scholarly journals “Hell Is Popping Here in South Carolina”: Orangeburg County Black Teachers and Their Community in the Immediate Post-Brown Era

2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-62
Author(s):  
Candace Cunningham
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Teachers ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Training School ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Equal Education ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

When the South Carolina legislature created the anti-NAACP oath in 1956, teachers across the state lost their positions. But it was the dismissal of twenty-one teachers at the Elloree Training School that captured the attention of the NAACP and Black media outlets. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, South Carolina's Black and White communities went head-to-head in the battle over White supremacy versus expanded civil rights. The desegregation movement in 1955 and 1956 placed Black teachers’ activism in the spotlight—activism that mirrored what was happening in their community. This largely unknown episode of civil rights activism demonstrates that Black teachers were willing to serve not only as behind-the-scenes supporters in the equal education struggle but as frontline activists. Furthermore, it shows that South Carolina was an integral site of the long civil rights movement.

Forced Confessions

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-78
Author(s):  
Silvan Niedermeier
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
High Profile ◽  
White Allies ◽  
Criminal Suspects ◽  
Bureaucratic State ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

This chapter studies two high-profile cases in which police officers used torture to extract confessions from black criminal suspects. In these cases, African Americans, aided by prominent white allies and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), appealed to the courts to protest acts of torture, contest forced confessions, and challenge legal discrimination. The chapter places these protests within the context of the “long Civil Rights movement” to illuminate the tensions between the demands of white supremacy and the demands of a “color-blind” law characteristic of the modern bureaucratic state.

Teaching Brown: Reflections on Pedagogical Challenges and Opportunities: Introduction

2004 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Dougherty
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
List Type ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
The North ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities

These first-person reflective essays were written from our perspectives as educators who find it immensely rewarding, yet incredibly challenging, to teach about Brown vs Board of Education. Rarely do we address an issue in our classroom that is wrapped up in so many layers of racial meaning, people's lived experiences, ongoing policy debates, and historical mythology. Teaching Brown forces many of us to confront a number of dilemmas that have no easy answers: •How do we “keep the struggle alive” in our students' hearts and minds while simultaneously teaching them to think like historians, who do not uncritically accept simplistic or celebratory accounts of the civil rights movement?•How do we bridge the gap between two diverging bodies of historical scholarship: one that praises desegregation activists who courageously challenged White supremacy and another that celebrates the good qualities of Black segregated schools?•How can we help our students see connections between historical struggles and contemporary debates over race, education, and power without slipping into presentism, the unfortunate tendency to perceive the past solely through present-day lenses?•Or how do we connect any of this academic literature to everyday people's lived experiences in the communities around us, whether we teach in the South, the North, or the West?

“Don’t Crash the Gate but Stand on Your Own Feet!”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reginald K. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Higher Learning ◽  
Black College ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Learning ◽  
Black Institutions ◽  
Professional Class ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

Scholars often consider the Brown decision of 1954 as the chief legal victory for African Americans in the twentieth century. Although the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s legal team achieved their goal of gaining access to public education for black citizens, historians studying this movement generally praise the outcome of Brown while not focusing on the unintended consequences of that victory. Such circumstances as the ultimate demise of many southern-based black institutions in the name of integration. Researchers have often labelled the leaders of such institutions as obstructionist, gradualists, accommodationist or even worse, “Uncle Toms.” Much of this criticism came from individuals who did not carry the burden of leading either a southern-based institution or community during the early 1900s. Despite these negative labels, black college administrators such as Shepard were responsible for creating a southern black professional class, and future Civil Rights leaders through their institutions of higher learning. Consequently, this essay will explore how Shepard navigated the currents of southern white supremacy, and northern black radicalism while creating an institutional legacy that remains today despite his “gradualist” approach during the long Civil Rights Movement.

Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Draper
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Employment Discrimination ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Individual ◽  
White Workers

The relationship between organized labor and the civil rights movement proceeded along two tracks. At work, the two groups were adversaries, as civil rights groups criticized employment discrimination by the unions. But in politics, they allied. Unions and civil rights organizations partnered to support liberal legislation and to oppose conservative southern Democrats, who were as militant in opposing unions as they were fervent in supporting white supremacy. At work, unions dithered in their efforts to root out employment discrimination. Their initial enthusiasm for Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed employment discrimination, waned the more the new law violated foundational union practices by infringing on the principle of seniority, emphasizing the rights of the individual over the group, and inserting the courts into the workplace. The two souls of postwar liberalism— labor solidarity represented by unions and racial justice represented by the civil rights movement—were in conflict at work. Although the unions and civil rights activists were adversaries over employment discrimination, they united in trying to register southern blacks to vote. Black enfranchisement would end the South’s exceptionalism and the veto it exercised over liberal legislation in Congress. But the two souls of liberalism that were at odds over the meaning of fairness at work would also diverge at the ballot box. As white workers began to defect from the Democratic Party, the political coalition of black and white workers that union leaders had hoped to build was undermined from below. The divergence between the two souls of liberalism in the 1960s—economic justice represented by unions and racial justice represented by civil rights—helps explain the resurgence of conservatism that followed.

The Bible Told Them So

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Russell Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
God's Will ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
White Evangelicals ◽  
American Society ◽  
The 1960S

The Bible Told Them So explains why southern white evangelical Christians in South Carolina resisted the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Simply put, they believed the Bible told them so. Interpreting the Bible in such a way, these white Christians entered the battle against the civil rights movement certain that God was on their side. Ultimately, the civil rights movement triumphed in the 1960s and, with its success, fundamentally transformed American society. But such a victory did little to change southern white evangelicals’ theological commitment to segregation and white supremacy. Rather than abandoning their segregationist theology in the second half of the 1960s, white evangelicals turned their focus on institutions they still controlled—churches, homes, denominations, and private colleges and secondary schools—and fought on. Despite suffering defeat in the public sphere, white evangelicals continued to battle for their own institutions, preaching and practicing a segregationist Christianity they continued to believe reflected God’s will. Increasingly caught in the tension between their sincere beliefs that God desired segregation and their reticence to vocalize such ideas for fear of seeming bigoted or intolerant by the late 1960s, southern white evangelicals eventually embraced rhetoric of colorblindness and protection of the family as measures to maintain both segregation and respectable social standing. Such a strategy spread throughout the evangelical subculture and set southern white evangelicals on a detrimental path for race relations in the decades ahead.

Civil Rights and the Private School Movement in Mississippi, 1964–1971

2002 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Fuquay
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Private School ◽  
Black Children ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Housing Discrimination ◽  
Civil Rights Act

The signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was heralded as a tremendous victory for the civil rights movement, the fulfillment of a decade-long struggle to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Along with measures against job and housing discrimination, the Civil Rights Act included provisions specifically designed to overcome the white South's massive resistance campaign and enforce school desegregation. Despite the continued intransigence of segregationists, these measures proved successful and white public schools across the South opened their doors to black children. With segregationists in retreat and the Voting Rights Act on the horizon, this was a time of celebration for civil rights activists. But this was not the end of the story.

Pedagogies of Protest: African American Teachers and the History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1940–1963

2011 ◽  
Vol 113 (12) ◽  
pp. 2777-2803 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Baker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Teachers ◽  
Black Educators ◽  
The South ◽  
Student Protest ◽  
African American Teachers ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
Extracurricular Programs

Background/Context Although the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement marginalizes the role of black educators, revisionist scholars have shown that a significant number of black teachers encouraged student protest and activism. There has, however, been little analysis of the work of black teachers inside segregated schools in the South. Purpose/Objective This study examines the courses that Southern African American teachers taught, the pedagogies they practiced, and the extracurricular programs they organized. Using Charleston's Burke Industrial School as a lens to illuminate pedagogies of protest that were practiced by activist educators in the South, this study explores how leading black educators created spaces within segregated schools where they bred dissatisfaction with white supremacy. Research Design This historical analysis draws upon archival sources, school board minutes, school newspapers and yearbooks, oral testimony, and autobiographies. Conclusions/Recommendations In Charleston, as elsewhere in the South, activist African American teachers made crucial contributions to the civil rights movement. Fusing an activist version of the African American uplift philosophy with John Dewey's democratic conception of progressive education, exemplary teachers created academic and extracurricular programs that encouraged student protest. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the 1960s, students acted on lessons taught in classes and extracurricular clubs, organizing and leading strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations. The pedagogies that leading African American educators practiced, the aspirations they nurtured, and the student activism they encouraged helped make the civil rights movement possible.

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Church ◽  
African Ancestry ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
The Many ◽  
Southern City

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles interrogates Blackness and illustrates how it has been used as a basis to oppress, dismiss and exclude Blacks from societies and institutions in Europe, North America and South America. Employing uncharted analytical categories that tackle intriguing themes about borderless non-racial African ancestry, “traveling” identities and post-blackness, the essays provide new lenses for viewing the “Black” struggle worldwide. This approach directs the contributors’ focus to understudied locations and protagonists. In the volume, Charleston, South Carolina is more prominent than Little Rock Arkansas in the struggle to desegregate schools; Chicago occupies the space usually reserved for Atlanta or other southern city “bulwarks” of the Civil Rights Movement; diverse Africans in France and Afro-descended Chileans illustrate the many facets of negotiating belonging, long articulated by examples from the Greensboro Woolworth counter sit-in or the Montgomery Bus Boycott; unknown men in the British empire, who inverted dying confessions meant to vilify their blackness, demonstrate new dimensions in the story about race and religion, often told by examples of fiery clergy of the Black Church; and the theatres and studios of dramatists and visual artists replace the Mall in Washington DC as the stage for the performance of identities and activism.

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