Summary Of Charles Payne's Top-Down Approach

Challenging a narrative that almost exclusively focuses on the actions of presidents, federal officials, and the most prominent of the nation’s civil rights leaders, Charles Payne devotes his attention to the other side, “the view from the trenches,” to provide us with the bottom-up perspective of the civil rights movement. However, more than just being a mere corrective of a top-down approach, Payne’s essay provides a general critique of a White-centered narrative that conceals much of the movement’s complexity and diversity to fit into the larger storyline of American progress. Focusing on the less well-known leaders and local activists who dedicated their lives to the struggle against racial and social injustice, Payne creates a narrative

While Payne’s addition is more than overdue, at times he falls into the trap of replacing rather than dismantling notions of moralism by juxtaposing leadership models that operated on different political levels. In order to understand our contemporary situation, Payne argues, we need to understand the struggles of the past. The latter can only materialize when historians present the story of the civil rights movement in a more comprehensive way by including its most central players—the people on the ground. Payne’s approach thus speaks to the fact that the civil rights revolution was as much, if not even more, a victory of “ordinary” people than it was a concerted negotiation effort between “great men.” For Payne, this is important in several respects: without understanding that the long-term activism on the ground was crucial to initiate and eventually effect change, people get the wrong idea about the ways social and political transformation can be accomplished. Moreover, local actors

While the national government was anything but a reliable partner when it came to the protection of civil rights activists, its cooperation at least ensured that the pro-segregationists could no longer excuse their brutal actions by suggesting that they “enforced” the law while the civil rights activists were breaking it. In the long run, no matter how violent the reactions, the legitimacy and the authority of the victories before the Supreme Court officially vindicated and constitutionally undergirded the activists’ actions. The fact that so many local chapters had formed under the umbrella of the NAACP and the SCLC made them a natural partner for federal negotiations. This does not mean that the whole process could and should have been handled more democratically, or that the national leaders could have directed more of the attention and the acclaim to the tremendous and often extremely dangerous work of local