SOC 531: Community Organization

SOC 531: Community Organization

Fall 2010, Hogan

Aldon Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement

This is a great book to teach, particularly late in the semester, after students have read other, less enjoyable tomes. Before diving into the book, let me say a few words about the author and my experience with him and his book over the past thirty years or so.

Aldon Morris was an assistant professor (untenured) in the sociology department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor at the time this book was published, in 1984. He has since left Michigan and has been a department head and a dean at Northwestern University in Chicago: Aldon Morris at Northwestern

Professor Morris and I are friends as well as colleagues, but we don't see each other very often, except at the national American Sociological Association meetings. He came to Michigan in 1980, when I was in Colorado doing dissertation research, but we were both at the Center for Research on Social Organization (with Bill Gamson, Chuck Tilly, Mayer Zald and the incredibly efficient Sheila Wilder—all of whom are acknowledged in preface). He was furiously working on this book in order to be promoted and tenured (which he was in 1986), and I was furiously working on finishing my dissertation (which I did in 1982). So we spent a lot of time in our respective offices and also at the coffee pot or at Friday late afternoon/evening Sherry Hours and maybe even the occasional volleyball game (although I don't remember Aldon as a regular at our seasonal T noon and F afternoon volleyball games).

Obviously, his first book did better than mine (that was also the case for his grad student buddy, Doug McAdam, another Civil Rights scholar) and he has become a major figure in social movements and collective action and in Afro-American Studies. During his eight years at Michigan he mentored an impressive number of outstanding graduate students (including Cedric Herring, whom he mentions in the preface) who have all gone on to have successful careers, with students of their own. One year at the ASA meetings I saw Aldon at the head of a huge table of black faculty and graduate students, presumably colleagues and former students with their students. He is frequently called upon for plenary sessions and guest lectures. The last time we had David Roediger (whiteness studies historian who is coming to Purdue for the American Studies Spring Symposium this spring) here I invited Aldon Morris, so that we could do the "black man-white man thing." Aldon spoke on skin color—a talk that generated considerable discussion and concern among Purdue faculty.

The first time I taught this book was back in the spring of 1993, in an American Studies course (AMST 650/SOC 609A), American Social Movements. We did Populism, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Women's Movement, starting with Suffrage and ending with Eco-Feminism (with a grad student in anthropology who was a guest lecturer for that topic). This was one of the most amazing interdisciplinary experiences I've ever had, so I'll ramble a bit on that topic.

There were about 20 graduate students in the class, including English, American Studies, and even two Sociology students. I was team-teaching with the late Cheryl Orevicz, a very popular teacher and a dedicated member of the American Studies faculty, back in the day when American Studies was a community of scholars—like a little liberal arts college here in the midst of the Ag-Engine University. That course taught me most of what I know about literary criticism (which I still don't understand) and the tension between literary and sociological approaches to culture and politics (which I am beginning to understand a little better).

Most pertinent to our concerns, by the time that we read Morris we had already read Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (which really is, among other things, "a tale told by an idiot"—see Willie Shakespeare, MacBeth), and Michael Schwartz's structural Marxist analysis of tenancy, sharecropping, and the Southern Farmer's Alliance (the prelude to Southern Populism). Needless to say, the sociologists were baffled by Faulkner, and the Lit Crit folks could barely tolerate Schwartz. Fortunately, we all enjoyed the feminist historians if not the radical feminist novelist. Then, we read Morris.

One radical lesbian feminist Lit Crit person came to class extolling the virtues of his prose. "This guy has to be black. His prose have rhythm." [she moved her hips in time with music that only she could hear in order to punctuate this comment, for those of us could not see her point].

Later I will share my notes on Morris from that class. For now I will just mention that I have been teaching this book in my American Society course (SOC 312: sociology for engineers—which Alex took), where I use it as a companion to Piven and Cloward, Poor People's Movements (representing political sociology) but frame the Morris book (Origins) as a community study, in the context of lectures on community studies that are offered as "overview" on the website. When I first decided to teach this course I asked Harry Potter if he thought it odd that I used Morris as a community study. He thought it was an interesting way to explore the question of what are community studies. It is also a good example of how one can use more or less structured but open-ended interviews with key informants along with archival research methods. In this regard it is an interesting addition to our classic readings, as well as an excellent, canonical work on the Civil Rights Movement.