Would u cite specific instances of what u are referring to in this post?
The 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott was planned and operated by the working class people, but the SCLC appointed speakers and representatives that were from church elite...Jo Ann Robinson, who was the Blueprint behind the Bus Boycott said this in her autobiography.
When the white citizens council were killing people to resist the Brown Decision, working class people like Robert F. Williams in Durham organized powerful self-help violence groups in the community to stop whites from lynching blacks across the city. My work will describe other narratives like this.
Hassan Jeffries, one of my former classmates, great book "Bloody Lowndes: Civil RIghts and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt" shows the working class blacks in Lowndes County organizing a successful political group that would take power away from whites, which upset the middle class blacks who thought it would hurt overall movement if whites lost power...the middle class wanted co-optation.
Joe Trotter's Black Milwaukee shows all this in the Pre-Civil Rights Era in Milwaukee...the black workers fought vigorously hard to resist racial capitalism in the industries...
Check the League of Black Revolutionary Workers' films that were put out in the 1970s; they actually made a documentary that shows there protest and resistance to middle class and white unionism that sought to silence them.
The New York school district that was taken over by blacks in the 1970s was mainly supported by the working class neighborhoods; although the city gave the school district back to whites after the experiment, it showed that black autonomy worked to getting education back in the community's hands; the black children were learning about themselves, and developing great pride.
Atlanta, Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, you name the city, you will find that the black freedom movement was in the black working class community, but passive, Middle Class Civil Rights groups like the NAACP, SCLC, and CORE tried to take the autonomy away from black workers. There are so many stories about this in black newspapers; class struggle was a major component of the Black Freedom Movement and the black Liberation Struggle as a whole in this country. My research and work is detailed the workers' ability and willingness to organize themselves and lead the fight against oppression. In fact, evidence in newspapers, documents, and interviews suggests that CRM groups sought to marginalize the working class, which is why the heart of the CRM died...they were too concerned with creating an integrationist, multiracial utopianism, so they made black grassroots agency an afterthought; they did this to appeal to white middle class elites and white politicians like kennedy;
Aldon Morris's powerful and groundbreaking work, the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, shows how the working class people were the heart of the Civil Rights Era, the Black Power Era, and my work will pick up after the Black power Era fades...
