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

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.

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 352-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saladin Ambar

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston

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.


Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan

Before the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire in 1807, colonial Sierra Leone was an experiment in free trade and free labour, founded by the Sierra Leone Company, a joint-stock company led by antislavery activists, and settled by African American Loyalists from Nova Scotia. This chapter explores the early history of the colony, and shows how antislavery was undermined by the routines of the transatlantic slave trade. Meanwhile, African American settlers were marginalised, and the arrival of 500 Jamaican Maroons in 1800 helped to cement the relationship between the leaders of the antislavery movement and the British armed forces.


Troublemakers ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Kathryn Schumaker

The introductionexplains how and why student protest became common in the United States in the late 1960s and places these protests in the context of shifts in the history of education and in broader social movements, including the civil rights movement, the Chicano Movement, and black power activism. The introduction also situates students’ rights within the context of children’s rights more broadly, explaining the legal principles that justified age discrimination and excluded children and students from the basic protections of American constitutional law. The introduction identifies the two decades between the 1960s and 1980s as a constitutional moment that revolutionized the relationship of students to the state. It also connects students’ rights litigation to the issue of school desegregation and the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education.


Author(s):  
Elaine Allen Lechtreck

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.


Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors

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.


Author(s):  
Lindon Barrett

This chapter turns to the personal and in some cases domestic issues facing African Americans in the antebellum period. Turning from Douglass's classic 1845 Narrative to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)—which receives central consideration in this chapter—Barrett also considers Mary Prince's The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831), Ellen and William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), and James C. Pennington's The Fugitive Blacksmith (1849) as antebellum representations of how African American bodies connect both public and private rights in the struggle for the abolition of slavery and thus are foundational to the subsequent civil rights movement.


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Oleg Grygor ◽  
Yuri Krysiuk ◽  
Angela Boyko ◽  
Vadim Zubov ◽  
Igor Sinegub

At first glance, the relationship between philosophy and theory of law is not applied but is considered a purely theoretical aspect. This thesis is not correct due to the adoption of the European legal standard of human and civil rights, the role of philosophy of law, the foundations of the theory of state and law in the training of lawyers, the formation of future lawyers of high philosophical and methodological culture.In this article, based on the analysis of the history of philosophy of law and the general theory of state and law and their development, the authors justify as an autonomous status in the jurisprudence of the two disciplines, their relationship and vice versa - differences.To do this, the authors explored the historical excursion of world philosophical and legal thought, grouped scientific and theoretical views on the relationship between philosophy of law and theory of state and law and provided an argument for the close intersection of philosophy of law and theory of state and law, mobility between scientific disciplines.Close contact between philosophy and jurisprudence contributes to the understanding of law not only as a function of the state but also the essence of human spirituality.The authors concluded that the in-depth study of scientific and theoretical aspects of the relationship between philosophy, philosophy of law and theory of state and law is the result of bridging the gap between theory and practice and will further focus on expanding the interaction of philosophy, theory and law results of the functioning of the state and law.Emphasizing the relevance of the topic in terms of bridging the significant gap between theory and practice, between the declarative provisions of laws and their actual implementation, the legal, scientific community is increasingly expanding to enter the plane of the practical application of philosophical - theoretical thought.


Author(s):  
Carolyn Martin Shaw

This chapter examines the functioning of the feminist NGO Associated Women of Zimbabwe (AWZ) to highlight varieties of feminism and the influence of a political and economic crisis on a feminist organization in Zimbabwe at the turn of the twenty-first century. After providing a brief history of AWZ, the chapter considers its experiences to demonstrate how women consciously organize to fight sexism in Zimbabwean society. It then explores AWZ's role in the political process as it advocated for women and promoted women's civil rights in the context of increasing political competition, electoral violence, and a declining economy. It also discusses cosmopolitan feminism in Zimbabwe and the relationship between AWZ and the state—especially in relation to the politics of inclusion, state-sponsored violence, and economic decline; explains how an organization that once stood against government lost its edge, even as government became more oppressive; and analyzes the fiction of Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga. The chapter concludes by showing what happens to an NGO dependent on international donors when the money stream begins to dry up.


2021 ◽  

This History explores innovations in African American autobiography since its inception, examining the literary and cultural history of Black self-representation amid life writing studies. By analyzing the different forms of autobiography, including pictorial and personal essays, editorials, oral histories, testimonials, diaries, personal and open letters, and even poetry performance media of autobiographies, this book extends the definition of African American autobiography, revealing how people of African descent have created and defined the Black self in diverse print cultures and literary genres since their arrival in the Americas. It illustrates ways African Americans use life writing and autobiography to address personal and collective Black experiences of identity, family, memory, fulfillment, racism and white supremacy. Individual chapters examine scrapbooks as a source of self-documentation, African American autobiography for children, readings of African American persona poems, mixed-race life writing after the Civil Rights Movement, and autobiographies by African American LGBTQ writers.


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