Crossroads: New York's black intellectuals and the role of ideology in the civil rights movement, 1954--1965
Item
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Title
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Crossroads: New York's black intellectuals and the role of ideology in the civil rights movement, 1954--1965
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:50604cd6ce80:10979
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identifier
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11406
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Creator
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Burrell, Kristopher,
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Contributor
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Clarence Taylor | Joshua B. Freeman
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Black history | African American studies | American history | 1960s | African Americans | Black Intellectuals | Civil Rights | Civil Rights Movement | New York City
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Abstract
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This dissertation studies the importance of New York City, and the black intellectuals who gathered there, to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The figures discussed here merit the term "intellectual" because they were makers and purveyors of many ideas that sustained and broadened the movement. Studying key activist-intellectuals from across the ideological spectrum allows for a more complete understanding of the importance of ideas in propelling the movement. Looking at the ways in which black intellectuals evolved and used different ideologies in pursuit of racial equality is another way of demonstrating African American agency. This study writes against the characterization of the civil rights movement as primarily fueled by emotionalism and impulsive. Black intellectuals actively sought to plot out the course that the movement would take.;This dissertation continues to move civil rights historiography away from the notion that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X provided the only two approaches for achieving racial equality by demonstrating that there was a broader spectrum of ideologies that African Americans used and adapted in trying to successfully prosecute their struggle to secure racial equality. Instead of merely two approaches---liberal integrationism and black nationalism---I argue that there were four main ideologies in conversation and contention with one another during this period---racial liberalism, conservatism, leftism, and black nationalism.;This dissertation also contributes to the growing literature on the civil rights movement outside of the South. I make two main arguments about the significance of New York City to the movement. First, New York was important because institutions of every political and ideological stripe sank roots into and influenced the intellectual and cultural milieu of black New York and black America. Second, black intellectuals who were drawn to the city flourished because they sampled the extraordinary variety of ideas on display as they matured intellectually and developed their own strategies for growing and sustaining a national movement for social, political, and economic justice. For these reasons, New York is deserving of further study in relation to civil rights agitation and activism.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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History
