For over eighty years UNC-Chapel Hill and UNC Press have enjoyed a close relationship. UNC-Chapel Hill, which has demonstrated a particular and historic focus on the humanities, is the oldest public university in the nation and the flagship campus of the University of North Carolina system; UNC Press, the oldest university publishing house in the South, is regularly recognized nationally and internationally for the quality of its scholarly publications in the humanities, and for its distinguished list of publications related to the African American freedom struggle and the civil rights movement.
From its founding more than 200 years ago, UNC-Chapel Hill has seen the state of North Carolina and its practical problems as critical fields of study and service, and those needs continue to shape the University’s teaching, research, and public service agendas. As one of the nation’s best public universities, UNC-Chapel Hill has taken the lead in the discussion of vital social and ethical issues. Together, the University and UNC Press share a commitment to and a long-standing record of public engagement. In choosing the long civil rights movement as an organizing theme for this project, the partners are guided by the University’s current Academic Plan, which lays out six priorities–five of which intersect with the focus on the long civil rights movement.
First and foremost, the project directly supports the commitment of UNC-Chapel Hill to “further integrate interdisciplinary research, education, and public service.” The Academic Plan calls this goal “the most critical building block for setting strategic academic priorities.” In addition, the project supports the University’s effort to “increase diversity,” both of individuals and of ideas, within the university community. By extending the reach of civil rights scholarship beyond the academy, the project aims to “enhance public engagement” around a wide variety of contemporary issues from housing to health care to poverty to the environment. In expanding the conventional geographic and demographic understandings of the movement, the project supports the University’s effort to “extend global research and teaching.” And finally, by including graduate and professional students in the exploration of innovative collaboration and new kinds of scholarly publication, Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement will help “provide the strongest possible academic experience for students.”
Within the interdisciplinary priority, the Academic Plan identifies specific areas of strategic opportunity for academic enrichment. These include (1) fine arts, humanities, and social sciences; (2) global citizenship (including area studies programs such as African American studies, Latin American studies, Native American studies, and Southern studies); (3) social problem-solving, including civil rights—that is, “scholarship on such issues as education, economic and social justice, employment, health care, housing, and voting rights”; and (4) ethics, leadership, and public life. The Plan also notes that to promote interdisciplinarity, the University Library must “strengthen its leadership role” in providing both traditional and digital resources to scholars and students. The project has at its core a collaboration of scholars, librarians, and university press staff, exploring and developing innovative models of scholarly communications, the primary mechanism to connect research, teaching, and public service.
Within the priority of increasing diversity, the Academic Plan mandates “integrating the needs and concerns of African-Americans, Native-Americans, Latinos, and Asians into the curriculum and daily life.” This is viewed as a moral good, as an ethical responsibility, and as an opportunity for academic enrichment. Just as Carolina Covenant and the College Advising Corps, two non-academic programs designed to recruit and retain a diverse undergraduate population, complement and strengthen the University’s academic work, so this collaborative project in scholarly communications will add another important dimension to the campus-wide focus on civil rights.
The Organizing Theme: The Long Civil Rights Movement
Building on the extensive record of both UNC-Chapel Hill and UNC Press in producing and publishing distinguished scholarship about civil rights and other movements for social and economic justice, especially in the American South, this collaborative project will focus on the long civil rights movement. Much of the intellectual scaffolding of this theme—and the first use of the term—can be found in the widely cited and anthologized essay, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Spruill Professor of History and Director of the SOHP. The essay was delivered in 2004 as her presidential address to the Organization of American Historians and published the following year in the Journal of American History.
The project will encourage scholars in a wide variety of fields to rethink the conventional narrative that confines the civil rights movement to the dramatic decade-long effort to overthrow legal segregation in the American South. The project will expand the understanding of the civil rights movement in important ways—chronologically, demographically, thematically, and geographically—thus stimulating work that ranges widely in space and time. The project will stress the modern phase of the struggle that began in the 1930s and spawned a series of other social movements from the 1960s on. Although the project will focus primarily on the South, it will stress the region’s convergences with other parts of the U.S. and explore global influences and global resonances.
Reframing the traditional narrative in this way raises a host of intriguing questions. For example, how has the civil rights movement affected other freedom struggles around the world, and how has it been affected by them? How have the movements for economic, environmental, criminal, and social justice been influenced by global movements of labor and capital? What has been the effect of demographic change, whether internal migration or immigration? How different does the struggle for civil rights look when viewed through the lens of gender or the lens of class? How useful is the concept of southern distinctiveness? What has been the impact of popular culture, and what roles have the movie, music, and other cultural industries played in the long civil rights movement? How have individual and social memories of the civil rights movement affected legal outcomes and policy debates? Why is the resegregation of schools now on the rise? What are the relationships among the various movements spawned by the civil rights movement—for example, second-wave feminism, the gay rights movement, the Latina/o movement, and movements for Native American sovereignty? How have these and other movements, both progressive and conservative, appropriated the rhetoric, symbols, and legacy of civil rights? The list of questions ripe for scholarly exploration is seemingly endless.
The urgency with which the project partners approach these questions derives from their conviction that the world we live in today—whether examined on a local, state, regional, national, or international scale—was produced by the contradictory outcomes of the long civil rights movement. By collaborating in collecting, documenting, interpreting, and publishing materials related to this many-faceted phenomenon, the partners seek to overcome a false sense of closure that relegates the struggle for racial equality to the past and to a distinctive and benighted region of the country. They also seek to enhance scholarly understanding and public dialogue on the challenges that we, as a society and a people, now face.