What's Sex Got to Do with It: Gender and the New Black Freedom Movement Scholarship

Other works have examined the failure of desegregation, especially in schools and neighborhoods, and the resiliency of white supremacy and Black poverty, while newer scholarship has focused on the movement in the North, collapsing the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation and uncovering the pervasiveness of racial discrimination as a national, not merely a southern, phenomenon. Black organizing tradition, a tradition that scholars often ignore in their emphasis on mobilizing events, those dramatic moments featured in the media.11 This media-driven history has given us good theater but often obscures what each of these books so movingly conveys: that ordinary people are capable ot extraordinary contributions to social change.