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

Author(s): Kathryn L. Nasstrom

Source: The Journal of American History, Vol. 86, No. 2, Rethinking History and the Nation-
State: Mexico and the United States as a Case Study: A Special Issue (Sep., 1999), pp. 700-711
Published by: Organization of American Historians
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Beginnings and Endings: Life Stories
and the Periodization of the
Civil Rights Movement

Kathryn L. Nasstrom

Overthe lastfifteenyears,historiansof the civilrightsmovementhavebeencharting

a new interpretivecourse.A nationallyorientednarrative,with a chronologycen-
teredon keyeventsin the life of Rev.MartinLutherKingJr.,hasgivenwayto a host
of stateandlocalstudies,with all the varietyone wouldexpectfromsucha turn.As
a result,manybasicquestionsarebeingrevisited,includingperiodization (Whendid
the movementbeginand end?),scope (Whatevents,actions,and issuesconstitute
the movement?), andpersonnelandleadership(Howdo we writea historyof activ-
ism andleadershipin a massmovement?).Often,thesequestionsrefractupon each
other.A narrativethat beginsin the 1930s, for example,will of necessityintro-
duce previouslyignoredactorsand events.To exploreany of thesequestionsis to
ask, as Adam Faircloughdid in a 1990 reviewessaythat still raisesmany timely
issues, "Whatwas the civil rights movement?"'This essay considersthis basic
question, and especiallythe matter of periodization,through the life history
methodof oralhistory.2The storytellingthatemergesfromoralhistorypracticeis
a narrativeact in which experienceis orderedand interpreted,and the life history
approach,which aims at a full narrationof personalhistory,leadsnaturallyto a
considerationof beginningsandendings.Implicitly,eachlife storyopensonto the
question of periodization.3

KathrynL. Nasstrom is assistantprofessorof history at the University of San Francisco.

'Adam Fairclough,"Stateof the Art: Historians and the Civil Rights Movement,"Journalof AmericanStudies,
24 (Dec. 1990), 387-98. Fairclough'sown work took this turn from national to local narrative;see Adam Fair-
clough, ToRedeemthe Soul of America:The SouthernChristianLeadershipConferenceand Martin LutherKingJr.
(Athens, 1987); and Adam Fairclough,Race and Democracy:The Civil RightsStrugglein Louisiana, 1915-1972
(Athens, 1995). A review essay used the Carlson series Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement,
edited by David J. Garrow,as its jumping-off point to assessthe state of scholarshipas of the early 1990s: Steven F.
Lawson, "FreedomThen, FreedomNow: The Historiographyof the Civil Rights Movement,"AmericanHistorical
Review,96 (April 1991), 456-71.
2For a more general discussion of the value of oral history for studying the civil rights movement specifically,
and recent social movements more generally,see Bret Eynon, "Castupon the Shore: Oral History and New Schol-
arship on the Movements of the 1960s," Journal of American History, 83 (Sept. 1996), 560-70. See also the
review essay,Kim Lacy Rogers, "Oral History and the History of the Civil Rights Movement,"Journal of Ameri-
can History,75 (Sept. 1988), 567-76.
3For a discussion of the oral history interview as an interpretiveact, see Kim Lacy Rogers, "Memory,Struggle,
and Power:On InterviewingPoliticalActivists," OralHistoryReview,15 (Spring 1987), 165-84; and PeterFried-

700 The Journalof AmericanHistory September1999

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 Oral History 701

Over the last severalyears,I recordedthe life story of FrancesFreebornPauley,an

elderly,white, southern, female activist, and edited it for publication.These reflec-
tions on our joint endeavorfollow many happy months spent poring over the docu-
mentary recordand storytellingof a woman I admire tremendously.In particular,I
ponder that part of our collaborationover which I exertedthe most control, which
was to record the history of Frances'sactivism in the 1970s and 1980s, a subject
about which she had spoken little, although she had been interviewedmany times
before we began working together. Frances'snarration of these years provides a
record of civil rights activism that extended well into the supposedly post-civil
rightsera. Moreover,her storytellingsupportsseveralchronologiesof the movement
and encouragesa more nuanced interpretationof periodization. If Francesis any
indication, the life historiesof movement activistsmay be especiallyvaluableat this
particularjuncturein our writing of the history of the movement. In the dialogue of
oral history,the concernsof a new generationof scholarsand the experiencesof nar-
rators merge, allowing us to probe the relationship of the past and present. The
recordingof such historiesis still within our reachfor severalgenerationsof activists.
Frances,at age ninety-four, representsthe outer reachesof memory. By most mea-
sures (age, race,gender),she is also an atypicalfigurein the scholarshipon the move-
ment, and the conclusions her life story supports must be compared with many
others.The perspectivethat Frances,a southernwhite liberal,offerswould certainly
differ from that of a northern black nationalist, for example. Her distinctiveness,
however,affordsa certain advantage:she is unusual enough to offer a fresh vantage
point. I employ her here to pose questions and raiseinterpretivepossibilities.
FrancesPauley,born in 1905, grew up in the segregatedSouth and devoted her
life to the battle against discrimination and prejudice in the region. Her activist
careerspans five decades,from the 1930s to the late 1980s.4Francesfirst took up the
cause of social justice in the era of the Great Depression and New Deal; she helped
establishpublic health clinics for the indigent in DeKalb County, Georgia,immedi-
ately adjacentto Atlanta, and brought a hot lunch programto the county schools.
After World War II, she joined the Georgia League of Women Voters and for the
next fifteen years used the league to support racial desegregationand the broader
issues of democraticcitizenship raised by the civil rights movement. Then, caught
up in what she calls the "newmovement"of the 1960s, Frances,as executivedirector
of the Georgia Council on Human Relations, encouraged interracialorganizing,

lander, "Theory,Method, and Oral History,"in The Oral HistoryReader,ed. Robert Perksand AlistairThomson
(New York, 1998), 311 - 19. More generally,my analysisdrawson historicaland literarytheory of narrativestruc-
ture, particularlyas it relatesto the significanceof beginnings and endings. See William Cronon, "APlace for Sto-
ries: Nature, History, and Narrative,"Journal of AmericanHistory,78 (March 1992), 1347-76; Wallace Martin,
RecentTheoriesof Narrative (Ithaca, 1986), 81-100; Deborah E. McDowell, "In the First Place: Making Fred-
erick Douglass and the Afro-American Narrative Tradition," in Critical Essayson FrederickDouglass, ed. Wil-
liam L. Andrews (Boston, 1991), 192-214; and George Steinmetz, "Reflections on the Role of Social
Narratives in Working-Class Formation: Narrative Theory in the Social Sciences," Social Science History, 16
(Fall 1992), 489-516.
4On "careersof activism," see Kim Lacy Rogers, RighteousLives. Narrativesof the New OrleansCivil Rights
Movement(NewYork, 1993), 195-96.

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702 The Journalof AmericanHistory September1999

FrancesPauleyandLewisSinclairduringa demonstration at the Imperial

Hotel in downtownAtlanta.Advocatesfor the homelessoccupied
the abandonedhotelin June1990, to protestthe
housingin Atlanta.
lackof affordable
Courtesy
GladysRustay.

advocated enforcement of constitutional rights for African Americans, and, more

generally,championed improvement in the well-being of Georgia'sblacks. From
1968 to 1973, school desegregationconsumed most of her time and energy.As a
civil rights specialist for the United States Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare (HEW), Francesdeployed federal authority to move recalcitrantschool dis-

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 OralHistory 703

tricts in the South into compliance with school desegregation regulations. She
retiredfrom the federalgovernmentin 1973 and turned her attention more exclu-
sively to poverty.In 1975, at the age of sixty-nine, she founded the GeorgiaPoverty
Rights Organization (GPRO) and coordinated its efforts with and on behalf of the
poor for over a decade.Even afterher "retirement"in the late 1980s, Francescontin-
ued to work, if less energetically,on poverty,homelessness,and gay rights.
Frances is also a consummate and generous storyteller.Scholars, students, and
community activists have found their way to her door for years, because she has
sharedher story so willingly.The result is over one thousand pages of oral history
transcripts(as well as severaluntranscribedtapes) from interviewsrecordedbetween
1974 and 1998, including the interviews that I conducted with Francesover the
four yearswe havebeen workingon this project.I approachedFrancesabout the possi-
bility of an oral history-based book in 1995, just as she turned ninety and at a point
when the onset of maculardegenerationhad diminished her eyesight significantly.
We can neverknow how Francesherself would have produceda book about her life,
but as she and I embarkedon our collaborationit was clear that our projectwould
be shaped largelyby my editorialchoices, although with her approval.
As I preparedfor my own interviews,I noticed that in previousinterviewsFrances
had not made more than passing remarksabout the last major phase of her activist
career,the povertyrightsyears.This omission was especiallystrikingbecauseher per-
sonal and professionalpapersin the SpecialCollections Department of Emory Uni-
versitycontain voluminous materialson the GPRO.5 That seriesin her papersis by far
the largestin the collection. Likewise,Franceshad devoted more of her activistyears
to the GPRO than to severalother of her majororganizationalaffiliations,such as the
GeorgiaCouncil on Human Relationsand HEW. I have puzzled over and worked on
that silence and its implications ever since, seeking both to understandit and to
overcomeit.
Why had Frances omitted from her storytelling the activities to which she
devoted her last extended energyand that were, if anything, a culmination of a life-
time of activism?The scope of earlierinterviews,determinedlargelyby the research
agenda of other scholars,provided part of the answer.Other interviewershad not
askedFrancesabout the GPRO, a pointed reminderfor me of just how much the oral
historiancan shape the historicalrecord.This was not, however,a sufficientexplana-
tion, as Franceson occasion set the agenda in her interviews.As I read through the
transcriptsof earlierinterviews,I noticed that she often did not allow an interviewer
to move on to a new subjectif an aspect of the currenttopic had been missed or not

5 FrancesFreebornPauley Papers(Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library,Emory Uni-

versity,Atlanta, Georgia). FrancesPauleyinterview by JacquelynHall, July 18, 1974, transcription,Southern Oral
History Program Collection (Manuscripts Department, Southern Historical Collection, University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill); Pauleyinterview by Cliff Kuhn, April 11, 1988, transcription,Georgia Government Doc-
umentation Project (Special Collections Department, Pullen Library,Georgia State University,Atlanta); Pauley
interview by Kuhn, May 3, 1988, transcription,ibid.; Pauley interview by Paul Mertz, Aug. 1, 1983, transcrip-
tion, PauleyPapers;Pauleyinterview by Mertz, June 10, 1988, transcription,ibid.; Pauley interview by LeneciaL.
Bruce, Sept. 20, 1983, transcription, League of Women Voters of DeKalb County (Georgia) Records (Special
Collections Department, Woodruff Library).

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704 TheJournalof AmericanHistory September1999

sufficientlyelaborated.Even more often, she would bring up subjectswithout being

asked.Finally,a particularlydistinctiveset of recordingsindicatedthat her silence on
the GPRO yearswas largelya matter of choice. Each year from 1987 to 1996, on the
occasion of her birthday,Francesspoke about her lifetime of activism to a small
audience at the Open Door Community, a residentialChristiancommunity serving
the homeless and hungry in Atlanta. Unlike the oral history material, which was
generated in the interview format, the Open Door material is more like a set of
speeches,albeit informallydelivered,before a familiarand congenial audience. Only
rarelydid Francesmention the GPRO years.6 Clearly,she had chosen not to talk about
a phase of her work that I found particularlyinteresting, and I wondered what
would happen when I embarkedon a line of questioning about those years.
When I approachedFrancesabout this matter,she did not object to my desireto
know more about the GPRO; she agreedthese were importantyearsand thought they
should be included in our book. We first worked to recordher history as a poverty
rights advocate in standardone-on-one interviews, but that process generatedvery
little detailed material,certainlynothing like the oral history documentation of her
earlieractivities,recordedwhen Frances'smemory and health were both better. Sev-
eral of Frances'sfamily members and friends helped me chart a different course.
Over time, a plan to involve others in recordingthe history of the GPRO evolved,and
I conducted a number of joint interviewswith Francesand other key people in the
GPRO.7Eventually,we generatedenough materialto make a chapteron the poverty
rights yearspossible. It is the last chapterof Frances'slife story,followed by a much
shorterchapter,in effect an epilogue, on her activitiesin retirement.
As I reflectedon this particularphase of our collaboration,from the vantagepoint
of having completed the book, I found myself contemplating the implications of
having added these last two decades of activism to her life story and therebyestab-
lishing a later ending point than she had previouslynarrated.I have come to appre-
ciate that severalchronologies of the civil rights movement inhere in Frances'slife
story, each one offering a different perspectiveon Francesand on key questions in
the history of the movement.
The first and narrowestchronologicalframeworkis the movement defined as the
decade of the sixties. This, in fact, is Frances'smost direct statement on the matter.
When asked by one interviewerwhat time period encompassedthe movement, she
replied, "to me that means pretty much the sixties."8In explainingits distinguishing
characteristics,Franceshas variouslycalled it a "new movement"and a "grass-roots

6 These recordingsare availablein the Pauley Papers.A portion of this materialis collected in Murphy Davis,
ed., FrancesPauley:Storiesof Struggleand Triumph,1996 (Open Door Community, Atlanta, Ga.).
7 Pauleyand Muriel Lokey interviewby Nasstrom,Jan. 23, 1997, transcription(in Nasstrom'spossession);Pauley

and Betsey Stone interview by Nasstrom, May 31, 1997, transcription (in Nasstrom's possession); Pauley and
Buren Batson interview by Nasstrom, June 11, 1997, transcription(in Nasstrom'spossession). These interviews
will be placed in the Pauley Papersfollowing publication of the book.
8 Pauley interviews by Albert McGovern, Feb. 1994 (in Pauley'spossession; used by permission). These inter-

views will be placed in the Pauley Papers following publication of the book. Throughout this essay, I use the
past tense to describe Frances'sactivities in the past and to identify singular comments she made during one
interview. I use the present tense for her ongoing storytelling and for those comments she has made on a num-
ber of occasions.

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 Oral History 705

movement," "coming up all over the United States, and particularlyall over the
South." "Certainleadersemerged,"she said, but she went on to emphasizethe mass
characterof strugglein the sixties:"Therewere a tremendousnumber of heroes and
heroines on a local level that really were the movement." (And, in a comment to
warm any oral historian'sheart, she added, "In fact, I wish that we could get a grant,
and let'sjust take Georgiaand see if we couldn'tget a list and a little account of what
differentpeople did in differenttowns. Becauseif we don't do it soon, it's going to
be forgotten.")Frances,for her part, traveledthe state of Georgia to organizeinter-
racialcouncils, worked closely with severalmajor civil rights organizations,negoti-
ated desegregation agreements with local officials, and occasionally faced down
mobs of angrywhite segregationists.Like many movement activists,Franceshas her
shareof dramaticstoriesof harassment,threats,and arrest,which she now tells with
relish. Often, however, she finds it difficult to put her experiencesinto words, as
when she describesthe mass meetings of the early 1960s in Albany,Georgia:
That singing was so tremendousthat now I get quite emotional sometimes when I
even hear some of the songs. I don't think that there'sany way of ever readingor
seeing on television or evergetting a realfeeling of what some of those mass meet-
ings were like, and some of that singing was like. Sometimes when I hear those
songs again, they'realmost hollow in comparison with the way they were when
those audiences sang them. It was something about that, the movement and the
feeling of the movement, that was just so compelling. I suppose that'sthe reason
that you alwaysstick with it and keep on trying to do something about it.
No other phase of her activist careerfeaturedsuch intense and extended activity in
the context of a powerfulmovement culture "thefeeling of the movement."This
combination of heightened individualand collectiveexperiencesets the sixties apart
as "themovement"for Frances.9
Despite these directstatements,Frances'sstorytellingsupportsalternateand wider
chronologicalframeworksfor the movement in which the sixties remainpivotal but
not so exclusivelyimportant. In the full body of her storytelling,the sixties take on
meaning in the context of a lifetime of activism begun in the 1930s. Franceshas
said, on many occasions,words to this effect: "The firstthing I ever rememberorga-
nizing was during the Depression."10From this point of origin, Francesnarratesa
bumpy, messy,but clearlydiscerniblestory of progressfrom the New Deal, through
the earlystages of the civil rights movement, with an emphasison voting rights and
desegregation,into the mass action, grass-rootsmovement of the sixties. As she
describes a transition from one phase of her activist career to the next, she also
sketchesthe developmentof a mass movement that broughtsignificantsocial change
to the South. For Frances, two forces made change possible: "good people" who
challenged prejudice and discrimination and a federal government that, when
pushed by these people, lent its clout to the cause of social justice. Francescame of
'All quotations in this paragraph,subsequent to the first, are taken from "Everybody's Grandmotherand
Nobody'sFool":TheLife Storyof FrancesFreebornPauley(Ithaca, forthcoming), chap. 4. In the notes that follow, I
cite the interview itself only in those instances in which a quotation does not appearin the book manuscript.
IO"Everybodys Grandmotherand NobodysFool,"chap. 3.

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706 TheJournalof AmericanHistory September1999

age politicallywith the New Deal, a time of vigoroussocial movementsand growing

public responsibilityfor social welfare, and the combination of citizen action and
government responsivenessremained for her a model approachto social problems.
The sixties, then, brought trendsbegun in the 1930s to fruition. In her storytelling,
Francesmost naturallyturns to the people and events of these yearsto representthe
significanceof her activist career.This tendency lends a certain timeless quality to
her storytelling,as she freezesthese moments in time and makes them speak for the
meaning of a life'swork. The effect is to suggest that the sixties were the last, best,
and most representativetimes. These yearstake on such force in storytellingnot sim-
ply because of the events of the decade but also because of the cumulativeweight
the decade bears.I consider this arc from the 1930s to the sixties to be the internal
periodization of the movement in Frances'sstorytelling. What comes after, the
1970s and 1980s, she is willing to narrate,but she does not naturallyincorporate
these yearsinto her storytelling.
That Francessimultaneouslyattachesgreat importanceto the sixties and contex-
tualizes that decade with referenceto her earlierhistory of activism makes her an
interestingfoil for other reminiscencesof the sixties. In some respects,Francesfits
neatly with a large group of activists for whom that decade remains, in memory,
exceedingly important. Much of the recent researchon the sixties was written by
participantsthemselves, and some of these works blend memoir with analysis.As
one scholarnoted recently,"The activistsof the [1960s] erakeep relivingtheir youth
by writing books about it, while their conservativeopponents . . . never tire of
invoking it as the root of all evil.""1Yet most of these participantsturned authors
were of the student generation, and the meaning of the sixties is debated most
fiercely by those, whether on the right or left, who cut their political teeth on the
social movements of the decade.The sixties are the standardby which they measure
everythingthat followed. Frances,who was in her fiftiesand sixties, not her twenties,
in these years, trains our sights in the opposite direction. She frames the sixties by
what came before.The life storiesof elderlyactivistsplace the sixties in a wider con-
text and thereby reveal the extent to which we have been under the generational
sway of student activistswhen assessingthe sixties. Yet Francestakes nothing away
from the mystique of the decade;indeed, she adds to it. When a pudgy, gray-haired,
white woman tells her stories of demonstrationsand arrest,it is harderto view the
activism of the sixties as solely the product of youthful idealism and rebellion.The
sixties can be freighted with just as much political and emotional weight if they
came toward the end, ratherthan the beginning, of an activist life. At this stage in

" MorrisDickstein quoted in William Dudley, ed., The 1960s: OpposingViewpoints(San Diego, 1997), 214. A
burst of scholarshipproduced by New Leftistsemerged in the mid- to late-I 980s. See Maurice Isserman,If I Had
a Hammer:TheDeath of the Old Leftand the Birth of the New Left (New York, 1987); James Miller, "Democracy Is
in the Streets":
FromPort Huron to the Siegeof Chicago(New York, 1987); Todd Gitlin, TheSixties:Yearsof Hope,
Days of Rage (New York, 1987); David Caute, The Yearof the Barricades:A Journeythrough1968 (New York,
1988); and Ronald Fraseret al., 1968: A StudentGenerationin Revolt(New York, 1988). More recently,revisionist
accounts have been produced, largely by a younger generation of scholars. For an excellent discussion of these
works, see Rick Perlstein,"Who Owns the Sixties?The Opening of a ScholarlyGeneration Gap," LinguaFranca,
6 (May/June 1996), 30-37.

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 Oral History 707

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708 TheJournalof AmericanHistory September1999

power."'3More generally,her descriptionsof the GPRO contain numerousparallelsto

her earlieractivism, rangingfrom the methods used to build povertyrights chapters
around the state to her returnto the extensivelegislativework that characterizedher
yearswith the Leagueof Women Voters.In short, when Francesansweredmy ques-
tions about the GPRO, she told a story organizedaroundcontinuity.Ratherthan gen-
erate a differentview of herself,she elaboratedthe essentialFrances,this time with
antipovertywork as the content. Reminiscencesamong the elderly often have this
quality;narrativesdeliveredin later life tend to bring on retrospection,summation,
and a definition of the whole.14 Franceshad been speakingretrospectivelyabout her
life since 1974, and her storytelling was well under way when I arrivedin 1995.
There is little reasonto believe that getting her to talk about one particularphase of
her life would generatea significantlydifferentsense of her life'swork.
In other ways, however,my addition of two decadesof activismdoes have conse-
quences, both for the view of Francesthat emergesand for the question of the peri-
odization of the civil rightsmovement.These derivefrom the laterending point that
I establishedfor her activist career.Whereas Francesmost naturallyends with the
1960s, when she was at her peak, my addition tracesthe winding down of a career,a
portraitof an aging activist in her seventies and eighties. For many people who are
familiarwith Frances'swork, myself included, these are especiallyremarkableyears,
because we know so little about activism in this age group. The longevity of her
careerwas what drew me to Francesin the first place. We became acquainted in
1991 when she was eighty-five, and one image of our first meeting remains fixed
in my mind: Frances'scar sported a bumper sticker-"Fight AIDS, Not People with
AIDS.'15 I rememberbeing impressedthat an eighty-plus-year-oldwoman was taking
a stand on AIDS (acquiredimmune deficiency syndrome). As I learned more about
Frances,I came to know that she was an activist who continually rose to the next
challenge, whether it was voting rights in the 1940s or homelessnessin the 1980s.
For Frances,however, her years in the GPRO held another meaning, signaled most
clearly by her tendency not to talk about them. The key to Frances'sreticence, I
believe, lies in the nature and timing of this work. Much of it verged on drudgery:
following bills through the legislature;buttonholing representativesto lobby for an
unpopular measure, usually one to benefit the poor; and constantly doing battle
with government bureaucracy.Franceshad worked on similar projectsfor decades,
but those tasks had previously been leavened by a strong dose of organizing, an
activity she enjoyed tremendously.With advancing age, Francestraveledthe state

13 Grandmotherand Nobody'sFool,"chap. 6.
"Everybodys
14On the synthesizing quality of memory and for an introduction to historical memory generally,see David
Thelen, "Memory and American History,"Journal of American History, 75 (March 1989), 1117-29. On life
review among the elderly, see Robert N. Butler, "The Life Review: An Interpretationof Reminiscence in the
Aged," Psychiatry,26 (Feb. 1963), 65-76; and Robert N. Butler, "The Life Review:An Unrecognized Bonanza,"
InternationalJournalof Aging and Human Development,12 (1980-1981), 35-46.
15Pauley interview by Nasstrom, Aug. 9, 1991, tape recording (in Nasstrom'spossession). I conducted this
interview as part of my dissertation research.See Kathryn L. Nasstrom, "Women, the Civil Rights Movement,
and the Politics of Historical Memory in Atlanta, 1946-1973" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, 1993).

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 Oral History 709

less often to organizeGPRO chapters.Then, in the mid- to late 1980s, the impetus
for much of the organization'swork passed to other individuals. Letting go of the
GPRO was an admission that a life of activism was most definitely winding down.
Franceswrote to a good friend in 1986: "Totell you the truth, Paul, I am sick of the
whole thing. I think ten yearsis enough. A lot of people are picking up. If they can
carry it, O.K. If not, O.K., also.... If we had done better, the children of Georgia
wouldn'tbe so bad off today."'16 There is acceptancein these words, but a grudging
acceptance, and there is recognition of how much more needs to be done. As
Franceslooked about her in the mid-1980s-and today-the problems of poverty
and homelessnessweigh on her. She has not turned this information into stories, I
suspect, because it is still painful. As an activist she caresdeeply about these issues,
and as an elderlyperson she is frustratedby her inability to do much. In one inter-
view, she sighed, "Itwould be nice to be young again."'17 In her storytelling,Frances
constructs an activist self who always found a way to work around obstacles and
make a difference.She prefersto rememberherself,and be remembered,as she was
in the sixties, at her best.18
As I reflect now on the chapter on the GPRO years, I find parallels between
Frances'sstorytelling and her activism. Much as Franceshad let go of the GPRO in
the 1980s, she also relinquishedcontrol, ten years later, over narratingthose years,
by allowingme to recordmaterialshe had previouslyomitted and by allowing others
to determine, in part, how the history of the GPRO would come across.The text I
created is marked by the particularitiesof these circumstances.The form of the
chapteron the GPRO is quite differentfrom the others. It contains, not a first-person
narrative,but a conversationbetween Francesand friends. On severalmajor topics,
the narrativeis carriedless by Francesthan by these other interviewees.I originally
planned to pull out only Frances'swords from the joint interviews,but the ideas and
reminiscenceswere so deeply intertwined, as Francesand her friends traded stories
and prompted each other'smemories, that separatingone from the other was impos-
sible. Thus, late in the book and late in Frances'snarrationof her life story, the
readerencounters a significantly different form of storytelling. There is a certain
awkwardnessin this shift, but the form, which reflectsthe assistanceFrancesrequired
to narratethese years, capturesthe difficulty of both tasks: bringing a careerto a
close and then telling the story of its end. The form of the chapter,much more than
the content, conveys the emotional weight of the matter.
As the historianwho helped Francestell this story, and as a historian of the civil
rights movement, I am interestedin both the content and timing of this last phase

16FrancesPauley,"Historyof work on increasingbenefitsfor AFDC-as I rememberit" [addressedto PaulRilling],

Jan. 1, 1986, Pauley Papers.
17Pauleyand Stone interview.
181n a conversation with me on June 11, 1997, Murphy Davis of the Open Door Community helped me
understandthe difficulties Francesfaced in her last yearswith the GPRO. On life stories as constructions of self, see
Daphne Patai, "Introduction:Constructing a Self," in Brazilian WomenSpeak: ContemporaryLife Stories(New
Brunswick, 1988), 1-35; Rogers, RighteousLives; and Susan E. Chase and Colleen S. Bell, "Interpretingthe
Complexity of Women's Subjectivity,"in InteractiveOral HistoryInterviewing,ed. Eva M. McMahan and Kim
Lacy Rogers (Hillsdale, N.J., 1994), 63 - 8 1.

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710 TheJournalof AmericanHistory September1999

of her activist career,as they establishyet a third periodizationfor the civil rights
movement that reachesfrom the 1930s to the 1980s. In many ways, Frances'scivil
rights movement ended only with her retirementin the late 1980s. While scholars
of the movement have pushed back its origins into the 1930s and 1940s, very little
attention has been paid to the yearsafter 1970.19Both scholarlyand popularassess-
ments most often lament a movement in decline and disarray,especiallyfollowing
Martin LutherKing'sdeath in 1968. The life stories of activistswho worked beyond
the sixties will be criticalin telling a fuller story of these years, one that respectsthe
unique characterof the sixties ("thefeeling of the movement,"as Francessays) but
also recognizesongoing activism. In terms of content, the civil rights movement, as
framedby the entiretyof Frances'scareer,can be seen as beginning and ending with
advocacy for the poor: the public health clinics and school lunch programof the
1930s and the poverty rights organizingof the 1970s and 1980s. With the 1930s
and 1980s as anchor points, the centralityof poverty to her fifty-yearactivist career
comes into focus. Even as desegregationdominated the agenda of the Georgia
League of Women Voters during Frances'spresidency in the 1950s, the leaguealso
studiedthe state'swelfareprogramand advocatedfor the needs of welfarerecipientsin
Georgia.While she traveledthe state for the Georgia Council on Human Relations
in the 1960s, Francesalso establishedwelfarerightsgroupsin numerouscommunities.
The civil rights movement, seen through the trajectoriesof lifelong careers,may be
much more centrallyabout addressingthe needs of the poor than we have believed
to date, something that the extended arc of the 1930s to the 1980s makes it easier
to appreciate.
In the life story of FrancesFreebornPauleythat I assembled,these differentperi-
odizationscoexist and the overalleffect is one of layering.There is the chronologyof
Francesthe storyteller,who most naturallyends her story in the sixties, holding out
as an ideal the best of herself,the movement, and her government.And there is the
chronology of Francesthe activist,who began in the 1930s and continued to work
in remarkablysimilar ways into the 1980s. That Frances'slife story supports these
distinct but overlappinginterpretationsof the movement suggeststhat the question
of periodization is irreduciblycomplex. There is no single beginning nor ending
point, even for one person, much less an organization,a community, or the move-

19 For historians who emphasize a civil rights movement that began earlier than the 1950s and 1960s, see
Charles M. Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom:The Organizing Traditionand the MississippiFreedomStruggle
(Berkeley, 1995); John Dittmer, Local People: The Strugglefor Civil Rights in Mississippi(Urbana, 1994); Fair-
clough, Race and Democracy;Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor,
Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement," Journal of AmericanHistory,75 (Dec. 1988), 786-811; and
Robert J. Norrell, Reapingthe Whirlwind:The Civil RightsMovementin Tuskegee(New York, 1985). For an argu-
ment that the movement spans the twentieth century, see August Meier, "Epilogue:Toward a Synthesis of Civil
Rights History,"in New Directionsin Civil RightsStudies,ed. Armstead L. Robinson and PatriciaSullivan (Char-
lottesville, 1991), 211-24. Most scholarsconclude their civil rights studies with events in the late 1960s or early
1970s, treating the later decades as an epilogue. See, for example, Robert Weisbrot, FreedomBound:A Historyof
AmericasCivil RightsMovement(New York, 1990). Studies that emphasize black political empowerment in rela-
tionship to the civil rights movement, such as Steven F. Lawson'sRunningforFreedom:Civil Rightsand BlackPoli-
tics in Americasince 1941 (New York, 1997), are more likely to push past the 1960s into the decades when black
officeholding increased. Charles Payne, whose study draws heavily on oral history and life histories, traces some
activist lives beyond the sixties in Payne, I've Got the Lightof Freedom.

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 Oral History 711

ment as a whole. We are urged instead to more subtle questions, open to multiple
beginnings and endings: When, why, and how did the movement draw in partici-
pants of varying backgrounds,and when, why, and how did they leave?How did
these individualsunderstandtheir involvementin the movement, at the time and in
memory?Which issues and eventswere defined at the time, and aredefined in retro-
spect, as part of the movement?To answer these questions, many life stories are
needed; Frances'sis one. The promise of the method lies in recording sufficient
numbersof life stories to createa mosaic of memory, to trace the contours of many
activistcareersover time, and therebyto write a history of the civil rightsmovement
rooted in life stories.

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