scholarly journals The Making of a Movement: An Intergenerational Mobilization Model of the Nonviolent Nashville Civil Rights Movement

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Cornfield ◽  
Jonathan S. Coley ◽  
Larry W. Isaac ◽  
Dennis C. Dickerson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Local Movement ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Movement Mobilization ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Bridge Building ◽  
And Training

The 1960s-era, Nashville nonviolent civil rights movement—with its iconic lunch counter sit-ins—was not only an exemplary local movement that dismantled Jim Crow in downtown public accommodations. It was by design the chief vehicle for the intergenerational mentoring and training of activists that led to a dialogical diffusion of nonviolence praxis throughout the Southern civil rights movement of this period. In this article, we empirically derive from oral-history interviews with activists and archival sources a new “intergenerational model of movement mobilization” and assess its contextual and bridge-leading sustaining factors. After reviewing the literatures on dialogical diffusion and bridge building in social movements, we describe the model and its sustaining conditions—historical, demographic, and spatial conditions—and conclude by presenting a research agenda on the sustainability and generalizability of the Nashville model.

scholarly journals Taking a Stance: Teacher Researchers’ Historical and Political Positioning

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 20-25
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Currin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Education Reform ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Teacher Research ◽  
Teacher Educators ◽  
Media Attention ◽  
Teacher Researchers ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Oral History Interviews

With teacher walkouts and other forms of protest on the rise, EdD programs are beginning to frame practitioner-scholars’ work as activism. The purpose of this article is to explore and complicate that trend by interpreting data from oral history interviews with three long-term teacher researchers, alongside shifting historical scholarship on civil rights activism. Each participant cites civil rights activism as an inspiration and positions the rise of neoliberal education reform as a backlash to the 1960s that threatens the so-called teacher research movement. However, historians challenge the dominant narrative of the 1960s, highlighting behind-the-scenes conservative activism that did not garner the same media attention as liberal marches and boycotts. Consequently, while the participants’ stories offer abundant insight for practitioner-scholars as well as for the teacher educators who guide them, this article ultimately argues EdD activists should take a schoolhouse-to-statehouse approach.

The Civil Rights Movement and American Law, 1950–1969

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-198
Author(s):  
Donald G. Nieman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
White Backlash ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
American Law ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter shows that Brown v. Board of Education raised hope for fundamental change but produced few results. Massive resistance blocked school integration, and only the emergence of black-led organizations and massive grass-roots protests forced Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to support civil rights legislation and Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act. The federal bureaucracy and courts aggressively enforced these laws to topple Jim Crow, bring African Americans into the political process, and open economic opportunities. Although change was dramatic, it bypassed many poor blacks, including those living in northern cities. As the 1960s ended, their anger sparked urban uprisings that shattered the illusion of progress and generated a white backlash.

Redemptive Love, Vigilante Terror, and Rebellion

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerry Pimblott
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Reconciliation ◽  
Local Branch ◽  
White Resistance ◽  
Local Movement ◽  
Urban Rebellion ◽  
Religiously Based ◽  
Class Youth

Chapter Two chronicles the key battles in Cairo’s Civil Rights Movement with a particular focus on how activists working with the local branch of the NAACP and SNCC mobilized Black congregations behind a powerful local movement aimed at upending the edifice of Jim Crow. By adopting a religious conception of civil rights liberalism rooted in Black Christian discourses of racial reconciliation and nonviolence, local activists were able to recruit intergenerational and cross-class support. However, this religiously based alliance ultimately fractured under the weight of white resistance and the growing disillusionment of Cairo’s Black working-class youth whose frustrations culminated in the urban rebellion of 1967.

From Reconciliation to Revolution

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Cline
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Student Interracial Ministry ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Student Christian Movement ◽  
Church Structures

The Student Interracial Ministry (SIM) was a seminary-based, nationally influential Protestant civil rights organization that drew on the Social Gospel and Student Christian Movement traditions to simultaneously dismantle Jim Crow and advance Prorestant mainline churches’ approach to race. Entirely student-led and always ecumenical in scope, SIM began in 1960 with the tactic of placing black assistant pastors in white churches and whites in black churches with the goal of achieving racial reconciliation. In its later years, before it disbanded in mid-1968, SIM moved away from church structures, engaging directly in political and economic movements, inner-city ministry and development projects, and college and seminary teaching. In each of these areas, SIM participants attempted to live out German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's exhortation to “bring the church into the world.” From Reconciliation to Revolution demonstrates that the civil rights movement, in both its “classic” phase from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s and its longer phase stretching over most of the twentieth century, was imbued with religious faith and its expression. It treats the classic phase of the civil rights movement as one manifestation of a theme of Liberal Protestant interracial reform that runs through the century, illustrating that liberal religious activists of the 1960s drew on a tradition of Protestant interracial reform, building on and sometimes reinventing the work of their progenitors earlier in the century to apply their understanding of the Gospel’s imperative to heal the injustices of the modern world.

Race and Gender

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Temin
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Latino Immigrants ◽  
Dual Economy ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S

Racism, or racecraft, began when African slaves first were brought to America. Slaves were not included in “all men” who were created equal, and the Civil War did not make African Americans equal citizens. Jim Crow laws and actions prevented them from voting and getting a decent education until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. The backlash from this movement led to a dual economy. Women also were not full citizens until the 20th century, and their right to full equality is still being contested. Latino immigrants more recently have entered racecraft on a par with blacks, as in pejorative statements about black and brown people.

Blue Texas

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Krochmal
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Labor Rights ◽  
Liberal Tradition ◽  
Community Activists ◽  
Racial Lines ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Many ◽  
Oral History Interviews

Beginning in the 1930s, Max Krochmal tells the story of the decades-long struggle for democracy in Texas, when African American, Mexican American, and white labor and community activists gradually came together to empower the state’s marginalized minorities. At the ballot box and in the streets, these diverse activists demanded not only integration but economic justice, labor rights, and real political power for all. Their efforts gave rise to the Democratic Coalition of the 1960s, a militant, multiracial alliance that would take on and eventually overthrow both Jim Crow and Juan Crow. Using rare archival sources and original oral history interviews, Krochmal reveals the often-overlooked democratic foundations and liberal tradition of one of our nation’s most conservative states. Blue Texas remembers the many forgotten activists who, by crossing racial lines and building coalitions, democratized their cities and state to a degree that would have been unimaginable just a decade earlier--and it shows why their story still matters today.

Not as It Is Written

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
International Exhibition ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Made In

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.

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.

Federal Policy and the Racial Integration of Southern Industry, 1961–1980

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Federal Intervention

In the last two decades, one of the central debates of civil rights historiography has concerned the role that the federal government played in securing the gains of the civil rights era. Historians have often been critical of the federal government's inaction, pointing out that it was only pressure from the civil rights movement itself that prompted federal action against Jim Crow. Other scholars have studied the civil rights record of the federal government by analyzing a single issue during several administrations. In this vein, there have been studies of the federal government's involvement in areas as diverse as black voting rights and racial violence against civil rights workers. These studies have both recognized the importance of federal intervention and have also been critical of the federal government's belated and half-hearted endorsement of civil rights.

West of Jim Crow

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn M. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
White Schools ◽  
Black Bodies

This book follows California’s history of segregation from statehood to the beginning of the long civil rights movement, arguing that the state innovated methods to control and contain African Americans and other people of color. While celebrated in popular discourse for its forward-thinking culture, politics, and science, California also pioneered new ways to keep citizenship white. Schools, streetcars, restaurants, theaters, parks, beaches, and pools were places of contestation where the presence of black bodies elicited forceful responses from segregationists. Black Californians employed innovative measures to dismantle segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they borrowed some tactics from race rebels in the South, others they improvised. West of Jim Crow uses California to highlight the significance of African American resistance to racial restrictions in places often deemed marginal to mainstream civil rights histories. Examining segregation in the state sheds light on the primacy of gender and sexuality in the minds of segregationists and the significance of black women, black bodies, and racial science, in the years preceding the modern civil rights struggle. California has much to teach us about the lives of African Americans who crossed the color line and the variety of tactics and strategies employed by freedom fighters across the United States.

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