Chapter 20 - Cultural Activism and Theater of the Civil Rights Movement

Summary

This article examines how 1960s activist theater inspired a movement of cultural activism across the U.S. South and beyond. It looks at how some activists during the civil rights movement used creative mediums such as performance, radio, music, craft-making, photography, film, and literature to engage with their local communities. It argues that their efforts were related, but alternative to the conventional voter registration and sit-in protests. Rather, the process of making art opened ways to enact participatory democracy in the spirit of activist Ella Baker and others who emphasized that change should come from below. In doing so, people across the South involved in the civil rights movement could tell stories of the freedom struggle in their own words and images. The article starts with the Free Southern Theater in Mississippi and branches out to show how performance practices influenced other modes of creative activist production, including craft-making cooperatives, film, and works of literature from authors such as Alice Walker and Toni Cade Bambara, who used their platform to tell the story of grassroots activists and ordinary people creating together as a path to social change.