THE TRIUMPH OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 253-263
Author(s):  
EDWARD J. BLUM

In the middle of the 1960s, Harold Cruse was angry with his fellow “Negro intellectuals.” “The Negro movement is at an impasse,” he wrote in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, “precisely because it lacks a real functional corps of intellectuals able to confront and deal perceptively with American realities on a level that social conditions demand.” When his book was published in 1967, American race relations seemed to be vectoring toward another nadir. Urban unrest, declining job opportunities for African Americans, the escalating war in Vietnam, and the civil rights movements’ divide over “Black Power” were only parts of the “crisis” Cruse identified. To him, black intellectuals had failed to wrestle with the particularities of racism in the United States and thus had failed to offer meaningful solutions beyond what he deemed to be the dead-end roads of integration and black nationalism.

Author(s):  
Natsu Taylor Saito

In the 1960s, global decolonization and the civil rights movement inspired hope for structural change in the United States, but more than fifty years later, racial disparities in income and wealth, education, employment, health, housing, and incarceration remain entrenched. In addition, we have seen a resurgence of overt White supremacy following the election of President Trump. This chapter considers the potential of movements like Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock water protectors in light of the experiences of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and other efforts at community empowerment in the “long sixties.”


Author(s):  
Martha Minow

Usually left out of discussions of school desegregation, the historic treatments of American Indians and Native Hawai’ians in the development of schooling in the United States was a corollary of conquest and colonialism. As late as the 1950s, forced assimilation and eradication of indigenous cultures pervaded what was considered the “education” of students in these groups. The social, political, and legal civil rights initiatives surrounding Brown helped to inspire a rights consciousness among Indian and Native Hawai’ian reformers and activists, who embraced the ideal of equal opportunity while reclaiming cultural traditions. Between the 1960s and 2007, complex fights over ethnic classification, separation, integration, and self-determination emerged for both American Indians and Native Hawai’ians. Their struggles, crucial in themselves, also bring to the fore a challenging underlying problem: are distinct individuals or groups the proper unit of analysis and protection in the pursuit of equality? The centrality of the individual to law and culture in the United States tends to mute this question. Yet in this country as well as elsewhere, equal treatment or equal opportunity has two faces: promoting individual development and liberty, regardless of race, culture, religion, gender, or other group-based characteristic, and protection for groups that afford their members meaning and identity. Nowhere is the tension between these two alternatives more apparent than in schooling, which involves socialization of each new generation in the values and expectations of their elders. Will that socialization direct each individual to a common world focused on the academic and social mobility of distinct individuals or will it inculcate traditions and values associated with particular groups? Even in the United States, devoted to inclusive individualism, the Supreme Court rejected a statute requiring students to attend schools run by the government and created exemptions from compulsory school fines when they burdened a group’s practices and hopes for their children. In Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the Court respected the rights of parents to select private schooling in order to inculcate a religious identity or other “additional obligations.”


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Schrijver

Lara Schrijver examines the work of Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas as intellectual legacy of the 1970s for architecture today. Particularly in the United States, this period focused on the autonomy of architecture as a correction to the social orientation of the 1960s. Yet, these two architects pioneered a more situated autonomy, initiating an intellectual discourse on architecture that was inherently design-based. Their work provides room for interpreting social conditions and disciplinary formal developments, thus constructing a `plausible' relationship between the two that allows the life within to flourish and adapt. In doing so, they provide a foundation for recalibrating architecture today.


Author(s):  
Risa L. Goluboff ◽  
Adam Sorensen

The crime of vagrancy has deep historical roots in American law and legal culture. Originating in 16th-century England, vagrancy laws came to the New World with the colonists and soon proliferated throughout the British colonies and, later, the United States. Vagrancy laws took myriad forms, generally making it a crime to be poor, idle, dissolute, immoral, drunk, lewd, or suspicious. Vagrancy laws often included prohibitions on loitering—wandering around without any apparent lawful purpose—though some jurisdictions criminalized loitering separately. Taken together, vaguely worded vagrancy, loitering, and suspicious persons laws targeted objectionable “out of place” people rather than any particular conduct. They served as a ubiquitous tool for maintaining hierarchy and order in American society. Their application changed alongside perceived threats to the social fabric, at different times and places targeting the unemployed, labor activists, radical orators, cultural and sexual nonconformists, racial and religious minorities, civil rights protesters, and the poor. By the mid-20th century, vagrancy laws served as the basis for hundreds of thousands of arrests every year. But over the course of just two decades, the crime of vagrancy, virtually unquestioned for four hundred years, unraveled. Profound social upheaval in the 1960s produced a concerted effort against the vagrancy regime, and in 1972, the US Supreme Court invalidated the laws. Local authorities have spent the years since looking for alternatives to the many functions vagrancy laws once served.


Author(s):  
Stephanie Hinnershitz

After World War II and through the 1960s, Asian Americans began a transformative process, from being the “yellow peril” to becoming the model minority, and Asian Americans in the South experienced, to some degree, the same transformation. The war and its mottos of fighting for freedom and democracy at home and abroad affected the way Americans viewed their own hypocrisy toward minorities in the United States. African Americans were the largest minority group to use the aims of the war to demand attention to their plight with Jim Crow, prompting the growth of a nationwide civil rights movement, but Americans also came to view the century-old forms of legal discrimination against Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in a new light. Not only did Congress repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 (making it legal for some Chinese to naturalize and allowing a small number of Chinese immigrants to enter the United States), but Filipino Americans and Indian Americans received similar treatment during and after World War II. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act (or the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952), although designed to protect American security during the early Cold War by prohibiting and deporting subversive aliens, also made it possible for Asian immigrants of all ethnicities to become American citizens (while the number of Asians admitted to the United States did not drastically increase). Americans also viewed the ability of Japanese Americans to overcome the massive civil rights violations of wartime imprisonment and achieve economic and educational success as a model for all minorities to follow. Asian Americans came through the fires of World War II and proved that they were loyal Americans and deserving of equal treatment and respect, and while more subtle and sometimes not so subtle forms of racism and discrimination ...


2019 ◽  
pp. 346-353
Author(s):  
David Sorkin

This chapter looks at how the Great Migration from eastern Europe made the United States a center of world Jewry. The Nazis' murder of most of European Jewry magnified that status. While the migrants and their children were citizens, their rights were restricted. Thus, in the period after World War II, American Jewry's civil defense organizations engaged in a concerted emancipation campaign. Jews collaborated with African Americans, Catholics, and other minorities to end inequality. That campaign succeeded: from the 1940s to the 1960s, state and federal civil rights laws, and court rulings prohibiting discrimination, dismantled the structure of inequality. Those events constituted American Jews' second emancipation: it positioned the immigrant's children and grandchildren to realize the promise of American equality.


Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy

This book has explored how network television mobilized a certain type of image that, when appropriately paired with figures of whiteness, was presumed to make whites less anxious about social change. It has highlighted a common link in these representations of a dignified blackness intertwined with an accommodating and welcoming whiteness. It has considered a number of television shows, including East Side/West Side and Good Times, to emphasize the propensity of networks to tell narratives relating to “black and white together,” the “worthy black victim,” and the aspirational “civil rights subject.” This epilogue examines television news coverage of Barack Obama's historic election as president of the United States. It suggests that networks were returning to the familiar discourse about the civil rights movements during the 1960s as they packaged stories that celebrated black and white voters coming together to put a biracial black man into the White House, to make Americans feel good about their country and its race relations.


2020 ◽  
pp. 95-112
Author(s):  
Harris Beider ◽  
Kusminder Chahal

This chapter examines the possibilities of building cross-racial coalitions between the white working class and communities of color as the United States transitions from majority white to a minority white country. Fifty years after the campaign for civil rights and the passage of landmark legislation during the 1960s, there is little evidence of formal and sustainable cross-racial coalition building at the grassroots or grasstops level between the white working class and communities of color. White working-class communities wanted to engage with communities of color but did not have the means of engaging across racial boundaries beyond a superficial everyday level. Discussions between different communities were “soft-wired” and based on fleeting exchanges in informal spaces rather than becoming “hard-wired” in a strategic plan that can create a framework for coalition building. Stakeholders were largely ambivalent and occasionally hostile toward engaging with white working-class communities to build effective cross-racial alliances. Similar to white working-class communities in relation to communities of color, stakeholders found it challenging to engage with these groups.


Author(s):  
Lindsey Patterson

Contrary to the traditional notion that disability rights in the United States were the by-product of the tumultuous 1960s, the disability rights movement actually dates back to the late nineteenth century. Over the years, ordinary citizens and local, national, and international organizations combined in promoting the citizenship rights of disabled people. Excluded from most aspects of public life, people with disabilities championed self-determination through deinstitutionalization, the independent living movement, and access to education, employment, and public transportation. This examination of local, state, and national efforts by people with disabilities to achieve full participation in civic life will help expand our understanding of civil rights movements in modern U.S. history.


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