Brian C. Odom; Stephen P. Waring (Editors). NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement. xi + 266 pp., index. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2019. $85 (cloth); ISBN 9780813066202.

Isis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 112 (3) ◽  
pp. 632-634
Author(s):  
Neil M. Maher
Author(s):  
John Lowney

There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Through inquiry into influential Marxist, Black Atlantic, and African diasporic studies of jazz literature and jazz history, the introduction explains how Jazz Internationalism is distinguished by its historical scope and attention to multiple genres of jazz literature. This introduction outlines not only a history of Afro-modernist jazz literature that corresponds with the Long Civil Rights Movement, it also underscores the intertextuality of jazz literature as it evolves through several generations of black music and writing. While the primary purpose of Jazz Internationalism is not one of recovering obscure writers or texts, it does make the case for a more expansive understanding of jazz writing for both African American literary history and African diasporic studies more generally.


Author(s):  
David Miguel Molina ◽  
P. J. Blount

In chapter 3, Molina and Blount offer a contextualization of NASA’s interlocutory role throughout the long civil rights movement by mobilizing these three themes to analyze a series of archival and cultural artifacts. The authors first analyze the rhetoric deployed by the Poor People Campaign’s various mobilizations to show that the American space program was viewed with deep skepticism by the African American community and particularly within the context of ongoing struggles for black freedom. Second, they discuss the “distance” between the tropes of spatial disenfranchisement represented in the civil rights movement and the Moon missions to show how space exploration was portrayed as an acceleration of the marginalization of black spaces.


2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-62
Author(s):  
Candace Cunningham

When the South Carolina legislature created the anti-NAACP oath in 1956, teachers across the state lost their positions. But it was the dismissal of twenty-one teachers at the Elloree Training School that captured the attention of the NAACP and Black media outlets. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, South Carolina's Black and White communities went head-to-head in the battle over White supremacy versus expanded civil rights. The desegregation movement in 1955 and 1956 placed Black teachers’ activism in the spotlight—activism that mirrored what was happening in their community. This largely unknown episode of civil rights activism demonstrates that Black teachers were willing to serve not only as behind-the-scenes supporters in the equal education struggle but as frontline activists. Furthermore, it shows that South Carolina was an integral site of the long civil rights movement.


NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement addresses the role/relationship of NASA and the Apollo program to the “long” civil rights movement in, particularly but not limited to, the Deep South (Huntsville, Florida, Houston, Mississippi, and New Orleans) and identifies the impact of NASA on the movement and the experiences of those who were directly affected by the space program and the impact of the movement on NASA’s development during the Cold War.


2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (01) ◽  
pp. 243-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein

Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007) advances the historiographical idea that a long civil rights movement, beginning well before the mid‐1950s, had a robust and innovative legal dimension. Her study of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) itself, demonstrates that lawyers in those organizations took guidance from many working‐class clients to successfully deploy a conception of civil rights rooted on the farm and in the factory to challenge the economic and social edifice of Jim Crow, in the North as well as the South.


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