Markets, Information, and Benevolence

1994 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Brennan
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Corporate Law ◽  
Law School ◽  
Washington Post ◽  
Death Row ◽  
Death Sentences ◽  
Foundation Funding ◽  
Visibility Politics

In the January 6, 1991, issue of the Washington Post Magazine, reporter Walt Harrington wrote a profile of Bryan Stevenson. Mr. Stevenson is a 31-year-old working-class African-American from Delaware who graduated from Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government. Like the typical graduate of Harvard Law School, Mr. Stevenson had the opportunity to join the worlds of six-figure corporate law or high-visibility politics. Rather than follow his colleagues, however, Mr. Stevenson works seven-day, eighty-hour weeks as director of the Alabama Capital Representation Center. He appeals death sentences, handling twenty-four death-row cases himself, supervises five other lawyers who cover about thirty cases, and raises federal government and foundation funding. He does this living a Spartan existence on a salary of $24,000, refusing even the $50,000 directorship salary offered to him.

Nuanced and Dissenting Voices

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peggy J. Miller ◽  
Grace E. Cho
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Self Esteem ◽  
The Self ◽  
African American Parents ◽  
Dominant Discourse ◽  
Social Positioning ◽  
Conservative Christian ◽  
Bakhtinian Theory

Chapter 4, “Nuanced and Dissenting Voices,” examines the nuances diverse parents brought to their understandings of childrearing and self-esteem. Framed within Bakhtinian theory, this chapter gives voice to African American parents, working-class parents, conservative Christian parents, and mothers, particularly women who had experienced low self-esteem. These parents endorsed self-esteem, but refracted the language of the self-esteem imaginary in ways that made sense, given their diverse values and ideological commitments, social positioning, and idiosyncratic experiences. This chapter also describes the perspectives of two groups from the larger study who challenged key elements of the dominant discourse: grandmothers of Centerville children who raised their children in an earlier era, and Taiwanese parents who grew up in a different cultural context but were temporarily residing and raising their children in Centerville. These two groups of dissenters underscore again the book’s theme that self-esteem is rooted in time and place.

I Wonder if I Cannot Make Application for an Appointment Too

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Ziparo
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
White Women ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Female Employment ◽  
Service Work ◽  
Demographic Information ◽  
Female Employees

Chapter One explores how women came to work for the federal government. During the early years of the Civil War, different supervisors, scattered across various executive departments, created individualized and ad hoc policies regarding female employees based on their immediate labor needs, budget constraints, and personal views on the wisdom of female federal employment. The demographic information in application letters, employee files, and department ledgers, show that women across the country and the socioeconomic spectrum responded to the opportunity of civil service work in overwhelming numbers. The federal government hired African American women as manual laborers and clerks, though in far fewer numbers than it hired white women. Women’s letters reveal that they yearned for intellectually demanding and high-paying jobs in a land of limited options for female employment.

Intelligent and Civilized Sentiments

Lethal State ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 111-152
Author(s):  
Seth Kotch
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
State Law ◽  
Death Row ◽  
Death Sentences ◽  
Death Row Inmates ◽  
History Of ◽  
Tangible Result

This chapter tells the history of some of the elements that contributed to the declining use of the death penalty in North Carolina. Journalist Nell Battle Lewis railed against the practice as racist, un-Christian, and barbaric. Paul Green echoed those sentiments as he campaigned to save death row inmates from death. Yet their activism had little tangible result. More significant was a change in state law that allowed juries to formally recommend mercy following a conviction, meaning that judges were no longer required to deliver mandatory death sentences. The end of the mandatory death sentences ended executions, which ceased in 1961 and would not resume until 1984.

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."

“An Example for the Rest of the Nation”

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-246
Author(s):  
Martin Summers
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Mentally Ill ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Hospital Staff ◽  
World War ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Changing Demographics

This chapter covers the various challenges to Saint Elizabeths’ segregationist culture made by both black Washingtonians and the federal government over the first half of the twentieth century. It begins by exploring the staff’s inability to effect an absolute racial segregation in the wards, which was the result of the hospital’s constantly being in a state of overcapacity. The chapter also looks at the changing demographics of the patient population following World War II, when the army and navy stopped sending its mentally ill service members to Saint Elizabeths. It then turns to an examination of local community members’ and the federal government’s challenges to discrimination against black medical students, mistreatment of African American patients in the 1920s and 1930s, and exclusionary and segregationist employment policies. This chapter covers the desegregation of the hospital staff, from attendants and nurses in the 1930s and 1940s to physicians in the 1950s.

Strengths and Needs of Working-Class African-American and Anglo-American Grandparents

1997 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Watson ◽  
Sally A. Koblinsky
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Metropolitan Area ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Need For Information

This study examined gender and racial differences in the grandparenting strengths and needs of working class grandparents. A total of 192 African-American and Anglo-American grandmothers and grandfathers from the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area were administered the Grandparent Strengths and Needs Inventory. Grandmothers perceived themselves to be significantly more involved in teaching their grandchildren and significantly more successful in the grandparent role than grandfathers. African-American grandparents perceived themselves to be significantly more involved in teaching their grandchildren than Anglo-American grandparents, but were also significantly more likely than their Anglo-American counterparts to express frustration and need for information about the grandparenting role. A significantly greater percentage of African-American grandparents expressed interest in taking a grandparent education course than Anglo-American grandparents. Implications of the findings for grandparent education are discussed.

The Timothy 0. Webster Papers and the Pearce Civil War Collection: Using Civil War Military Collections for Women's History

Collections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-381
Author(s):  
Julie L. Holcomb
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
Final Part ◽  
American Women ◽  
Women's Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civil War Era

Working-class and rural white women and free and enslaved African American women left few material traces, making it difficult for scholars to document their experience of the Civil War. This three-part article uses the story of the Timothy O. Webster Papers, which is part of the Pearce Civil War Collection at Navarro College in Corsi-cana, Texas, to examine the possibilities and limitations of recovering women's experience of the war from military collections. The first part examines the practice of collecting Civil War documents, the history of the Pearce Civil War Collection, and the collection and preservation of the Webster letters. In the second part, I begin to reconstruct Harriet's story using letters from the Webster Papers. The final part returns to the archive to consider how archivists might aid scholars in recovering the story of Civil War-era women from military collections.

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