| This dissertation explores the forces that gave birth to the Civil Rights Movement in Hancock County, Georgia, and how local history, knowledge, practices, and ideas drove the ways the movement developed. It examines the leadership of John L. McCown and the rise and collapse of the East Central Committee for Opportunity (ECCO). This dissertation asserts that the deep history of the local experience played an important role in shaping the movement and its leadership. Deep history of the chain gang, sharecropping, gambling, hoodoo, and other everyday social experiences laid the foundation for McCown's later activities in Hancock. In rural Hancock County, the movement expressed the long-held quest for economic equity and independence; it took shape around McCown whose legacy included aggressive advocacy for black economic rights, conflicting court cases, armed resistance to white authorities, and federal and state investigations.; The work also shifts the way civil rights historians previously sought to examine the roots of the African American struggle for justice. This historical investigation chronicles how the nation, following the American Civil War, turned most African Americans loose in the South landless and homeless. To abet their survival, many of these landless and homeless African Americans turned to the informal economy of crime against property. My dissertation demonstrates how this informal economy of crime against property and individuals are related to the struggle for justice as well as oppression.; In general, the failure of civil rights historiography has been its unwillingness to dig into the pock of the African American struggle for justice. Although ignored by civil rights historians, many of the numerous crimes against property by African Americans in the late 19th and 20th centuries were essentially part of the struggle for economic and social justice. Because civil rights historians have focused primarily on the formal American economy in their investigation of the civil rights movement, they have not been able to tell us much about the people who gave birth to one of America's great crusades for democracy. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
