The "Long Movement" as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies

Development of Neighborhood Trajectories employing Historic Redlining and the Area Deprivation Index

“…Considering historic features alone as the measure of structural inequity fails to capture the dynamic aspects of ever-evolving policies, practices, and communities. In the context of civil rights in America, historians have described fixed historic factors as having vampiric qualities which “exists outside of time and history, beyond the processes of life and death, [as well as] change and development.” 4 The Neighborhood Trajectories developed here aim to better classify communities as shaped by both historic factors and the intervening, dynamic changes that happen since that time. As such, our Neighborhood Trajectories used HOLC maps and current census data at the level of the census block group.…”

“…Increasing attention is being given to understanding the influence of residential location on a range of health and health care outcomes. However, many methods used to study historic or current neighborhood characteristics fail to fully capture the dynamic aspects of how neighborhoods influence health-related outcomes 4 , 5 . For example, wealthy neighborhoods in present day may have been historically affluent, accumulating wealth over time, or due to a recent transfer of wealth as the result investment, development, and the displacement of poorer residents in these communities.…”

Recasting the Movement and Reframing the Law in Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

“…Of course, it is not enough to demonstrate that the civil rights movement had its antecedents in the era of social reform that began during the 1930s. As Sundiata Keita Cha‐Jua and Clarence Lang (2007) argue in a provocative critique of the “Long Movement” thesis, this historiographical turn “collapses periodization schemas, erases conceptual differences between waves of the black liberation movement and blurs regional distinctions in the African American experience” (265). Such a movement exists outside of time and history, they write, a perspective endorsed by Eric Arnesen (2009), the prolific historian of African American labor, who argues that social movements rise and die in very specific social and ideological circumstances.…”