“A Monument to Judge Lynch”: Racial Violence, Symbolic Death, and Black Resistance in Jim Crow Mississippi

2014 ◽  
pp. 229-249
Author(s):  
Jason Morgan Ward
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Black Resistance

Federal Policy and the Racial Integration of Southern Industry, 1961–1980

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Federal Intervention

In the last two decades, one of the central debates of civil rights historiography has concerned the role that the federal government played in securing the gains of the civil rights era. Historians have often been critical of the federal government's inaction, pointing out that it was only pressure from the civil rights movement itself that prompted federal action against Jim Crow. Other scholars have studied the civil rights record of the federal government by analyzing a single issue during several administrations. In this vein, there have been studies of the federal government's involvement in areas as diverse as black voting rights and racial violence against civil rights workers. These studies have both recognized the importance of federal intervention and have also been critical of the federal government's belated and half-hearted endorsement of civil rights.

Archival Enthusiasm

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-102
Author(s):  
Lindsay V. Reckson
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Political History ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Death Scene ◽  
Moving Body ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Enthusiasm

This chapter examines the ecstatic performances haunting Stephen Crane’s 1895 narrative of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage. While much has been made of the way the novel strategically “forgets” the political history of the war, this chapter analyzes the novel’s complex overlay of religious enthusiasm and minstrel performance, exploring how Red Badge deploys these forms in order to grapple with the embodied semiotics of the Jim Crow era. Recovering traces of the midcentury minstrel figure “Dandy Jim of Caroline” in Jim Conklin’s exuberant death scene, the chapter argues that the narrative afterlife of such traces reveals the novel’s tendency to simultaneously erase and embed the excesses of war and postwar racial violence. Marking the historical resonance between minstrelsy and religious enthusiasm in their objectification of the moving body, Red Badge’s performances treat bodies as kinetic archives, whose stylized gestures offer stunning testimony to history’s traumatic returns. In this sense, the novel treats the ambivalence of performance as precisely the arena in which literature might grapple with history’s unaccountable remainders.

A Table Prepared by Our Enemies

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Harper
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
African Americans ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
The Cross

This chapter explains how black southerners interpreted early Jim Crow politics in light of the theological expectations they held from emancipation. Despite new forms of segregation, intensified racial violence, and disfranchisment efforts, black Protestants in North Carolina were encouraged by Fusion, a successful biracial political movement, and black autonomy in that state’s black regiment for the Spanish American War. Then, a devastating white supremacy campaign in 1898 left African Americans in mourning. Black Protestant leaders turned to the crucifixion narrative to make sense of the loss. Just as Jesus faced abandoned by God on the cross only days before his glorious resurrection, black southerners still had reason to hope. Their theological expectations forced them to see their own struggle for freedom as uninterrupted by the politics of Jim Crow.

Adrienne Herndon's Homeplaces: Shakespeare and Black Resistance in Atlanta, c.1906

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-58
Author(s):  
PATRICIA A. CAHILL
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
The Political ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Racial Trauma ◽  
Black Resistance ◽  
Jim Crow South

This essay examines the political significance of the career of Atlanta-based Shakespearean Adrienne McNeil Herndon in the early twentieth century. It contextualizes Herndon's writing in the activist journal Voice of the Negro and elucidates the radicalism of Herndon's Shakespeare work at Atlanta University and beyond. More broadly, the essay shows how Herndon's performances and pedagogy – especially her focus on elocution work, bodily expressivity, domestic spaces, and visual culture – repeatedly challenged the white supremacist culture of the Jim Crow South, offering black Americans a way to resist racial terrorism and endure racial trauma.

“Peace at Home Is the Most Essential Thing”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brent M. S. Campney
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
World War ◽  
Race Riots ◽  
Black Resistance ◽  
Black Populations ◽  
New Generation

This chapter chronicles the long “Red Summer” and persistent racial violence throughout the 1920s. With America's entry into World War I, black populations swelled in response to labor shortages, thus precipitating racial conflict over jobs and housing between white residents of northern industrial cities and the black newcomers. These tensions would culminate in the “Red Summer,” a season of race riots, conflagrations, and other types of spectacular violence. Though the wartime surge in violence would subside after 1921, racial prejudice and violence continued on. Despite these setbacks, however, black resistance likewise persisted; and this period marks the ascent of a new generation of civil rights activists, as well as a few other notable milestones such as the Thurman-Watts v. Board of Education of Coffeyville and Brown v. Board of Education decisions and the establishment of the Kansas City branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

‘Race’ and Resistance to Policing Before the ‘Windrush Years’: The Colonial Defence Committee and the Liverpool ‘Race Riots’ of 1948

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Fevre
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Black People ◽  
National Level ◽  
Black Population ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Race Riots ◽  
Black Resistance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

Abstract Between 31 July and 2 August 1948, Liverpool experienced three nights of racial violence on a scale not witnessed since the end of the First World War. Despite being initiated by white rioters, the so-called ‘race riots’ of 1948 were more significant in terms of the relationship between the police and Liverpool’s black population. Previous studies have sought to understand why and what happened during the riots; however, there has been little analysis of the aftermath. This article looks specifically at how black people responded to the ‘race riots’ in 1948 and argues that this episode led to a period of heightened political activity at a local and national level centred around the issue of policing. It focusses on the Colonial Defence Committee (CDC) that was formed immediately after the riots to organize the legal defence of individuals believed to have been wrongfully arrested. In its structure and organizational methods, the CDC represented a prototype of the defence committees that became a hallmark of black political opposition to policing during the 1970s and 1980s. Examining the aftermath of the Liverpool ‘race riots’ in 1948, thus, offers new perspectives on the historical development of black political resistance to policing in twentieth-century Britain. On the one hand, it reveals a longer history of struggle against racially discriminatory policing, which predates the ‘Windrush years’ migration of the 1950s and early 1960s. It also highlights the historical continuities in the way that black resistance to policing manifested itself over the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Becoming ‘Objects of Fear’ and Relationships to Racist Thinking

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Troy Crayton, Ph.D.
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Exponential Increase ◽  
Working Hypotheses

In recent years it seems that violence against black folks has exponentially increased. However, the case is that this ‘exponential increase’ is really bringing to the fore historically persisting results of Jim Crow beliefs, laws, and practices. The ability to record such events so readily paints a façade of some increase in such racial violence. When the excesses of violence and discrimination against black folks has persisted for centuries. And the sociohistoric residue of folks’ attitudes and practices has perdured through the generations of individuals. How many times have we heard the phrase, “I’m not racist, I have black friends”? Or “I feared for my life, so I shot in self-defense”? This manuscript, as a continuing series of working hypotheses, contends that these events are related. Toward gathering the knowledge about individual reasoning processes, these events are related by either supporting or thwarting that racist thinking is a product of fear.

Geographies of Pain, Geographies of Pleasure

Walking Raddy ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 31-44
Author(s):  
LaKisha Michelle Simmons
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Female Performance ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
The City

In this chapter, LaKisha Simmons argues that the Jim Crow streets in New Orleans were sites of racial violence for black women and girls. By exploring cases of assault and police brutality on the city streets during segregation, the chapter contends that bodily vulnerability defined black womanhood. Yet despite the violence and trauma of Jim Crow life, black women went out on the streets in search of pleasure. Simmons contends that the Million Dollar Baby Dolls declared their humanity and reclaimed their bodies by seeking out pleasure. Simmons analyzes Ralston Crawford photographs of black women dancing and partying to better understand pleasure geographies and black female performance culture in New Orleans during segregation.

Blues Conditions

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-59
Author(s):  
Adam Gussow
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Large Cohort ◽  
Personal Freedom ◽  
Soul Music ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
The World

Between 1920 and 1960, blues was Black popular music. During the decade that followed, however, the Black blues audience largely melted away, redirecting its attentions towards soul music, and a large cohort of white blues fans and blues musicians emerged to fill that space—a cultural earthquake whose effects have lingered to the present day. This chapter, looking to educate that successor cohort, seeks to anchor our understandings of the blues in a fresh appreciation for the world in which the music’s Black southern creators lived. Jim Crow social relations, which included lynching and other forms of racial violence along with legislated segregation, were the crucible in which early blues players struggled to achieve personal freedom and develop their creative gifts. Slavery had been replaced by cotton sharecropping after Emancipation; new sexual freedoms and wide-ranging mobility, however compromised, were there to be explored, in blues lyricism as in life. Playwright August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” vividly dramatizes these themes, offering revelations about the persistence of traumatic memories generated by white southern violence.

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