Organization Despite Adversity

2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theda Skocpol ◽  
Jennifer Lynn Oser
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Community Service ◽  
The United States ◽  
Voluntary Organization ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Community Institutions ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Per Capita

A prominent form of voluntary organization in the United States from the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, fraternal associations are self-selecting brotherhoods and sisterhoods that provide mutual aid to members, enact group rituals, and engage in community service. Synthesizing primary and secondary evidence, this article documents that African Americans historically organized large numbers of translocal fraternal voluntary federations. Some black fraternal associations paralleled white groups, while others were distinctive to African Americans. In regions where blacks lived in significant numbers, African Americans often created more fraternal lodges per capita than whites; and women played a much more prominent role in African American fraternalism than they did in white fraternalism. Rivaling churches as community institutions, many black fraternal federations became active in struggles for equal civil rights.

The Social Impact of Sport

2021 ◽  
pp. 97-121
Author(s):  
Joseph Cornelius Spears, Jr. ◽  
Sean T. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Social Impact ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
International Health ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Social

The COVID-19 pandemic assumed an international health threat, and in turn, spotlighted the distinct disparities in civil rights, opportunity, and inclusion witnessed by lived experiences of African Americans. Although these harsh disparities have existed through the United States of America's history, the age of technology and mass media in the 21st century allows for a deeper and broader look into the violation of African Americans civil liberties in virtual real time. Also, historically, the sports world has been instrumental in fighting for the civil rights of African Americans; athletes such as Jesse Owens and Muhammed Ali led by example. This chapter will showcase how the sports world continues to support social justice overall and specifically during this international pandemic. The authors will examine contemporary events like the transition in support for Colin Kaepernick's protest against police brutality and the NBA play-off (Bubble) protest in 2020.

Latino/a and African American Relations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian D. Behnken
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black And White

African Americans and Latino/as have had a long history of social interactions that have been strongly affected by the broader sense of race in the United States. Race in the United States has typically been constructed as a binary of black and white. Latino/as do not fit neatly into this binary. Some Latino/as have argued for a white racial identity, which has at times frustrated their relationships with black people. For African Americans and Latino/as, segregation often presented barriers to good working relationships. The two groups were often segregated from each other, making them mutually invisible. This invisibility did not make for good relations. Latino/as and blacks found new avenues for improving their relationships during the civil rights era, from the 1940s to the 1970s. A number of civil rights protests generated coalitions that brought the two communities together in concerted campaigns. This was especially the case for militant groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Mexican American Brown Berets, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, as well as in the Poor People’s Campaign. Interactions among African Americans and Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban/Cuban American illustrate the deep and often convoluted sense of race consciousness in American history, especially during the time of the civil rights movement.

scholarly journals Preparing for 2007: Legal and Legislative Issues Surrounding the Reauthorization of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Benson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Political Empowerment

Forty years ago, civil rights activists across the country rejoiced in the passing of the Voting Rights Act1 (“VRA” or “the Act”). The Act was a crowning achievement of the classical civil rights movement and the culmination of a bloody series of events seeking political empowerment for African-Americans in the United States.

Race and Representation in the United States: the Constitutional Validity of Majority–Minority Congressional Districts

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-507
Author(s):  
ROBERT J. McKEEVER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Equal Protection Clause ◽  
Congressional Districts ◽  
Constitutional Principle ◽  
Racial Lines

In an effort to maximize the representation of African Americans and Hispanics in the United States House of Representatives, many state legislatures have consciously sought to create so-called “majority–minority” congressional districts. This involves carving out districts in which African Americans or Hispanics constitute more than 50 per cent of the voting age population. The expectation is that such districts will elect a minority member of the House, which in turn will lead to a Congress that is more sensitive and responsive to the needs and interests of America's two largest ethnic minorities. Indeed, this expectation has become an article of faith for the mainstream civil rights movement and its white sympathizers.However, like other forms of affirmative action, majority–minority districting sits rather uncomfortably alongside the Constitutional principle of race-neutrality. In a series of recent cases, the United States Supreme Court has declared that, by subordinating traditional districting principles to the overriding need to draw boundaries along racial lines, states have violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Mortality, Incarceration, and African American Disenfranchisement in the Contemporary United States

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cottrell ◽  
Michael C. Herron ◽  
Javier M. Rodriguez ◽  
Daniel A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Right

On account of poor living conditions, African Americans in the United States experience disproportionately high rates of mortality and incarceration compared with Whites. This has profoundly diminished the number of voting-eligible African Americans in the country, costing, as of 2010, approximately 3.9 million African American men and women the right to vote and amounting to a national African American disenfranchisement rate of 13.2%. Although many disenfranchised African Americans have been stripped of voting rights by laws targeting felons and ex-felons, the majority are literally “missing” from their communities due to premature death and incarceration. Leveraging variation in gender ratios across the United States, we show that missing African Americans are concentrated in the country’s Southeast and that African American disenfranchisement rates in some legislative districts lie between 20% and 40%. Despite the many successes of the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights movement, high levels of African American disenfranchisement remain a continuing feature of the American polity.

Red Summer and Early 20th-Century Race Massacres

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann V. Collins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Early 19Th Century

Between the turbulent months of April and October 1919, racial violence reached a peak in the United States. Some twenty-six white-on-black massacres took place across the country. Author and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson dubbed this terrible period the Red Summer as a way to characterize pervasive racial hostility and for the blood spilled in its wake. Yet, racial violence has had a long and painful history in the United States. From the moment enslaved Africans arrived in the New World, whites strove cruelly and systematically to maintain power and control over their bodies and labor. Indeed, many interactions between ostensible racial groups have centered on white hostility. A type of brutality that proved especially vicious took the shape of white-on-black race massacres. First appearing in the early 19th century and fading by the end of World War II, whites used these types of disturbances to deny African Americans progress and freedom. Destruction of black communities, massive bloodshed, and lynchings characterized these occurrences. The early 20th century, and particularly the Red Summer, marked a critical moment in the history of race relations of the United States—one that proved deadly to African Americans.

From Bondage to Citizenship: A Comparison of African American and Indian Lower-Caste Mobilization in Two Regions of Deep Inequality

2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 770-809
Author(s):  
Narendra Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Civic Discourse ◽  
Social Classification ◽  
Racial Lines ◽  
Demographic Patterns

AbstractThe paper explores mobilization to reduce the deepest inequalities in the two largest democracies, those along caste lines in India and racial lines in the United States. I compare how the groups at the bottom of these ethnic hierarchies—India's former untouchable castes (Dalits) and African Americans—mobilized from the 1940s to the 1970s in pursuit of full citizenship: the franchise, representation, civil rights, and social rights. Experiences in two regions of historically high inequality (the Kaveri and Mississippi Deltas) are compared in their national contexts. Similarities in demographic patterns, group boundaries, socioeconomic relations, regimes, and enfranchisement timing facilitate comparison. Important differences in nationalist and civic discourse, official and popular social classification, and stratification patterns influenced the two groups’ mobilizations, enfranchisement, representation, alliances, and relationships with political parties. The nation was imagined to clearly include Dalits earlier in India than to encompass African Americans in the United States. Race was the primary and bipolar official and popular identity axis in the United States, unlike caste in India. African Americans responded by emphasizing racial discourses while Dalit mobilizations foregrounded more porously bordered community visions. These different circumstances enabled more widespread African American mobilization, but offered Dalits more favorable interethnic alliances, party incorporation, and policy accommodation, particularly in historically highly unequal regions. Therefore, group representation and policy benefits increased sooner and more in India than in the United States, especially in regions of historically high group inequality such as the Kaveri and other major river Deltas relative to the Deep South, including Mississippi.

African American Civil Rights Movements to End Slavery, Racism and Oppression in the Post Slavery Era: A Critique of Booker T. Washington’s Integration Ideology

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (Issue 3) ◽  
pp. 62-68
Author(s):  
Nancy Bwalya Lungu ◽  
Alice Dhliwayo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
The United States ◽  
Equal Treatment ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
The Impact

The Transatlantic Slave trade began during the 15th century when Portugal and subsequently other European kingdoms were able to expand overseas and reach Africa. The Portuguese first began to kidnap people from the West Coast of Africa and took those that they enslaved to Europe. This saw a lot of African men and women transported to Europe and America to work on the huge plantations that the Whites owned. The transportation of these Africans exposed them to inhumane treatments which they faced even upon the arrival at their various destinations. The emancipation Proclamation signed on 1st January 1863 by the United States President Abraham Lincoln saw a legal stop to slave trade. However, the African Americans that had been taken to the United States and settled especially in the Southern region faced discrimination, segregation, violence and were denied civil rights through segregation laws such as the Jim Crow laws and lynching, based on the color of their skin. This forced them especially those that had acquired an education to rise up and speak against this treatment. They formed Civil Rights Movements to advocate for Black rights and equal treatment. These protracted movements, despite continued violence on Blacks, Culminated in Barack Obama being elected the first African American President of the United States of America. To cement the victory, he won a second term, which Donald Trump failed to obtain. This paper sought to critic the philosophies of Booker T. Washington in his civil rights movement, particularly his ideologies of integration, self-help, racial solidarity and accommodation as expressed in his speech, “the Atlanta Compromise,” and the impact this had on the political and civil rights arena for African Americans.

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