Dr. Charles McKinney, chair of Africana studies and an associate professor of history at Rhodes, has co-edited a new book with Brown University history professor Françoise N. Hamlin titled From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.
In the book published by Vanderbilt University Press (March 2024), the editors have put together a collection of works by scholars discussing the similarities, differences, and underrepresented aspects of the mid-twentieth century Civil Rights Movement and the newer #BlackLivesMatter Movement.
Dr. David Mason, associate professor of media studies at Rhodes, contributed the chapter “The Ambivalence of Activist Photography: July 10, 2016.”
According to the description of From Rights to Lives, “McKinney and Hamlin invite the contributors to take up 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.”
“This timely and updated exploration of ‘the long civil rights movement’ is an urgently needed volume,” said Militant Mediator author Dennis Dickerson about the book. “Comparisons between facets of Black Lives Matter and the antecedent Civil Rights/Black Power movements open new areas for scholarly examination. The essays move back and forth between contemporary and earlier eras of Black activism and invite fresh thinking about the Black Freedom Struggle.”
At Rhodes, McKinney teaches courses that focus on the African American experience in the United States, and his primary research interests include the Civil Rights Movement and the Black freedom struggle in Memphis. He also is the author of Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina, and co-editor of An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee.