of movement work—mark them both. Crucially, these moments also engender aggressive, repressive, multilevel responses to these assertions of Black humanity.

From Rights to Livescritically engages the dynamic relationship between these two moments of liberatory possibility on the Black Freedom Struggle timeline. The book’s contributors explore what we can learn when we place these moments of struggle in dialogue with each other. They grapple with how our understanding of the postwar moment shapes our analysis of #BLM and wherein lie the discontinuities, in order to glean lessons for future moments of insurgency."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 inFrom Rights to Livesis fresh, timely, and a necessary intervention in understanding the ever-evolving movement for Black lives and liberation."
—Regina N. Bradley, author ofChronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South"Urgent and necessary,From Rights to Livesis, 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 Poull"