Record-Pressed Revolution: Black Auditory Advocacy and the Late Civil Rights Movement

The movement had all but ended--Malcolm and Martin twin Moseses toward the new decade's Canaan, their people at once led to and lost in Equal Right's promised land. Two Kennedys and administrations sat lost to the threshold too. Tribute to the 60s--many hands made the law's lords work. "The Revolution"--now sponsored by Black Power, deep base, and less faith--was underway, and everywhere. It would not, though, be brought to you/ by Xerox in four parts without commercial interruptions' or show you pictures of Nixon blowing a bugle. Gil told us. The old revolution was dead, long live the Revolution. Much has been written on the turn charted in Scott-Heron's Black Power anthem, expressing the sentiments of a community left to grapple with the consequences of a "rights" mission seen as, but by no means actually, accomplished. The fight for Civil Rights--at least of the sort a government could give--had ended, in no small part thanks to death, disillusionment, and a right-wing government elected by equality's opponents to trim its imagined excesses. Expressed amidst the violence and propaganda of America's smoldering wars (in Vietnam, on dissent, and on dissenters), Scott-Heron's critique of televised politics reads as a response, in part, to the power asymmetries inscribed in the form, as well as the content, of broadcast images. The Revolution would not be televised, because in truth it could not be. It could, though, be reproduced via other means: through sound. Pressed, packaged, and delivered (cheap!) to a living room near you, thanks to Phillips, RCA Victor, media mail postage (which is to say Uncle Sam), and countless others. No less baggage, just different. The Revolution could not be televised, but it could be played for audiences at home. That Revolution--the type pressed in wax along with ink--is the focus of this course. In this study, the Revolution will be considered, listened to, and, if successful, "will be no rerun,[it] will be live." Course Focus: In taking up the media and mechanisms of advocacy animating the Black Power spirit Scott-Heron captures, this course turns our attention backward, revisiting the American moment out of which Scott-Heron's contemporary was born. Keeping the Black Power Movement back-of-mind, this course focuses its attention on the late American Civil Rights era (1963-1969), re-examining Rights Advocacy in this moment through the prism of socio-cultural, rather than institutional, legal and (small c) constitutional change. Reading popular media as a flattened space for socio-legal argumentation, this course traces how a culture moves through and with a populace to reshape conceptions of justice and legality. In doing so, we approach popular media as a critical interlocutor with traditionally privileged socio-legal discourses. Putting the two in conversation, this course aims to rebalance examinations of Black Rights discourse, de-centering rhetorical and legal rights advocacy in examining the rights claims advanced in the period. In doing so, we hope to better understand the mechanisms of socio-legal change, as well as the late Rights Era's relationship to its Black Power permutation. Elements used in grading: Grading will consist of [75%] class participation (attending and contributing to discussion, participating in syllabus creation, etc.) as well as a [25%] collaborative final project whose format is to be decided among course participants. In offering syllabus entries, participants are welcome (and encouraged) to discuss their selections with members of the course before finalizing submissions.