People Get Ready: Performance and Practice in the Long Civil Rights Movement (Performance and American Cultures #11)

Reframes civil rights history through the lens of rehearsal and embodied preparation

The spectacular public moments—the marches, sit-ins, and defiant protests—of the civil rights movement are etched in the global imagination. Yet behind these iconic events lay an intricate, often overlooked world of preparation. In People Get Ready, Paige McGinley asks a vital question: How did ordinary people prepare to perform such extraordinary acts?

In an exploration spanning from the 1930s through the 1960s, McGinley reveals that the movement’s milestones were forged in the "backstage" spaces of rehearsal. For many organizers, performance was no mere metaphor; it was a rigorous organizing principle. Through deep archival research, she documents the improvisational exercises, role-playing scenarios, and large-scale simulations that allowed participants to test strategies, anticipate contingencies, and envision new models of collectivity. These sites of experimentation—from interracial institutes to citizenship schools—were about more than following a script; they were rich terrains for cultivating radical courage and new ways of living together.

By centering embodied practices such as meditation, singing, and theatrical rehearsal, McGinley intervenes in civil rights historiography and suggests a startlingly new genealogy of performance studies, one where Black grassroots organizers take their place as the primary innovators of some of the field’s core concepts. People Get Ready provides an essential look at the deliberate choreography of social change, dismantling the myth of spontaneous upheaval. Ultimately, it offers vital, practical tools for contemporary movements seeking to rehearse a more just future.