scholarly journals “They will liberate themselves”: Education, Citizenship, and Civil Rights in the Appalachian Coalfields

2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-477
Author(s):  
Kristan L. McCullum
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Educational Experiences ◽  
Educational Experience ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
The 1950S

AbstractThe Black Appalachian educational experience during the civil rights era has largely been obscured by mythologies of invisibility and regional racial innocence. The narrative in this article counters these myths through the stories of Black Appalachians who came of age during the 1950s and 1960s in Jenkins, a southeastern Kentucky coal town. It explores the nuances and complexities of Jim Crow in this Appalachian community and demonstrates the various ways in which the Black community navigated segregation and inequality through its commitment to education as freedom. The belief in the liberatory potential of education fostered different forms of activism, from direct-action protest to more subtle acts of resistance. This article uses oral histories to reconstruct the educational experiences of Black Appalachians during a particular transformative moment in history. Prioritizing the voices of those who lived this history not only highlights the agency of Black Appalachians, but also assigns subjectivity and agency in constructing the narrative itself.

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.

“These Women Really Did the Work”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lucander
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Food Service ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Color Line ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Access To Food

This chapter describes a series of sit-ins during 1944. Led by largely forgotten African American women, this interracial direct-action campaign sought to challenge the color line at department-store lunch counters. Integrating, or at least improving, access to food service at major downtown retailers was an important step in the process of breaking down elements of Jim Crow segregation in St. Louis. That same year, the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) shifted its attention toward obtaining and retaining jobs for black workers in publicly funded workplaces. Gaining access to jobs operating switchboards and in the local administration of Southwestern Bell Telephone offices was presented as a stride toward securing sustainable employment for a largely female contingent of working-class African Americans who wanted long-term white- and pink-collar employment. This sort of local women's activism, juxtaposed against national men's leadership, is consistent with a gendered pattern of activism in civil rights campaigns that persisted through the 1960s.

An Entire World in Motion

2021 ◽  
pp. 53-90
Author(s):  
Erin R. Pineda
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Entire World

This chapter develops an alternative framework for understanding the civil disobedience of civil rights activists: as a decolonizing praxis that linked their dissent to that of anticolonial activists and tied the context of Jim Crow to global white supremacy. If the constitutional, democratic state formed the normative horizon for liberal understandings of civil disobedience, activists’ horizon was defined by processes of imaginative transit—the process of thinking and traveling across boundaries and disparate contexts, through which activists in motion constructed civil disobedience as a means of transforming worldwide structures of racist imperialism, colonial rule, apartheid, and Jim Crow. Between 1920 and 1960, African American, Indian, South African, and Ghanaian activists proposed, debated, and wielded nonviolent direct action as a means of self-liberation from white supremacy’s structures of fear and violence, and way of disrupting and transforming the practices that held those structures in place.

Race and Rape Prosecution in US History

2020 ◽  
pp. 57-104
Author(s):  
Matthew Barry Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Us History ◽  
Rape Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Defendants ◽  
Post Civil Rights

This chapter examines the current disproportion of Black defendants wrongly convicted of sexual assault through a historical lens. It notes the US history of statutorily separate sexual assault penalties based on race of the defendant and victim. Throughout US history the legal definition and societal response to rape (and rape allegations) have been influenced by considerations of race. These considerations were consistently made to the detriment of Black defendants charged with rape. The chapter reviews how race, rape law, and prosecution have been manifested in different historical eras (the period of race-based enslavement, the period of Jim Crow segregation, and the current post–civil rights period) and the mechanisms of racial bias against Black defendants in the post–civil rights era.

scholarly journals School Integration in the New Jim Crow: Opportunity or Oxymoron?

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 257-275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonya Douglass Horsford
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
School Integration ◽  
Critical Policy Analysis ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Research Perspectives ◽  
Policy Agendas ◽  
Critical Policy

In this article, I consider the limitations of school integration research that overlooks Black research perspectives, White policy interests, and the paradox of race in the New Jim Crow—America’s system of racial caste in the post–Civil Rights Era. Applying critical race theory as critical policy analysis, I discuss the importance of theorizing race in school integration research and recentering Black citizenship and equality as fundamental goals of school desegregation. I conclude with a call to desegregate the research on school desegregation through critical policy analyses that deconstruct liberal education policy agendas, create new policy knowledge, and reject the institutionalization of Black educational inferiority.

Dreaming Blackness: Black Nationalism and African American Public Opinion. By Melanye T. Price

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 897-898
Author(s):  
Robert Gooding-Williams
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Nationalism ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black President ◽  
Post Civil Rights

This is a timely, engaging, and illuminating study of Black Nationalism. The book's “fundamental project,” Melanye T. Price writes, “is to systematically understand individual Black Nationalism adherence among African Americans in the post-Civil Rights era” (p. 60). Black Nationalism has a long history in African American politics, but with the demise of Jim Crow and the election of our first black president, we may reasonably wonder whether ordinary African American citizens are disposed to endorse it. Price's book is important because it addresses this question head-on, defending the thesis that a renewal of Black Nationalism remains a viable possibility in post-Obama America.

Youth and Women Lead

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
Wesley C. Hogan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Typical Mode

Diane Nash, Bob Moses, and The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) routed an oppressive system that had existed for nearly a century. In just five years, between 1960 and 1965, young activists—most Black, some not—dismantled large parts of legalized segregation, a system widely known as Jim Crow. They set up voting rights, community organizing, and nonviolent direct action in the very places in which segregation was most deeply rooted—Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. Ella Baker, possibly the greatest champion of American democratic politics that no one outside of certain circles has ever heard about—was a lodestar for SNCC’s group-centered leadership. Baker resisted the typical mode of individual heroics. Her legacy not only pervades the story of SNCC but also becomes visible in many of the movements that followed the civil rights/Black Power era.

Urban Destination Selection among African Americans during the 1950s Great Migration

2008 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Townsand Price-Spratlen
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Weighted Least Squares ◽  
Urban System ◽  
Utility Model ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Migrant Selectivity ◽  
Destination Selection ◽  
The 1950S

This article examines a place utility model of how destination assets influenced inmigration for the 1950s African American urban system. Archival and historiographical data are combined with census data to conduct weighted least-squares regressions that compare economic, ethnogenic, and other place utilities. Despite declines in migrant selectivity and net southern out-migration, ethnogenic characteristics increased the size of in-migrant streams during the 1950s, net of the momentum from prior migration and, most important, net of economic and demographic place utilities. Even as several dramatic changes began or intensified during the period, ethnogenic attractions continued to shape destination selection during this “bridge” decade of civil rights–era migration.

THE “SICK” RACIST

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Thomas ◽  
W. Carson Byrd
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Pharmacological Interventions ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Psychiatric Discourse ◽  
Post Civil Rights ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractSince the early 1960s, there has been a movement among activists, scholars, and policymakers to redefine racism as a psychopathological condition, identifiable and treatable through psychotherapeutic and pharmacological interventions. This development reflects, and is reflected by, the popular framing among mass media and ordinary social actors of racism and racist events as individual pathology rather than as a social problem. This shifting perspective on racism, from a social problem and a system to an individual pathology, has increasingly become a part of academic and psychiatric discourse since Jim Crow. In this article, we have two aims: first, to trace the emergence of “psychopathological racism”; second, to illustrate the relationship between “psychopathological racism” and “colorblind racism” in the post-Civil Rights era. We argue that the psychopathological view of racism compliments colorblindness in that larger structural issues are dismissed in favor of individual pathos. Furthermore, psychopathological explanations for racism dismiss socio-political contexts, eschewing the contributions of well over fifty years of social scientific research in the process.

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