This presentation argues that constant comparisons between our contemporary moment and the 1960s (the "Sixties") not only distorts that past, but it also substitutes for political creativity and imagination today. In the case of a phenomenon like "Black Lives Matter," the persistence of the "Sixties" as a cultural and political point of reference can blind us to the current challenges and opportunities that we confront in the early twenty-first century. Thus, while it is appropriate, even healthy, to review the past in order to grapple with the present, resorting to a "Sixties" framing can have unintended negative consequences for how we might understand the prospects for a transformative black politics in the here and now.

Building on my previous work on African American community building and social movements in St. Louis and the urban Border South, this presentation provides social and historical context to the black political mobilizations that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland in the wake of the police-related deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, respectively. This presentation also explores what historians do, or ought to do, when the focus of their work "comes home," so to speak. Specifically, what are historians' relationship with, and responsibility to, the subject matter of their research? To put it another way, how do historians creatively inhabit the history that they write?

As “North” and “South” converge in a new synthesis of the history of the Black Freedom Movement, scholars confront the need to expand and refine typologies of place for assessing both the national character and regional particularities of historic African American freedom struggles. Among other things, this method calls for (1) treatment of regional histories, local political economies, and African Americans’ position therein; (2) government processes at the city, state, and federal levels; (3) interpretation of the specific forms of black community and institutional development, and class stratification, present among defined black populations; (4) consideration of the dynamics of migration and immigration to a given locale, and the impact on African Americans, both interracially and intraracially; and (5) an appreciation of the uneven patterns of political development, organization and mobilization among black communities across time and place. Using the city of St. Louis, Missouri, as an illustration, this presentation argues for a conceptualization of the “border South” region as a transitional space where both northern and southern political economies, migration and immigration patterns, and modes of black racial control and black politics merged, often prefiguring shifts in the rest of the nation. This presentation suggests that the peculiar histories of such border states such as Missouri, Maryland, and Kentucky illustrate simultaneously the instability and concreteness of regional designations in historical narratives of black freedom struggle.