Jelinek, Donald A. (2020). White Lawyer, Black Power: a Memoir of Civil Rights Activism in the Deep South

Author(s):  
John Butler
Keyword(s):  
2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim M. Williams ◽  
Lonnie Hannon

AbstractIn 2010, the Alabama GOP took control of the state legislature for the first time since Reconstruction. The next year, in a sharply partisan vote, the legislature passed, and Governor Robert Bentley (R) signed into law, the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, also known as House Bill 56, the harshest immigration law in the country. This punitive state law was the impetus for Black elites in Birmingham to frame the immigration debate as a matter of civil rights and thus to see the issue in a new light. When Alabama Republicans moved to the Right on immigration, Black leaders in Birmingham moved Left. In this study, backed up by an event analysis of local newspapers, an analysis of interviews with members of the Black elite in Birmingham in 2013, who were previously interviewed in 2007, helps to substantiate this claim. In the summer of 2007, against the backdrop of an immigration debate in Washington, our Black elite study participants largely told us they had no stake in immigration. By 2013, many were willing to fight for immigrant rights at the highest level.


2020 ◽  
Vol 122 (7) ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Katerina Suchor

Background The historical literature on the civil rights movement has tended to underemphasize the movement's educational activities, while literature on the civil rights and Black Power movements has overemphasized ideological and tactical differences between these chapters in the struggle for Black liberation. A few studies have examined Freedom Schools—educational projects established as part of larger civil rights campaigns—but these studies have focused almost exclusively on Freedom Schools in the Southern context. Purpose Focusing on Freedom Schools organized as part of a school desegregation campaign in Milwaukee during the mid-1960s, this article explores the pedagogical purpose and philosophy of the Freedom Schools, as distinct from other protest activities undertaken as part of the campaign, as well as the legacy of the Freedom Schools after the campaign's conclusion. Research Design This historical analysis examines materials such as lesson plans, flyers, and correspondence from the archives of the Milwaukee United School Integration Committee (MUSIC), the organization responsible for the school desegregation campaign. Findings This article shows that core components of the Freedom School curriculum, which sought to challenge deficit-oriented policies and empower youth to create social change, foreshadowed key tenets of Black Power ideology. Conclusions These findings suggest that the Freedom Schools, as important sites of ideological development, highlight continuity between the civil rights and Black Power movements and situate the Freedom Schools as part of a longer tradition of education for liberation and self-determination.


Author(s):  
Stephen Tuck

1968 is commonly seen as the end of the classic era of modern civil rights protest: a year when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, when violence seemed endemic in urban black communities, when Black Power groups fractured and when candidates opposed to further civil rights legislation made giant strides at the ballot box. 1968 seemed to usher in a decade bereft of major civil rights activity, ahead of a resurgence of conservative politics. And yet a look behind the headlines tells a different story in the post-1968 years at the local level: of increasing civil rights protest, of major gains in the courts and politics and the workplace, of substantial victories by Black Power activists, and calls for new rights by African American groups hitherto unrecognised by civil rights leaders. This chapter argues that in many ways 1968 marked the beginning of a vibrant new phase of race-centred activism, rather than the end, of the modern civil rights movement.


Author(s):  
Edward G. Goetz

This chapter describes the tension between integration and community development from the 1940s through the end of the 1960s. It describes the conflict within the African-American community between efforts to achieve integration on the one hand and building power and capacity within the community on the other. It describes the emergence and evolution of the fair housing movement in the U.S. Finally, the ways in which this conflict played out during the civil rights and Black Power eras is highlighted.


Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker

This chapter explores radicalization of comic rage in Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada. Emerging in the middle of the transition from the integrationist period of the civil rights movement to the nationalism of the Black Power movement, both works openly challenge fundamental concepts about race. In addition to targeting fundamental assumptions of Western superiority, these works also question simplistic counter-representations that African Americans present to combat racist stereotypes. Using forms increasingly important in African American literature, like drama and neo-slave narratives, these works enact comic rage as way to depict unique and powerful forms of resistance.


Author(s):  
Brenda Plummer

Brenda Plummer examines the effect of the U.S. space program on race relations in key areas of the South, and the impact of that connection on popular culture. She also explores the intersection of the struggle for racial equality and aerospace exploration, as both constituted potent narratives of freedom in the American imaginary. Plummer disputes the assumption that NASA as an instrument of modernization and partner in the creation of the New South was implicitly allied with the civil rights movement. While the transformation of parts of the Deep South undeniably broke up earlier political, economic, and cultural patterns, aerospace research and development helped inaugurate a successor regime that neither challenged the structural foundations of racial inequality nor guarded against the production of new disparities.


Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors

This chapter discusses Greensboro, North Carolina as the unofficial headquarters for the Black Power Movement in the south and the role that North Carolina A&T State University played in facilitating that development. Since the dawn of the turbulent 60s, A&T had been a force for change and an epicenter for student activism. With the dawning of the Black Power Movement, A&T students completely embraced the rhetoric of the era and followed it up with action. Those activists’ energies fed other Black Power initiatives across the state and soon led to the creation of a new national organization, as well as a powerful local organization that embodied the shifting agenda of the civil rights movement to address abject poverty throughout Black America. Those energies also attracted the attention of local law enforcement and the National Guard, which invaded the campus in May of 1969, shot and killed a student, and terrorized the predominantly black side of Greensboro. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the shifting landscape of HBCUs during the early 70s and the external and internal pressures that arrested the development of Black Power organizations during the decade.


Author(s):  
David Goldberg

This chapter focuses on the influence that the Black Power movement and rise of employment discrimination litigation had on the Vulcan Society and Black firefighters across the country. The dialectical relationships between the civil rights and Black Power movements and the Vulcan Society’s old and new guard eventually transformed the organization and its objectives and helped facilitate the IABPFF, a national Black caucus group formed to combat discrimination and increase Black representation in — and community control of — urban fire departments. Both the IABPFF and the Vulcan Society embraced “separatism without separation,” and used their “outsider status within a white-dominated institution,” as well as shifts in employment discrimination case law, to “reveal the inner workings of institutional racism” within the FDNY and urban fire departments more generally. This shift was instrumental in the fight to establish legal remedies to address institutionalized racism and its impact on the racial composition of urban fire departments and became the primary method used by the Vulcan Society and the IABPFF and its local affiliates to make fire departments more representative of and responsive to the people and communities they served


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