Black student activists started to leave their politically, socially, and culturally isolated “islands within” decades before the 1960s. In a larger sense, Black activism did not abruptly burst onto the scene in the mid-twentieth century. In recent years, historians have come up with new frameworks within which to chronicle this extended story, pulling the origin of the twentieth century Black freedom struggle back to the 1920s and extending the purview of activism to the North and West. In 2005, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall termed this new historiography the “Long Civil Rights Movement,” exposing the sea of activism throughout the country in the late 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. In Hall’s conception, the Long Civil Rights Movement encompasses not only these formative struggles but also the classical civil rights period (1954–1965) and the Black Power Movement.