Jean Van Delinder

author of Struggles Before Brown: Early Civil Rights Protests and Their Significance Today

November 4, 2015

Jean Van Delinder is associate professor of sociology, with affiliated appointments in American Studies, Africana-African American Studies and Women's Studies, at Oklahoma State University. She earned her doctorate in sociology from the University of Kansas and wrote her dissertation on the community of Topeka, Kan. and the Brown case. She teaches courses on race and ethnicity in American society. Van Delinder has worked as a consultant on several civil rights oral history projects for the Kansas State Historical Society, Johnson County Historical Society and the Brown v. Board National Historical Site in Topeka, Kan. Dr. Van Delinder was also involved in the historical research for the exhibits at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn.

There were many little known challenges to racial segregation before the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The author's oral-history interviews highlight civil rights protests seldom considered significant, but which help us understand the beginnings of the civil rights struggle before it became a mass movement. The empirical data gathered for this book includes understudied border states in the Midwest, particularly Kansas and Oklahoma. It challenges two arguments that dominate the scholarship on the civil rights movement: the importance of material or political objectives and goals to explain the origins of social movements in general and the emphasis on civil rights organizations in providing leadership and institutional support for mass mobilizations to explain civil rights protest in particular. The author brings to light many important, but largely forgotten events, such as the often overlooked 1950s Oklahoma sit-in protests that provided a model for the better known Greensboro, N.C. sit-ins. This book's significance lies in its challenge to perspectives that dominate scholarship on the civil rights movement. The broader concepts illustrated – including agency, culture, social structure, and situations – throughout this book open up substantially more of the complexity of the civil rights struggle. This book employs a methodology for analyzing not just the civil rights movement, but for the analysis of other social movements and, indeed, social change in general.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2008-honorees/jean-vandelinder

Last Updated: 14 January 2022