Syney asks how does placing Rosa Parks within a NAACP narrative in 1944 potentially changes

our perspective of Parks and the role she played in the Civil Rights Movement? One might
further ask how the NAACP narrative undermines the CRM master narrative outlined by Julian
Bond. The NAACP narrative intervenes in the notion that the modern CRM was a product or
was inspired by the actions of an activist court in decisions such as Brown v. Board of
Education. This intervention is made by arguing instead that Decades of activist work by Black
women and men are the most meaningful social antecedent to the CRM rather than the whim of
an activist court.
Additionally, it is valuable to acknowledge less publicized instances of Black women refusing to
give up their seat that never entered into the iconography of the CRM at all, such as the
experience of Claudette Colvin, whose erasure both from popular memory as well as Farmer’s
text is a product of choices and power.
Payne’s chapter eight’s revision/intervention is clear from the outset, as the opening sentence
reads “More has been written about the role of oratory in the movement than about the role of
organizing.”
Payne presents The argument that activism and social change occurred in Mississippi one
relationship at a time through rather than en masse through shining oratory and mass conversion.
“for many people in Mississippi, attachment to the movement meant attachment to the particular
individuals who represented it rather than to particular organizations or political strategies”
“not everyone understood all the political ramifications of what they were being asked to do -
although they understood perfectly well what it would cost them - but they came to appreciate
the people doing the asking”
This chapter undermines the CRM master narrative’s focus on iconic Black men in the period,
such as Martin Luther King Jr. by emphasizing the functional importance of masses of skilled
and experienced organizers making relationships one at a time.
Chapter nine also undermines the traditional canon of CRM icons by foregrounding the
contribution of women to the organizing efforts in the Mississippi delta. While many might only
be able to remember female figures such as Coretta Scott King or Rosa Parks, Payne writes that
“In the Delta, in the rural South generally, women were in fact much more politically active than
men, at least in the early sixties.”
Tracing antecedent networks and subgroups of female kinship, Payne centers the narratives of
women such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Laurie McGhee as critical organizing hubs beginning in
the 1950s. These narratives, for Payne, demand a reformulation of the connotation of leadership
by emphasizing the functional importance of roles traditionally understood as “support” to the
primary work of liberation / civil rights.
Chapter 10 demonstrates a strategy lead by a groundswell of activism and organizing, rather than
a top-down implemented plan emanating from a central authority. This trajectory of bottom-up
change upsets the CRM master narrative’s focus on icons and leaders, instead underscoring how
individuals and smaller groups and networks were able to direct to scope and direction of local
change.