While each period is historically unique, veterans and scholars of the civil rights movement say there are some important similarities between the era of Jim Crow and racial segregation and our current moment. One similarity, as author and professor Joshua Clark Davis notes, is the role that local law enforcement plays in enforcing regimes of racial oppression and attacking the movements opposed to them. But, as civil rights Icon Judy Richardson argues, there are also critical similarities when it comes to organizing and executing successful resistance efforts then and now. In this extended episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Richardson and Davis about the hardwon lessons from the civil rights movement that must be applied to the growing anti-authoritarianism movement today.

Guests:

Judy Richardson was on SNCC staff in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama (1963-66). Her experiences in SNCC continue to ground both her film and education work. She most recently produced the Frederick Douglass visitor center film for the National Park Service’s site at Cedar Hill in Washington, DC. She is currently working on 4 museum films, including those for the civil rights museums in Memphis and Atlanta. In 1968, she was a co-founder of Drum & Spear Bookstore, once the country’s largest African-American Bookstore. She was on the production team for all 14 hours of the seminal PBS series Eyes on the Prize as its series associate producer, then its education director. With Northern Light Productions she continued to produce documentaries: for PBS, the History Channel, and museums. She co-edited Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, a compilation of the testimonies of 53 SNCC women. She co-directed two NEH teacher institutes, co-hosted by Duke University and focused on “Teaching Grassroots Movements in the South (1940-1985).” She is a member of the SNCC Legacy Project board, was a Visiting Professor at Brown University, and has an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore College.
Joshua Clark Davis is associate professor of US history at the University of Baltimore. He’s the author of multiple books, including Police Against The Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back, a retelling of the civil rights movement through its overlooked work against police violence—and the police who attacked the movement with surveillance, undercover agents, and retaliatory prosecutions.

Additional resources:

Joshua Clark Davis, Princeton University Press, Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back
Judy Richardson, “SNCC changed me forever”

Credits:

Producer: Rosette Sewali
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino
Audio Post-Production: Stephen Frank

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