the civil rights movement. well, the new book "the movement of" challenges the popular narrative that it was charismatic leaders showing the way that drove the revolutionary change. he argued that it would be accumulated grievances of ordinary citizens that fueled and sustained the movement. so we are going to dig into that and then as we are talking please submit questions via the q and a feature at the bottom of the screen and i will try my best to get to as many of them as possible. now to introduce the speaker thomas holt professor emeritus of african-american history at the university of chicago. his previous book our children afire the history of african americans and the problem of race in the 21st century. among his distinctions, he is a macarthur genius awardee and former president of the american historical association and american philosophical society. thank you so much for joining us tonight. >> thank you for having me. >> you begin with many women you write about in the book who were not so well-known in the well ke struggle for civil rights. kerry fitzgerald and irene morgan. i want to start with the first, your maternal grandmother. >> guest: i will begin with the story of my grandmother because it captures some of the things you just noted that i wanted to explore in the book. my grandmother, as i described in the book in early 1944, basically it's a kind of rosa parks moment a bus going from lynchburg to her home and my birthplace. she took a seat in the so-called white section of the bus and as it turned out, she got arrested like rosa parks but i think that her experience was exemplary of that moment in history when one, the circumstances and social context were such that she felt the grievances that were built up over time she could challenge and also although this was something that i think of their own song and unrecorded instances of the sort. it didn't lead to a movement at that point although it had all of the marks of some of the instances that had occurred. but rather, it would be another decade before the kind of social changes and developments after world war ii were enabled in the broad-based sustained civil rights that developed from 65. >> your grandmother was among those but also newly conscious of the means and the possibility to act. what are some of the material changes that made these kind of actions possible at that time in the 1940s? >> that's another way she was exemplary in the story that i want to tell because my family had been like most black families of the south, a majority farmers, a few owned land for the most part was a system that exercised extraordinary control over any aspect of your life actually. virginia, north carolina, south carolina. you also had a degree of control of your residence. that was part of the contract if you will working as a tenant or sharecropper on a farm. when that breaks down does it open up the possibility that individual acts like my grandmother's can be become larger collected acts with hundreds of thousands of people who would challenge the jim crow system. >> another note you make in the book to distinguish the experience from the northern experience but also the new cities of the south, the new south this urban life exposed fault line. what do you mean by that or what are some of the fault lines that made the movement possible? >> the great migration that accelerates with world war ii and thousands of african-americans moved to the northern cities also brought them into the southern cities and it was quite phenomenal now that means the breakdown of the kind of social control that was true in the rural south first of all the residency was separate and greater in the city and on the one hand, then on the other hand to get the work, you needed to travel by bus for most part because people did not have cars. my family didn't have a car until i was almost a teenager so on the buses, you get this situation around the segregated the system and jim crow ideology paths of extra force and in fact it reinforces on a daily basis the insult of the jim crow regime in a way that other aspects might not have seen emotional impact but it was a patent insult to give up a seat and surrender to a white passenger. the segregation system didn't actually have that kind of in your face kind of situation. that happens in the cities it's not an accident that sets up the movement. not issues about employment or voting all of which are important but they didn't start off this kind of action that happened in the area of the public accommodation common to the cities that brought black-and-white into conflict in a very different way than other aspects of the segregated system. >> that was illuminating for me this begins in the transportation flashpoint and also stretches back to plessy versus ferguson. what are some of the other ways that your book challenges the notion of the struggle for civil rights that began in the mid 20th century what are some other precedents and strategies for the resistance that did begin in the 19th century and took place in the early part of the 20th century? >> as a matter of fact, many of the strategies, techniques and tactics that we see in the 50s and the 60s we can chase back to a full chapter of the book in new york 1856 before the civil war. in older lady trying to get to church on sunday thrown off of what was then a horse-drawn car. the closest parallel to what happened when again a number of the southern cities, 26 i think there were boycotts and because of segregated service or no service at all. so, there is a long history of some of those were successful in the civil war era. some do achieve the desegregated services and it was passed in 1875 in the discrimination but it was overturned by the supreme court and so then in the 1890s with the rise of more intense forms of state law and the practice of individual enterprises we had this and forced by the state law and it comes directly out of the decision that seemed to justify or validate the possibility of separate but equal facilities. >> in the montgomery bus boycott and the civil rights movement you point out there had been more than a hundred racial conflicts in birmingham alabama through the years leading up to montgomery. so, why montgomery? why did that ignite a spark and why then? >> we know statistically that there were hundreds of cases where they got arrested and thrown off the buses or whatever and it didn't lead to a movement. they had been leading up to the famous case of rosa parks and there had been a number of cases over the years. and interestingly enough it's working class women that are often the ones protesting and take the lead it was a constellation of factors. you had again a leadership systematically challenging or trying to find ways of challenging and bringing suit to challenge. a member of the railroad porter but also the head in montgomery and people like rosa parks who had also been very much engaged for almost a decade in the civil rights activities and counseled one of the girls that had experienced discrimination and protested it as well as the local college there were a bunch of faculty so it was a multi tiered coalition that was waiting to form and the right incident turned out to be that evening when rosa parks was driving home and challenged the system. and as usual the bus gets crowded and therefore people have to surrender their seat and move further to the back. in that content the other factor was after the emmet hill murder and trial that resulted in a not guilty verdict that was very much on rosa parks lined the combination on these factors leads to a possibility of a broad coalition coming together and mobilizing to the challenges that came to the montgomery bus boycott. then it extended and lasted martin luther king was a recent rival and montgomery assumed leadership of that organization and of course the rest is history. >> this leads to a couple different questions we have from the audience here. the difference in tactics and different cities, the freedom rider bus pulled into albany georgia a couple of years later where we meet cornell reagan and freedom writers you introduce us to in the book. two of hundreds of students that were jailed, and this is where the tactic of jail, no bond came into play. first of all, what was behind that and what else came out of albany georgia? the question we have is how did the civil rights movement differ in specific parts of the city? maybe you can help us tease out how that played out compared to other places. >> the movement evolved all the time with different tactics with lunch counters and mass demonstrations in the streets and eventually voter registration campaigns towards the end. the voter registration had always been a part of it. in albany they were called to freedom writers by the students because they came from fame further south or west i should say but it began with the testing at the bus station the students got arrested, those students drew in charles sharad wanting to protest and those protests eventually became mass demonstrations but it isn't a part of the repertoire. for the most part it hasn't been a part of the repertoire movement and that's one of the changes that occurred in albany. it gained prominence and that began in a much earlier movement in 1947 when they were testing and decided to bail on the moral principle. it was picked up again the demonstration that occurred in south carolina shortly before albany and charles sharad had been involved in the particular incident to become one of the principal parties of the strategies and the idea that we have hundreds of people in the street that overwhelm the capacities of the jails and that creates a crisis rather than the fine or whatever the case may be and you go to jail instead and that puts pressure on the local authority to have to deal with that so there's birmingham and other cities subsequently. >> there's another question here about the albany movement. often overlooked in any discussion of the civil rights movement what impact do you think it had on the future marches and demonstrations and what are the things you draw out of that? why is it such an important part of the movement? >> in the case of albany there was music in the movement in fact earlier the meetings with the idea before the student nonviolent coordinating committee we shall overcome was one of them. what happened is the movement was entered in a church and its natural in a black church to express. that concept is in a democratic form because it is expressing itself and the usual accommodation brings it together in a situation where music gets people together in a way that speeches or other things may not because they are expressing themselves and they are not just a tune. people add things related to local events because -- out of that movement comes the freedom singers and some of the other young women from church the form this organization and become a fund-raising mechanism so that's one element of it i don't want to say,, -- they did a podcast about albany called shots in the back if you are interested in that little bit of local history. going back to the question about how the civil rights movement differed in different parts of the country, the freedom riders that do take off in 1961 it was a pretty smooth ride. john lewis famously attacked in south carolina but then they get to alabama and things are different. they are escorted out and then arrive in mississippi. i'm not sure a lot of people realize that they were jailed in mississippi. this is like you quoted somebody in the book, the american congo, the naacp. give us some examples of how the movement is specific to police. this isn't a nationwide or one-size-fits-all kind of approach. >> after that point which i emphasized they are trying to industrialize and modernize the requires outside capital and a sense of order that racial violence and so forth the goals of businesspeople and others that want to maintain racial subordination but they don't want the kind of things that happened. so there is a divide between a place like birmingham, montgomery, nashville, these places that have those aspirations and people among the white politicians and the ruling class who want to do it more politely. so they were more vulnerable to the kind of actions and things of that sort which in some sense were hitting the consumer side of the economy in those places. often they organize that christmas or easter precisely in order to put maximum pressure on the economy. okay the mississippi edition especially the places of the movement it is still although it is changing rapidly during and after the movement it is still very much a plantation-based economy except for places like mobile and so forth and so a lot of what was being done in a place like montgomery or birmingham would be irrelevant in that situation and dangerous. on the other hand, the population was a right place to register people to vote and put pressure and bring about change in the political process. so that's where the goal of the movement shift more directly and had always been part of the objective. thanks to the freedom ride, they began to try to organize in those parts of the state and to focus on political power because it made sense. >> if you have questions please type it into the q and a. i have one from john who says it sounds like you seem to emphasize the impact of the movement versus more centralized leadership leveraging. any similarities in the impact then and the black lives matter effort from today? >> they are very similar in many respects. in different contexts but i would argue part of the strength of the movement is decentralized with a number of organizations he each of them had a contribution to make to the larger effort and a kind of tradition of labor but there was a focus by its name prison jobs and so forth come to focus mainly on the legal strategy by the 50s and 60s individually to organize at the grassroots community. but in other such efforts would come together. >> there was tension between them by the direct action working political channels playing out are there places were cases it became very pronounced i don't want to overstate but almost every instance in certain moments there would be tension over strategy in a given place at a given moment. often the naacp was on one side for example and that's the other complication is that at the local level, the local organization in mississippi and montgomery and birmingham was often quite different the leaders in birmingham or montgomery like i mentioned even nixon or places like mississippi so there was the division there as well. even within the organizations and industries and strategies and tension at the time, the cases -- >> thinking of registering the voters in rural alabama and taking on the stands of other organizations that may have been considered a militant that shows the evolution of the movement and i'm interested in hearing more about that. >> this is something all of them were to some degree as a matter of the form that it took. after what they've gone through in mississippi many of the counties in mississippi and alabama so that caused considerable tension but they don't go along with that particular strategy and so that's where some of the tension at that point in terms of the changing objectives and most of the organizations in the movement shifted from 1956 and on. >> and that is where we first saw the image for one of these organizations. >> the black panther movement came somewhat later that it was simply that organized political party with a recognizable symbol. it answered peoples sense of what they were trying to do so that's why we get to the black panther party organized in lowndes county as a political party which is quite separate from the black panther party which becomes much more famous. a. >> we have a question here development that led to this. >> i would put a great deal of emphasis on, as i said, the failure of the challenge which was the effort to challenge or on see the delegation to the convention from 1964. but again, this comes just weeks after the murder of the civilized workers of mississippi. you could take that with a sense of betrayal of people who were considered friends and wanted a compromise and some way of smoothing over to get lyndon johnson elected president and the goal was for the people that had been working very hard to bring this challenge about were deeply hurt i think and disappointed in the reaction. again not the party as a whole but i think that begins to shift. if you told me a few months after that the selma march and of course the formation of the project in lowndes county that leads to the black panther party and then a year later during the march in mississippi stokely carmichael was articulating not just equal rights so i would say that a lot of people who were disillusioned and i think that's about the time that bob moses left the movement for more complex reasons undoubtably. it was a turning point and it was really pretty optimistic despite all the harshness and death that it endured to come to that point and to lose that slight. >> was there a real exodus of leaders from the big four movement, so those that help to sponsor the march on washington or produced the march on washington and 63 and we have the poor people's campaign that started before doctor king was assassinated but that had a march also in washington and 68 didn't get the same kind of level of momentum. and if your argument is that it is not about the charismatic leaders necessarily that carried this movement, why did so much the road after his death? was it a success and they passed the civil rights act and fair housing act came after that, is that what happened? >> i think the chronology is a little complicated. between the march which was a great success and quite effective in the voting rights act, ironically very much the same as the act in the 19th century in terms of having federal go into places and register people. but after that, there was i guess a number of things. one, it was clear that some of the issues facing black america were not as amenable to the kinds of movements that were seen. to some extent, the strange shift to the north, the northern states, the actions in chicago and new york and detroit and so forth, and the problems of deeply economic in the sense of a changing economy we look back on it and see the move from industrial to the service economy picking up the pace at the time these are structural changes that not necessarily caught people by surprise but it sort of outran the tactics that had come before the movement and such. there were still street marches and so forth but they didn't have the same effect. so you witnessed martin luther king's efforts in chicago which was after selma before the poor people's march which was also unsuccessful and i think placed many of the complexities of trying to move the needle in terms of social change within the tactics that were effective in the movement. by the time you get to the poor people's campaign in 1968, this is fully evident and there are some programs that are supposed to be addressed things i've these issues but of course you also have a vietnam war competing with the programs among other things. for the different context than say cutting to the timeline of the 1940s and 50s were the mid-1960s. so it's hard to say if the march on the poor people's campaign would have succeeded and what measures it would have been able to make with a concession of some sort but that is an open question i think. >> martin luther king jr., doctor king was leading people in a rally and a protest and they had bricks thrown at them but that is not an image that we see repeated a lot. was that just symbol northern the story isn't as interesting in the north or was it all of those others that you were talking about that was robbing attention. >> it was a simple explanation or the beginning which is that the movement up to selma had really been quite literally a demonstration that as you show to a broad through the north and west you mobilize support and people should be allowed to vote and get the political pressure to pass the voting rights act. then who are you going to appeal to to exert that pressure? you go to chicago and its mayor daley, very powerful democratic party. he's somebody that the johnson very much depends on so the geography i think very dramatically. i think this was recognized at the time you move to the north and now your basic tactic it formerly provided you some kind of support so you get people in the streets throwing bricks and so forth now there is no counterforce challenging that to any great extent so the dynamic is very different. it would take an explanation to tease that out but that is the answer to the question of why it would falter at that point. >> thank you for that. before we close, you write about a lot of hidden figures including some in the mississippi movement and a question do you think that frannie lou hamer has been given the recognition that she deserves and the civil rights movement? >> certainly the literature on the movement for the most prominent the reputation has grown over time. one of my former students wrote a biography and her role and development as an activist and role in the 1920s and on and its impact on the student nonviolent coordinating committee in the 60s. but she has worked with various other organizations and her place is certainly an act they know very well but it's a crucial figure of that and she was born in 1903. that older generation helps guide and nurture the younger generation coming of age in the 50s and 60s. some of the other people may have gotten less attention. we tend to forget the people doing voter education and registration back to the 1940s who were still active and they drew on their experience and these were important. .. >> it's about four or five women all of whom similar experiences they are not household names. but they are representative of a broad section of the black community that was crucial. >> i was raised in the baptist church so the church ladies behind the scenes to make this possible. >> we have a message from another former student who had the pleasure to learn from doctor cook retired from teaching. hello to you. thank you for the encouragement. let me pick up on the last point when you celebrate those that were not the big towering figures what does that allow and what does that tell us about activism going forward or any future of the civil rights movement? >> reinforcing the message of ella baker and bob moses the energy in the sustaining and the power the broad section of the population that basically like rosa parks said about her action. i have had enough and that is enough to sustaining to a great degree. and not from the top down. so is not so much being heralded by recognized in a way that future movements could learn from that experience. one of the motivations for writing this book teaching african-american history over the time shifted from students from the movement in the sixties from ancient history or and i hear we need another martin luther king and that's the wrong message. with all due respect to martin luther king it's very important. the movement made them they need to recognize that i think in any social movement to take place now and in the future. >> thomas holt thank you for speaking with us we appreciate your time tonight. >> thank you we have a lot of questions it's called the movement the african-american struggle for human rights we do encourage you to buy the book at the atlantic history center website