2024/12/01 by Charles W. McKinney · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #American History and Culture #American Political and Social Dynamics #Race, History, and American Society
paper · doi:10.1093/jahist/jaae244
openalex publication_date 2024/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
There is no shortage of scholarship focusing on the early years of the student-led portion of the civil rights movement. Scholars have long focused on the sit-ins, initiated by students at Black colleges across the South. This focus has typically been cursory at best: the early years of student protest are largely defined by what occurred in their aftermath—the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (Sncc) and subsequent national events. However, in recent years, scholars have produced a series of works focusing on the epicenters of activity in the region: historically Black colleges and universities. Brian Suttell's Campus to Counter is an illuminating and compelling work, a thoughtful corrective to the still-stunted understanding of these crucial early years of the student-led movement. Campus to Counter brings us back to the early 1960s with a novel and necessary reorientation. In a riff on the phrase North Carolina Research Triangle (used to describe the Raleigh-Durham–Chapel Hill triad), Suttell anchors his book by centering what he refers to as the “Protest Triangle”: Shaw University and St. Augustine's College in Raleigh, and North Carolina College in Durham. This consortium of schools, Suttell explains, “provided the backbone of the movement to challenge segregation in Raleigh and Durham” (p. 4). This reorientation is significant in that it shifts the center of intellectual, political, and tactical gravity back toward the activists at these schools—a core group who had created an infrastructure for protest and transformation before the conference that would result in the establishment of Sncc in 1960. By the founding Sncc conference, Protest Triangle students had already mapped out the resistance that would emanate from both white racial moderates (civility as a tool to maintain the racial status quo) and hard-core segregationists (bald political intransigence and racist appeals) as well as the nonviolent tactics that would prove central to subsequent action across the nation.