Charles Cobb Jr., visiting professor of Africana studies, teaches the civil rights movement of the 1960s from an informed perspective - he was there. As field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Cobb participated in the movement first-hand.
History courses tend to portray the civil rights movement of the 1960s as a set of disjointed events led by a few iconic figures, Cobb said. He seeks to dispel this misconception of the movement in his spring seminar AFRI 1260: "The Organizing Tradition of the Southern Civil Rights Movement."
"The real way to understand the southern movement is as a movement of grassroots community organizing in the rural black belt - which is quiet, almost invisible work," Cobb said. "That's where all the forces that led to substantial changes really took root."
Field work
Cobb's perspective is shaped by his experience as field secretary for SNCC from 1962-67. The committee focused its attention on mobilizing communities to demand change, he said. Treading through the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta region, Cobb said he spent his time as field secretary "talking to people, day after day after day."
Working in "plantation country," Cobb encouraged residents to register to vote at county courthouses. His first assignment was in Sunflower County, Miss., where only 100 of 20,000 blacks of voting age were registered to vote.
Cobb's work was especially difficult because of the poverty in the region, where residents had an average income of $3 per day. Violence and economic reprisal kept blacks from voting in a society dominated by a "feudal" sharecropping system, Cobb said.
"As an organizer, part of it was breaking through the mental habits of oppression," Cobb said, "and part of it was convincing people to try to register to vote" despite the potential backlash they might face.
Cobb and other SNCC organizers encouraged people to make demands for the kind of society they wanted.
"We weren't in the business of telling people what to do," Cobb said. "We were in the business of trying to end this paralysis that we found in these communities where nobody felt completely comfortable in making a demand on a larger scale."
Civil rights course
Cobb uses his field experience as a starting point to explore the grassroots efforts in the civil rights movement. Three points will frame his class' discussion, Cobb said.
First, Cobb urges his students to recognize that southern black populations began to speak for themselves. "Sharecroppers, day workers, maids, cooks" all began to gain a voice in the South in the 1960s, he said.
Second, Cobb highlights the internal challenges within the Southern black community.
"Although it's true that the movement challenged racial segregation and white supremacy," perhaps even more important were the "challenges black people made to one another within the black community," Cobb said. As an example, he cited Martin Luther King Jr., who emerged as a leader in response to a challenge from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People leader Edgar Nixon. Nixon accused ministers at a meeting in King's church of being "cowards," Cobb said.
Third, Cobb explores the convergence of activists of all ages during the movement. As a 19-year-old working for SNCC, Cobb found himself coordinating with much older activists - many of whom were local NAACP leaders - who shared their experiences and gave him access to valuable networks of grassroots mobilization.
Lesser known-figures who "never made it into the historical canon" are brought to the forefront in Cobb's course. "They need to be brought forward, and I can do that, because I was there," he said.
Cobb also makes distinctions within the movement, exploring organization in different states and contrasting urban and rural movements.
"That's a lot to try to do in Brown's 13-week semester," he said, smiling.
Exploring the tradition
"When you learn about the civil rights movement in high school, you learn the 'big men' approach," said Bradley Silverman '13, an opinions writer for The Herald, who took Cobb's course in spring 2011. "But you don't learn much about the ordinary people who were involved in it - how they sacrificed and why it worked."
Many students come into Cobb's course with specific interest but limited knowledge, Cobb said.
Michael Stewart '13 enrolled in the course last year after a friend told him Cobb "had the best stories ever."
"It was fairly amazing to be in a class with a professor who was so involved with what he was talking about," Stewart said.
Silverman also noted that Cobb's personal experiences added to his teaching in the classroom.
"He didn't speak to us as an academic," Silverman said. "He spoke to us as a man with really fascinating experiences, sharing his perspective on a very unique period in American history, for which he not only had a front row seat, but was a very active participant."
Cobb emphasizes the intricate planning behind every action in the movement, he said.
"There was a constant exchange of ideas and thought," he said. "People - whether they had a sixth grade education or a master's degree - were thinking."
This intellectual activity is "left out of the scholarship," and events are portrayed as if they happened "spontaneously," Cobb added.
Cobb urges students to explore the thought process behind voter registration, sit-ins and desegregation. He said he wants them to "literally think about the thinking."
Stewart said the class "definitely changed his views about the movement." He enjoyed learning about the "character flaws" of the prominent figures and said he gained an understanding of the tension between the younger and older generations of activists.
"The class really made me think about (the movement) in a more complex way, a more nuanced way," said Jesse McGleughlin '14. "I gained an understanding of the power of coalition building, the power of grassroots organizing."
From journalist to professor
The class reading list consists of "books of ideas," Cobb said. The list includes "On the Road to Freedom" written by Cobb himself. This book is one installment in Cobb's lifelong career of reporting and writing. He has worked as a foreign affairs reporter with National Public Radio, as a staff writer at "National Geographic" for 12 years and as a writer and reporter on multiple films with Public Broadcasting Service's "Frontline."
"I went everywhere from Utah to the eastern frontier of Russia," Cobb said with a laugh.
Cobb also helped found allafrica.com, which has become the largest online news provider of information about African affairs.
His career has shifted from daily reporting to feature reporting and book writing. While his former focus was foreign correspondence, the bulk of his current work revolves around the Southern civil rights movement.
Most of the year, Cobb spends his time writing in Jacksonville, Fla., but he makes an annual trip to Providence to teach his course as a visiting professor.
For Cobb, teaching the course complements his writing.
"Teaching is helping me find a language that effectively tells this story," he said.
Modern applications
The organizing tradition of the Southern civil rights movement holds many lessons for modern activist movements, Cobb said. Though racism and discrimination are not the forefront of today's major social movements, "the lessons of the black struggle, of what ordinary people can do to effect social change, are applicable," he said.
The Occupy Wall Street movement raises important issues about wealth disparities in America, Cobb said. So far, the movement has consisted largely of downtown encampments without becoming a community-wide effort, he added.
"It's one thing for a group to talk" among its members, Cobb said. "It's another thing when you have to figure out how to take your political ideas into a community, a community that may be hostile or afraid of those ideas."
Silverman expressed the need for social movements to engage in "meticulous organizing" - activities such as mass letter writing initiatives, door-to-door campaigns and fielding candidates in primary elections. "It's not just about sloganeering and holding rallies and getting attention," he said.
Cobb said grassroots organizing efforts are the crucial component in creating lasting social transformation, though protesting may still play an important role.
"If you look at the organizing tradition you see what ordinary people can do," Cobb said. "You don't have to be Martin Luther King (Jr.) to be an important factor for change."
