“It Has to Come from the Hearts of the People”: Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, Race, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 559-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
RANDALL J. STEPHENS
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
American Conservatism ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The People ◽  
Religious Dimensions ◽  
To Come ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Conservative Christians

In recent years historians and scholars of religious studies have chronicled and debated the critical role that black and white liberal Protestants, Catholics, and Jews played in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. At every stage of the movement, mainline and traditional black churches proved vital. Less is known about the actions and reactions of conservative or moderate white believers. The churches that these fundamentalists and evangelicals belonged to would grow tremendously in the coming decades, eventually claiming roughly 26 percent of the American population. From the 1960s forward, conservative Protestants would also become key political players, helping to decide national elections. Their responses to the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, which intended to end discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin, and the heated debates that led up to the law reveal much about how conservative Christians related to the state and to a changing society. Responses to the bill ranged from resigned acceptance to racist denunciation. But believers were united in their antistatism and in their opposition to political and theological liberalism. This article examines how evangelicals and fundamentalists engaged in politics and understood race and racism in personal terms. It also analyzes the religious dimensions of modern American conservatism.

The Gospel of the Sit-In

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Gershenhorn
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

During the 1960s, Austin lent his talents and his newspaper in support of the direct action movement in Durham and throughout the state. Unlike many other black leaders in the city, he immediately and enthusiastically embraced an early sit-in in Durham that began in 1957, three years before the more celebrated Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins. He also aided a boycott of white retail businesses that refused to hire black workers by publishing the names of those businesses in the Carolina Times. This strategy was quite effective in forcing white businesses to hire African Americans. Austin’s efforts and those of countless civil rights activists led to major freedom struggle successes with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“The Living Monument”: The Desegregation of Grady Memorial Hospital and the Changing South

2020 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-219
Author(s):  
Brendan P. Lovasik ◽  
Priya R. Rajdev ◽  
Steven C. Kim ◽  
Jahnavi K. Srinivasan ◽  
Walter L. Ingram ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Surgical Care ◽  
Physical Structure ◽  
Public Hospitals ◽  
Memorial Hospital ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Separate And Unequal ◽  
The American South ◽  
The 1960S

Grady Memorial Hospital is a pillar of public medical and surgical care in the Southeast. The evolution of this institution, both in its physical structure as well as its approach to patient care, mirrors the cultural and social changes that have occurred in the American South. Grady Memorial Hospital opened its doors in 1892 built in the heart of Atlanta's black community. With its separate and unequal facilities and services for black and white patients, the concept of “the Gradies” was born. Virtually, every aspect of care at Grady continued to be segregated by race until the mid-20th century. In 1958, the opening of the “New Grady” further cemented this legacy of the separate “Gradies,” with patients segregated by hospital wing. By the 1960s, civil rights activists brought change to Atlanta. The Atlanta Student Movement, with the support of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., led protests outside of Grady, and a series of judicial and legislative rulings integrated medical boards and public hospitals. Eventually, the desegregation of Grady occurred with a quiet memo that belied years of struggle: on June 1, 1965, a memo from hospital superintendent Bill Pinkston read “All phases of the hospital are on a non-racial basis, effective today.” The future of Grady is deeply rooted in its past, and Grady's mission is unchanged from its inception in 1892: “It will nurse the poor and rich alike and will be an asylum for black and white.”

scholarly journals Trends in Black-White Church Integration

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Q. Yang ◽  
Starlita Smith
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Americans ◽  
White People ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
The Church

Historically, the separation of blacks and whites in churches was well known (Gilbreath 1995; Schaefer 2005). Even in 1968, about four years after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. still said that “eleven o'clock on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week” (Gilbreath 1995:1). His reference was to the entrenched practice of black and white Americans who worshiped separately in segregated congregations even though as Christians, their faith was supposed to bring them together to love each other as brothers and sisters. King's statement was not just a casual observation. One of the few places that civil rights workers failed to integrate was churches. Black ministers and their allies were at the forefront of the church integration movement, but their stiffest opposition often came from white ministers. The irony is that belonging to the same denomination could not prevent the racial separation of their congregations. In 1964, when a group of black women civil rights activists went to a white church in St. Augustine, Florida to attend a Sunday service, the women were met by a phalanx of white people with their arms linked to keep the activists out (Bryce 2004). King's classic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was a response to white ministers who criticized him and the civil rights movement after a major civil rights demonstration (King [2002]).

The Return of Civil Rights Television

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Television News ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
The United States ◽  
Network Television ◽  
White House ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
The 1960S

This book has explored how network television mobilized a certain type of image that, when appropriately paired with figures of whiteness, was presumed to make whites less anxious about social change. It has highlighted a common link in these representations of a dignified blackness intertwined with an accommodating and welcoming whiteness. It has considered a number of television shows, including East Side/West Side and Good Times, to emphasize the propensity of networks to tell narratives relating to “black and white together,” the “worthy black victim,” and the aspirational “civil rights subject.” This epilogue examines television news coverage of Barack Obama's historic election as president of the United States. It suggests that networks were returning to the familiar discourse about the civil rights movements during the 1960s as they packaged stories that celebrated black and white voters coming together to put a biracial black man into the White House, to make Americans feel good about their country and its race relations.

Another Birth of Freedom

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angélica Maria Bernal
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Constitutional Politics ◽  
The People ◽  
The Us ◽  
To Come ◽  
We The People

This chapter examines a previously unexplored perspective on the US civil rights refounding: Méndez v. Westminster School District et al. (1947), a case reflecting the political and legal struggles of Mexican American parents in 1940s Orange County to challenge their children’s segregation from California’s public schools. Against familiar interpretations that excluded groups advance social-justice claims before the broader society as appeals to the promises of the Founding or Founders, this chapter argues that even when situated as appeals within the law, foundational challenges are better understood as underauthorized ones: actions that self-authorize not on the basis of an order that once was, but on the basis of a citizen-subject position and political order that are at once precarious and yet to come. This type of constitutional politics, the chapter argues, challenges understandings of democratic self-constitution predicated on a unified “We, the People” by bringing to light the constituent power of the excluded.

Carolle Bénitah’s Photo-Embroidery

2019 ◽  
pp. 159-191
Author(s):  
Naïma Hachad
Keyword(s):  
White Family ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Personal Story ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
History Of ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
To Come ◽  
The 1960S

In ‘L’enfance marocaine’ (2009), Carolle Bénitah scans, reframes, and embroiders over black and white family photographs from her childhood in Morocco in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter 5, analyzes Bénitah’s photo-embroideries, using theories on family photography and its ability to capture traumatic shifts that shape postmodern mentalities, as developed by Roland Barthes ([1980]1981), Marianne Hirsch (1997), Patricia Holland (1991), and Annette Kuhn ([1995] 2002). In tandem with these theorists, I draw on Sam Durrant’s analysis of the postcolonial narrative as a mode of mourning and an action partly meant to come to terms with traumatic historical events, and Mireille Rosello’s notion of ‘reparative mourning’ in her study of the reparative in postcolonial narratives. I read Bénitah’s images as a postmodern narrative that testifies to a fragmented subjectivity, situated at the intersection between public and private history and memory—the artist’s personal story against the backdrop of the twentieth-century history of Morocco and its Jewish community. The chapter analyzes spatial, temporal, visual, and cultural hybridity as a way of working through history while also engaging with transnational feminist strategies women use to undo gender hierarchies naturalized and perpetuated by photography and the family photograph.

The Politics of Empowerment. By Robert Weissberg. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. 272p. $50.00.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 837-838 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Resources ◽  
The 1960S

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s produced strong pressure on all levels of government to give “power to the people.” This urgent demand came not only from radical activists in the streets but also from the halls of academia, where scholars churned out a massive volume of studies encompassing detailed recommendations for filling the power vacuum between authoritative public and private decision makers and disadvantaged citizens whose lack of sufficient economic and political resources condemned them to the bottom rungs of the American social order. Although most of these studies were considered positive and progressive, they were not without their detractors. The most searing critique of “bottom up” schemes for empowering the disadvantaged has come from the pen of Robert Weissberg in his book, The Politics of Empowerment.

Renarrating the Thirties in the Forties and Fifties

Prospects ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 455-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Foley
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Early Signs ◽  
Generational Politics ◽  
To Come ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Literary Radicalism

Daniel aaron, writing about American literary communism at the turn into the 1960s, concluded that the literary radicalism of the 1930s had been one more “turn in the cycle of revolt” characterizing the generational politics of American writers since the early 19th Century. The American writer's “running quarrel with his [sic] society” springs “as much from his identity with that society as from his alienation,” Aaron argued. When this rebellion fails to sustain itself, the writer is “gradually absorbed into the society he has rejected.” Like earlier “experiments in rebellion,” the 1930s movement had its “ancestors and founders, its foreign prophets, its manifestoes, its saints and renegades.” It “be[gan] in joy and end[ed] in disillusionment,” although (here Aaron was probably alluding to the early signs of civil rights activity) “amidst its monuments and ruins are the shoots of rebellion to come” (20, 22).

scholarly journals Semiparametric Censored Regression Models

2001 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 29-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Y Chay ◽  
James L Powell
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
White Men ◽  
Ordinary Least Squares ◽  
Error Distribution ◽  
Least Squares Regression ◽  
Censored Regression ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Censored Regression Model ◽  
The American South ◽  
The 1960S

When data are censored, ordinary least squares regression can provide biased coefficient estimates. Maximum likelihood approaches to this problem are valid only if the error distribution is correctly specified, which can be problematic in practice. We review several semiparametric estimators for the censored regression model that do not require parameterization of the error distribution. These estimators are used to examine changes in black-white earnings inequality during the 1960s based on censored tax records. The results show that there was significant earnings convergence among black and white men in the American South after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Suicidal Behavior in Black South Africans

Crisis ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lourens Schlebusch ◽  
Naseema B.M. Vawda ◽  
Brenda A. Bosch
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Suicidal Behavior ◽  
Health Care Facilities ◽  
South African Society ◽  
South Africans ◽  
The Past ◽  
The People ◽  
Care Facilities ◽  
Black South Africans ◽  
To Come

Summary: In the past suicidal behavior among Black South Africans has been largely underresearched. Earlier studies among the other main ethnic groups in the country showed suicidal behavior in those groups to be a serious problem. This article briefly reviews some of the more recent research on suicidal behavior in Black South Africans. The results indicate an apparent increase in suicidal behavior in this group. Several explanations are offered for the change in suicidal behavior in the reported clinical populations. This includes past difficulties for all South Africans to access health care facilities in the Apartheid (legal racial separation) era, and present difficulties of post-Apartheid transformation the South African society is undergoing, as the people struggle to come to terms with the deleterious effects of the former South African racial policies, related socio-cultural, socio-economic, and other pressures.

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