Beginnings and Endings: Life Stories and the Periodization of the
Civil Rights Movement

Kathryn L. Nasstrom

Over the last fifteen years, historians of the civil rights movement have been charting a new interpretive course. A nationally oriented narrative, with a chronology centered on key events in the life of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., has given way to a host of state and local studies, with all the variety one would expect from such a turn. As a result, many basic questions are being revisited, including periodization (When did the movement begin and end?), scope (What events, actions, and issues constitute the movement?), and personnel and leadership (How do we write a history of activism and leadership in a mass movement?). Often, these questions refract upon each other. A narrative that begins in the 1930s, for example, will of necessity introduce previously ignored actors and events. To explore any of these questions is to ask, as Adam Fairclough did in a 1990 review essay that still raises many timely issues, "What was the civil rights movement?"1 This essay considers this basic question, and especially the matter of periodization, through the life history method of oral history.2 The storytelling that emerges from oral history practice is a narrative act in which experience is ordered and interpreted, and the life history approach, which aims at a full narration of personal history, leads naturally to a consideration of beginnings and endings. Implicitly, each life story opens onto the question of periodization.3

1

Over the last several years, I recorded the life story of Frances Freeborn Pauley, an elderly, white, southern, female activist, and edited it for publication. These reflections on our joint endeavor follow many happy months spent poring over the documentary record and storytelling of a woman I admire tremendously. In particular, I ponder that part of our collaboration over which I exerted the most control, which was to record the history of Frances's activism in the 1970s and 1980s, a subject about which she had spoken little, although she had been interviewed many times before we began working together. Frances's narration of these years provides a record of civil rights activism that extended well into the supposedly post-civil rights era. Moreover, her storytelling supports several chronologies of the movement and encourages a more nuanced interpretation of periodization. If Frances is any indication, the life histories of movement activists may be especially valuable at this particular juncture in our writing of the history of the movement. In the dialogue of oral history, the concerns of a new generation of scholars and the experiences of narrators merge, allowing us to probe the relationship of the past and present. The recording of such histories is still within our reach for several generations of activists. Frances, at age ninety-four, represents the outer reaches of memory. By most measures (age, race, gender), she is also an atypical figure in the scholarship on the movement, and the conclusions her life story supports must be compared with many others. The perspective that Frances, a southern white liberal, offers would certainly differ from that of a northern black nationalist, for example. Her distinctiveness, however, affords a certain advantage: she is unusual enough to offer a fresh vantage point. I employ her here to pose questions and raise interpretive possibilities.

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