Commentary

2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-427
Author(s):  
Larry J. Griffin
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
Valuable Book ◽  
History Of

Colorblind Injustice is an angry, ambitious, and very valuable book. In it,Kousser argues that the Second Reconstruction—that is, the post-1965 edifice of law and institutions securing essential African American and Latino civil rights and effective political voice—has been disastrously undermined, possibly mortally so, by the distorted, ignorant, or malicious (and, ultimately, to Kousser, dangerous) misinterpretations of the history of American race relations and of the meaning of the nation’s voting rights laws and Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments.The culprits in this tale include, among other members of the Rehnquist Supreme Court, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and ClarenceThomas; political scientist AbigailThernstrom,who believes that past discrimination against racial minorities never justifies raceconscious remedies; overzealous Republican (and Democratic, though more of the former than the latter) party partisans; and a lot of additional white politicians, officials, and judges ranging in localities from Los Angeles to North Carolina.

Black and Tan Academia

2019 ◽  
pp. 49-69
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
Student Newspaper ◽  
Safe Spaces ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the peculiar history of Tougaloo College from its founding during the Reconstruction Era to the turn of the century. Tougaloo, is best known for being a haven for black militancy during the modern civil rights movement and one of the few safe spaces for Freedom Riders, marchers, and sit-in activists in the most notoriously violent state in the south – Mississippi. Yet its early years illustrate an institution in constant flux, trying to survive economic hardships, and under the thumb of conservative administrators and teachers who exposed Tougaloo students to the expectations of respectability politics. Nevertheless, black students carved out vital spaces for expression and utilized the pages of their student newspaper to display their expanding social and political consciousness and their desire to resist the oppressive and often violent hardships of America’s lowest point in race relations.

Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xi + 323 pp. $59.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.

2000 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 145-148
Author(s):  
Alex Lichtenstein
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Economic Policy ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
Fair Employment ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Economy

Judith Stein recounts two histories in tandem that all too frequently are narrated separately: “that of a changing [American] economy and that of changing race relations” (2). The brilliant originality of Running Steel is to bring the history of civil rights in employment together with larger questions of national, indeed international, post-1945 political economy. The struggle for racial justice appears neither a beneficiary nor a casualty of an easily invoked but vaguely defined “liberalism,” as in so many other studies. Instead, the limits of fair employment prove an integral part of the making and unmaking of a political and economic totality with quite specific elements seemingly unconnected to race relations. In contrast to currently fashionable neoliberal accounts, Stein concludes “it was the foreign commitments and economic policies of liberalism, not the excesses of racial reformers or the racism of the culture, that transformed American politics in the postwar era” (6).

Not as It Is Written

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
International Exhibition ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Made In

This article discusses an international exhibition that detailed the recent history of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Methodologically, the exhibition paired oral history excerpts with selected historic photographs to evoke a sense of Black life during the twentieth century. Thematically, showcasing the Black experience in Pittsburgh provided a chance to provoke among a wider public more nuanced understandings of the civil rights movement, an era particularly prone to problematic and superficial misreadings, but also to interject an African American perspective into the scholarship on deindustrializing cities, a literature which treats racism mostly in white-centric terms. This essay focuses on the choices made in reconciling these thematic and methodological dimensions when designing this exhibition.

Response to Ken Mack—and New Questions for the History of African American Legal Liberalism in the Age of Obama

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 671-679 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Maclean
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Related Field ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

I so appreciate Professor Mack's generous comments onFreedom Is Not Enough—and even more his critical engagement with it. It's an author's dream to have a leading scholar in a related field read with such care and insight, and I am very grateful for this opportunity to converse about the intriguing issues he has raised. I first encountered some of Ken's articles about civil rights lawyering beforeBrownafterFreedom Is Not Enoughwas in press, and I thought then that my discussion of the earlier history would have been enhanced by them because his portrayal was so rich while our perspectives on the relationship between law and activism were so congruent. Now, reading his comments on the work as published, I wish I had studied law with him! His challenges would have made it a better book.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Elaine Allen Lechtreck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Southern States ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Martin Luther King

The introduction includes Bible verses cited by ministers to defend segregation and verses to oppose segregation. There are slices of the history of the United States, the Civil Rights Movement, and African American history. The southern states, where white ministers confronted segregation, are identified. The term “minister” is explained as well as the variety of labels given these ministers ranging from “Liberal,” Progressive,” “Neo-Orthodox,” “Evangelical Liberal,” “open conservative,” ‘Last Hurrah of the Social Gospel Movement” to “Trouble Maker,” “Traitor, “ “Atheist,” “Communist,” “N_____ Lover.” Rachel Henderlite, the only woman minister mentioned in the book, is identified. Synopses of the book’s seven chapters are included. Comments by historians David Chappell, Charles Reagan Wilson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ernest Campbell, and Thomas Pettigrew are cited.

Race Women

2019 ◽  
pp. 70-100
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Women ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the fascinating history of Bennett College – one of only two single sex colleges dedicated to educating African American women. Although Bennett would not make that transition until 1926, the institution played a vital role in educating African American women in Greensboro, North Carolina from the betrayal of the Nadir to the promises of a New Negro Era. The latter period witnessed Bennett, under the leadership of David Dallas Jones, mold scores of young girls into politically conscious race women who were encouraged to resist Jim Crow policies and reject the false principals of white supremacy. Their politicization led to a massive boycott of a theatre in downtown Greensboro and helped to set the tone for Greensboro’s evolution into a critical launching point for the modern civil rights movement.

Creating LDF South

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Rosen ◽  
Joseph Mosnier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Firm ◽  
Legal Aid ◽  
To Come ◽  
Washington University

This chapter describes Chambers's creation of a black-led and racially integrated law firm, for all intents the first such institution in the United States. In 1967, Chambers recruited two junior attorneys to his office: Adam Stein, a white George Washington University Law School graduate who had interned with Chambers in the summer of 1965, and James Ferguson, an African American from Asheville, North Carolina, who had just graduated from Columbia Law School. The three would form the nucleus of a powerful civil rights law practice for years to come. In 1968, after recruiting a young white Legal Aid attorney, James Lanning, Chambers formally created Chambers, Stein, Ferguson & Lanning. In 1969, African American attorney Robert Belton, a North Carolina native who was LDF's leading Title VII litigator, also joined the firm. So highly reputed was Chambers as a civil rights litigator, and so central was his firm to the wider LDF campaign in these years, that the firm was informally acknowledged as "LDF South."

Du Bois and James at Harvard: The Challenges of Fraternal Pairings and Racial Theory

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 352-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saladin Ambar
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
William James ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
American Political Thought ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article seeks to illuminate the relationship between two of the most important figures in American political thought: the pragmatist philosopher William James, and the pioneering civil rights leader and intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois. As Harvard's first African American PhD, Du Bois was a critical figure in theorizing about race and identity. His innovative take on double consciousness has often been attributed to his contact with James who was one of Du Bois's most critical graduate professors at Harvard. But beyond the view of the two thinkers as intellectual collaborators, is the fraught history of liberal racial fraternal pairing and its role in shaping national identity. This article examines Du Bois and James's relationship in the context of that history, one marked by troubled associations between friendship and race.

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