A Rhetorical History of the Civil Rights Struggle in Greenville, South Carolina, 1947-1972

FAIN: FT-279047-21

Sean Patrick O'Rourke
University of the South (Sewanee, TN 37383-2000)

Research and writing for a rhetorical history of the Civil Rights Movement in Greenville, South Carolina.

This project is a study of the rhetorical aspects of the Greenville, South Carolina Civil Rights Movement. Inspired in part by former NEH Chair William Ferris’s contention that we have failed to adequately study the local chapters of national movements and events, this study investigates Greenville’s important but untold chapter of that history. Despite some recent scholarship, Greenville’s share of the Civil Rights Movement is poorly understood. Greenville’s efforts to desegregate are now so shrouded in the myth – perpetrated by the city’s chamber of commerce – that Greenville enjoyed “integration with dignity,” integration carried out with “grace and style,” that we have lost sight of what really happened. And if the history of the period is little understood, the rhetorical appeals that were made in the effort to desegregate the public and private facilities are downright unknown, as are the rhetorical strategies of resistance and control.