Book Review: The Twentieth Century Civil Rights Movement: An Africana Studies Perspective by Mark Christian

The book is devoted to the works of James Baldwin, one of the most compelling writers of the twentieth century. The authors examine his most important contributions – including novels, essays, short stories, poetry, and media appearances – in the wider context of American history. They demonstrate the lasting importance of his oeuvre, which was central to the Civil Rights Movement and continues to be relevant at the dawn of the twenty-first century and the Black Lives Matter era.

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Introduction

Capturing the South ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469646459.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 1-17

Author(s):

Scott L. Matthews

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Caste System ◽

The South ◽

Folk Revival ◽

White Southerners ◽

Black And White ◽

Travel Writings ◽

Frederick Law Olmsted

The introduction explores why the South became known as America’s “most documented” region beginning in the 1940s and into the twenty-first century. It argues that documentarians saw the region as a fertile place to do fieldwork for two main reasons. First, the region possessed unique and seemingly fragile folk cultures in need of preservation before modern influences erased them. Second, the region possessed seemingly endemic problems associated with its racial caste system and agricultural economies that needed documentation, study, and reform. The introduction also provides an overview of how historians and theorists defined “documentary” throughout the twentieth century and how and why some black and white southerners resisted the intrusion of documentarians into their lives. Additionally, it traces the history of documentary fieldwork in the South from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century and demonstrates how the tradition’s dominant themes developed during this time, particularly in the travel writings and sketches of Basil Hall, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jonathan Baxter Harrison and others. Finally, it highlights the distinguishing features of twentieth-century documentary by emphasizing the role of Progressive and New Deal reform impulses, the Folk Revival and Civil Rights Movement, and the development of portable recording technologies.

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Quaker Brotherhood

10.5406/illinois/9780252037047.001.0001 ◽

2012 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Allan W. Austin

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

World War Ii ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Race Relations ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Extensive Study ◽

Japanese American ◽

World War ◽

Interracial Relations ◽

History Of

This is the first extensive study of the American Friends Service Committee's interracial activism in the first half of the twentieth century, filling a major gap in scholarship on the Quakers' race relations work from the AFSC's founding in 1917 to the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the early 1950s. The book tracks the evolution of key AFSC projects, such as the Interracial Section and the American Interracial Peace Committee, that demonstrate the tentativeness of the Friends' activism in the 1920s, as well as efforts in the 1930s to make scholarly ideas and activist work more theologically relevant for Friends. Documenting the AFSC's efforts to help European and Japanese American refugees during World War II, the book shows that by 1950, Quakers in the AFSC had honed a distinctly Friendly approach to interracial relations that combined scholarly understandings of race with their religious views. Highlighting the complicated and sometimes controversial connections between Quakers and race during this era, the book uncovers important aspects of the history of Friends, pacifism, feminism, American religion, immigration, ethnicity, and the early roots of multiculturalism.

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Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America

10.14325/mississippi/9781496826404.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Jordan J. Dominy

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Cold War ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Southern Literature ◽

American Exceptionalism ◽

The United States ◽

Societal Pressure ◽

The Cold War

The formalized study of southern literature in the mid-twentieth century is an example of scholars formalizing the study of modernist aesthetics in order to suppress leftist politics and sentiments in literature and art. This formalized, institutional study was initiated in a climate in which intellectuals were under societal pressure, created by the Cold War, to praise literary and artistic production representative of American values. This even in southern literary studies occurred roughly at the same time that the United States sought to extoll the virtues of America’s free, democratic society abroad. In this manner, southern studies and American studies become two sides of the same coin. Intellectuals and writers that promoted American exceptionalism dealt with the rising Civil Rights Movement and the nation’s complicated history with race and poverty by casting the issues as moral rather than political problems that were distinctly southern and could therefore be corrected by drawing on “exceptional” southern values, such as tradition and honor. The result of such maneuvering is that over the course of the twentieth century, “south” becomes more than a geographical identity. Ultimately, “south” becomes a socio-political and cultural identity associated with modern conservatism with no geographical boundaries. Rather than a country divided into south and north, the United States is divided in the twenty-first century into red and blue states. The result of using southern literature to present southern values as appropriate, moderate values for the whole nation during the Cold War is to associate these values with nationalism and conservatism today.

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Breaking White Supremacy

10.12987/yale/9780300205619.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Gary Dorrien

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Detailed Analysis ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

White Supremacy ◽

Social Gospel ◽

Christian Leadership ◽

Civil Rights Movements ◽

Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽

Martin Luther King

Breaking White Supremacy analyzes the twentieth-century heyday of the black social gospel and its influence on the Civil Rights Movement. Asserting that Martin Luther King Jr. did not come from nowhere, it describes major figures who influenced King, offers a detailed analysis of King’s leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and his catalyzing and unifying role in the southern and northern Civil Rights Movements, and interprets the legacy of King and the black social gospel tradition.

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Violent and Nonviolent Religious Militancy

The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199731640.013.0008 ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 211-235

Author(s):

Patrick Q. Mason

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Religious Tradition ◽

Multiple Forms ◽

Scholarly Writing ◽

Popular Opinion ◽

Forms Of Violence ◽

Religious Actors

This chapter explores religious militancy as a multivalent phenomenon that includes both violent and nonviolent expressions. Religious militancy has too frequently been equated with violence in popular opinion and scholarly writing alike, a trend that has both marginalized and delegitimized the contributions of nonviolent religious actors. A brief examination of the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth-century United States illustrates how religion motivated activists on both sides of the debate, moving them toward either extreme violence or radical peace. Religiously militant peacebuilders can build upon the notion of “justpeace” to develop a comprehensive approach to addressing the multiple forms of violence, seeking not only to counter the influence of violent religious extremists but ultimately to win the internal argument within each host religious tradition.

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