scholarly journals Policing Jim Crow America: Enforcers’ Agency and Structural Transformations

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Anthony Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Historical Importance ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Jim Crow South

This is a critical historiographical essay animated by the research question of how the decisions of police and sheriffs illuminated and drove the transformation of white supremacy through different forms from emancipation to the end of Jim Crow segregation. It situates this focus amidst current methodological trends that stress structural oppression and argues that law-enforcers’ agency could illuminate discussions among historians and other scholars about the relationship between formal and informal law alongside the rise of the modern criminological state. The historical importance of enforcers is accentuated in the story told in each section—the shifting demographics of enforcement during Reconstruction; the inequalities of policing alongside lynching in the last decades of the nineteenth century; the complex interplay between policing and segregation statutes, colorblind criminal law, and mob violence in the Jim Crow South; the concurrent modernization of racialized policing nationwide; and the displacement of informal mob law and formal racial caste by a national regime of extralegal police violence, unequal patterns of incarceration and execution, and federal protections of civil liberties and civil rights.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Amy Louise Wood ◽  
Natalie J. Ring
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Penal System ◽  
The South ◽  
Antebellum Era ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Jim Crow South

The introduction outlines the central themes of this collection: the problem of southern distinctiveness; the modernization of the criminal justice system and the centralization of state power; and the relationship between crime control and white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. In doing so, it offers an overview of criminal justice history in the South from the antebellum era through the rise and decline of convict leasing in the postbellum era to the development of new practices surrounding policing, incarceration, and capital punishment after 1890. It also explains the significance of this collection to the historiography on criminal justice in the South, as well as to understanding problems in our present-day penal system. Finally, the introduction summarizes each chapter in the collection.

scholarly journals “Did Emmett Till Die in Vain? Organized Labor Says No!”: The United Packinghouse Workers and Civil Rights Unionism in the Mid-1950s

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 8-40
Author(s):  
Matthew F. Nichter
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Organized Labor ◽  
Red Scare ◽  
Union Activists ◽  
Jim Crow South

Abstract Emmett Till's mangled face is seared into our collective memory, a tragic epitome of the brutal violence that upheld white supremacy in the Jim Crow South. But Till's murder was more than just a tragedy: it also inspired an outpouring of protest, in which labor unions played a prominent role. The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) campaigned energetically, from the stockyards of Chicago to the sugar refineries of Louisiana. The UPWA organized the first mass meeting addressed by Till's mother, Mamie Bradley; packinghouse workers petitioned, marched, and rallied to demand justice; and an interracial group of union activists traveled to Mississippi to observe the trial of Till's killers firsthand, flouting segregation inside and outside the courtroom. Analysis of antiracist unions like the UPWA can help rectify a weakness in the “whiteness” literature by illuminating the contexts and strategies that have fostered durable interracial working-class solidarity. The UPWA, which managed to survive the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s relatively unscathed, represents an important link between the “civil rights unionism” of the 1930s and 1940s and the civil rights movement of the mid-1950s and 1960s.

Religion, Race, and Sports

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Scholes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Baseball Player ◽  
Sports History ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
African American Race

Race, religion, and sports may seem like odd bedfellows, but, in fact, all three have been interacting with each other since the emergence of modern sports in the United States over a century ago. It was the sport of boxing that saw a black man become a champion at the height of the Jim Crow era and a baseball player who broke the color barrier two decades before the civil rights movement began. In this chapter, the role that religion has played in these and other instances where race (the African American race in particular) and sports have collided will be examined for its impact on the relationship between race and sports. The association of race, religion, and sports is not accidental. The chapter demonstrates that all three are co-constitutive of and dependent on each other for their meaning at these chosen junctures in American sports history.

Uncontrollable Blackness

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas J. Flowe
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Lawful Conduct ◽  
The Relationship

Early twentieth-century African American men in northern urban centers like New York faced economic isolation, segregation, a biased criminal justice system, and overt racial attacks by police and citizens. In this book, Douglas J. Flowe interrogates the meaning of crime and violence in the lives of these men, whose lawful conduct itself was often surveilled and criminalized, by focusing on what their actions and behaviors represented to them. He narrates the stories of men who sought profits in underground markets, protected themselves when law enforcement failed to do so, and exerted control over public, commercial, and domestic spaces through force in a city that denied their claims to citizenship and manhood. Flowe furthermore traces how the features of urban Jim Crow and the efforts of civic and progressive leaders to restrict their autonomy ultimately produced the circumstances under which illegality became a form of resistance.Drawing from voluminous prison and arrest records, trial transcripts, personal letters and documents, and investigative reports, Flowe opens up new ways of understanding the black struggle for freedom in the twentieth century. By uncovering the relationship between the fight for civil rights, black constructions of masculinity, and lawlessness, he offers a stirring account of how working-class black men employed extralegal methods to address racial injustice.

An Entire World in Motion

2021 ◽  
pp. 53-90
Author(s):  
Erin R. Pineda
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Entire World

This chapter develops an alternative framework for understanding the civil disobedience of civil rights activists: as a decolonizing praxis that linked their dissent to that of anticolonial activists and tied the context of Jim Crow to global white supremacy. If the constitutional, democratic state formed the normative horizon for liberal understandings of civil disobedience, activists’ horizon was defined by processes of imaginative transit—the process of thinking and traveling across boundaries and disparate contexts, through which activists in motion constructed civil disobedience as a means of transforming worldwide structures of racist imperialism, colonial rule, apartheid, and Jim Crow. Between 1920 and 1960, African American, Indian, South African, and Ghanaian activists proposed, debated, and wielded nonviolent direct action as a means of self-liberation from white supremacy’s structures of fear and violence, and way of disrupting and transforming the practices that held those structures in place.

“Herself but Black”: Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, and the “Near Enemy” of Civil Rights

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-180
Author(s):  
Rachel Watson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Flannery O'connor ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
Jim Crow South

Rachel Watson takes up O’Connor’s role as a political thinker and writer by examining issues of racial hierarchy in O’Connor’s fiction and putting her work in conversation with that of Richard Wright. Watson notes that although O’Connor invokes the “manners” of the Jim Crow South, she does not offer a sentimental or abject form of pity for her characters, regardless of their race. It is in this pity, so often connected with Cold War totalitarianism, that Watson finds a connection between the work of Flannery O’Connor and Richard Wright. This chapter shows the commonality between two authors whose work had previously seemed disparate, as Watson highlights their mutual fear of a racial and economic hegemony. 

scholarly journals Alive American History: Сivil War of Monuments

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 12-29
Author(s):  
N. M. TRAVKINA
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American History ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Legal Barriers ◽  
The U.S

The article analyzes the origins and causes of public resistance in the United States about the issue of preservation of monuments,  symbolizing the period of the Confederacy in the U.S. South during the Civil war (1861-1865). Indicates that the main factor in  the confrontation was a victory in the presidential elections of 2016  of D.Trump, who in the minds of his Democratic Party supporters is  associated with racial ideas of “white supremacy”. With the coming  to power of D. Trump in the U.S. relatively powerful movement emerged, mainly in the southern States for the  demolition and dismantling of Confederate monuments, which  symbolize, in the opinion of left-liberal forces, the ideas and theories  of superior and inferior races, who were believed to be sunk into  oblivion after the adoption in the 1960-s of civil rights laws.  Currently in the U.S. there are more than 1.5 thousand artifacts  relating to or symbolizing the period of the Confederacy and glorify  its military leaders. The specific histories of the dismantling of  monuments of the Confederation in various States are outlined.  However are considered and the counteractions of the opponents of  dismantling the legacy of the Confederacy are considered, which  created in the recent years the strong legal barriers for the  protection of Confederate monuments under the pretext of  protecting the cultural heritage of past historical periods. It is stated  that in retrospect, the current wave of dismantling of the  Confederate monument is to some extent а justified step because for  the first 30 years of the twentieth century these monuments  were erected as political symbols of the segregation-racist regime of  apartheid established in 26 U.S. States after the adoption of the so- called laws of “Jim Crow” at the turn of XIX-XX centuries. In the  conclusion it is stated that under the President D. Trump the severity  of the problem of the removal/preservation of Confederate  monuments and other monuments of the past American history will  remain in the foreseeable future.

scholarly journals Carson McCullers and Lillian Smith : The Intersections of Gender and Race in the Jim Crow South

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
Constante González Groba
Keyword(s):  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Southern Women ◽  
Carson Mccullers ◽  
Racial Categorization ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Lillian Smith ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Jim Crow South

Carson McCullers and Lillian Smith openly rejected a false conception of loyalty to fantasies like southern tradition or white supremacy, a loyalty that veiled a persistent lack of self-analysis. They exposed the cracks in the South’s pretended “unity” and homogeneity and criticized the self-destructive resistance to acknowledge that, as a socially constructed category, race is linked to relations of power and anticipated the instability of racial categorization that would be underscored by historical and scientific research later in their century. These two southern women writers opposed the insistence of their culture on racial purity as vehemently as its demands for rigid sexual definition and its suppression of any deviant form of sexuality. The characters in their fiction are victims of a dichotomic culture that resists the acknowledgement that black and white have always been as inextricably linked as male and female. In Killers of the Dream and Strange Fruit, Lillian Smith showed the interactions of racial and sexual segregation, which she saw as parallel emblems of the South’s cultural schizophrenia. She was one of the first to detect the psychosexual damage inflicted on southern women by the racial discourse, and established a most interesting parallel between the segregated parts of the female body and the segregated spaces of any southern locality. Like any system of differentiation, segregation shapes those it privileges as well as those it oppresses. Excluded from the white parameters of virtue and even from the condition of womanhood, the black woman’s body became the sexual prey of the white man who could not demand sexual satisfaction from his “pure” wife. The culture of segregation privileged the white woman but it also made her powerless; the very conventions which “protected” her deprived her of contact with physicality and locked her into bodilessness.

Epilogue

2014 ◽  
pp. 115-118
Author(s):  
Heather Andrea Williams
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
First Century ◽  
The North ◽  
The Right

Despite the abolition of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, notions of black inferiority and white supremacy still persisted in both the North and the South. The ‘Epilogue’ outlines the profound struggles by African Americans to make their freedom meaningful. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to African Americans and promised equal protection under the law and, in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment gave black men the right to vote. The modern civil rights movement of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s began to impact on the discriminatory Jim Crow laws and practices, but for many African Americans, struggles for equality, justice, and fairness continue into the twenty-first century.

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