The Black Freedom Struggle in the Urban North

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Sugrue
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
The North ◽  
Black Freedom

Racism in the United States has long been a national problem, not a regional phenomenon. The long and well-documented history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and racial violence in the South overshadows the persistent reality of racial discrimination, systemic segregation, and entrenched inequality north of the Mason-Dixon line. From the mid-19th century forward, African Americans and their allies mounted a series of challenges to racially separate schools, segregated public accommodations, racially divided workplaces, endemic housing segregation, and discriminatory policing. The northern civil rights movement expanded dramatically in the aftermath of the Great Migration of blacks northward and the intensification of segregation in northern hotels, restaurants, and theaters, workplaces, housing markets, and schools in the early 20th century. During the Great Depression and World War II, emboldened civil rights organizations engaged in protest, litigation, and lobbying efforts to undermine persistent racial discrimination and segregation. Their efforts resulted in legal and legislative victories against racially separate and unequal institutions, particularly workplaces and stores. But segregated housing and schools remained more impervious to change. By the 1960s, many black activists in the North grew frustrated with the pace of change, even as they succeeded in increasing black representation in elected office, in higher education, and in certain sectors of the economy. In the late 20th century, civil rights activists launched efforts to fight the ongoing problem of police brutality and the rise of the prison-industrial complex. And they pushed, mostly through the courts, for the protection of the fragile gains of the civil rights era. The black freedom struggle in the North remained incomplete in the face of ongoing segregation, persistent racism, and ongoing racial inequality in employment, education, income, and wealth.

“A White-and-Negro Environment Which Is Seldom Spotlighted”

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-118
Author(s):  
Brent M. S. Campney
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
The North ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
White Backlash ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sundown Towns ◽  
The Right

This article investigates white-black race relations in postwar urban Kansas. Focusing on seven small and mid-sized cities, it explores how white Kansans continued to maintain discrimination, segregation, and exclusion in these years, even as they yielded slowly to the demands of civil rights activists and their supporters. Specifically, it examines the means employed by whites to assert their dominance in social interactions; to discriminate in housing, employment, and commerce; and, in some cases, to defend their all-white (or nearly all-white) municipalities, the so-called sundown towns, from any black presence at all. In addition, it briefly discusses the white backlash which followed as whites turned sharply to the right on racial issues, convinced that blacks now enjoyed full equality and no longer required further concessions. In so doing, the article provides insight into the history of the black freedom struggle in a sampling of cities in a midwestern state, supplements the historiography of racism in Kansas, and opens new lines of inquiry into the historiography of the freedom struggle in the North during this period of rapid and profound transformation.

“If the March Cannot Be Here, Then Where?”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aram Goudsouzian
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Methodist Church ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
National Office ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The City

This essay examines the role of Memphis in the Meredith March against Fear, a demonstration for black freedom that moved through Mississippi in June 1966. James Meredith began his journey from Memphis and was shot by Aubrey Norvell, who hailed from a suburb of the city. In the aftermath of the shooting, Memphis hosted important events that not only determined the character and success of the march but also influenced the course of the black freedom struggle. The titans of the civil rights movement orated from the pulpits of Memphis churches and engaged in contentious debates in the rooms of the Lorraine Motel. Even as the march continued south through Mississippi, its headquarters remained at Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, which achieved James Lawson’s vision of an activist church driven by grassroots pressure and militant nonviolence. The city’s whites exhibited both hostility and accommodation toward black protesters, demonstrating both connections to and distinctions from the racial patterns of Mississippi. For the Memphis branch of the NAACP, the demonstration presented an opportunity to assert its historic strength, even as the march highlighted the complicated dynamics between local branches and the national office.

Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Greene
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
White Male ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are the names that come to mind for most Americans if asked about the civil rights or Black Power movements. Others may point to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, both of whom backed pathbreaking civil rights legislation. However, recent scholarship suggests that neither black male leaders nor white male presidents were always the most important figures in the modern struggle for black freedom. Presidents took their cues not simply from male luminaries in civil rights organizations. Rather, their legislative initiatives were largely in response to grassroots protests in which women, especially black women, were key participants. African American women played major roles in local and national organizing efforts and frequently were the majority in local chapters of groups as dissimilar as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Black Panther Party. Even familiar names like Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King have become little more than sanitized national icons, while their decades-long efforts to secure racial, economic, and gender justice remain relatively unknown. Aside from activists and scholars, even fewer of us know much, if anything, about the female allies of the black freedom struggle, including white southerners as well as other women of color. A closer look at the women who made enormous contributions to both the modern civil rights and Black Power movements sheds new light on these struggles, including the historic national victories we think we fully understand, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In short, examining women’s participation in the “long civil rights movement,” which historians increasingly date to the New Deal and World War II, calls for a redefinition of more conventional notions of leadership, protest, and politics.

Black Power and Black Theology in Cairo, Illinois

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerry L. Pimblott
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Church ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Moral Suasion ◽  
Over Time

This chapter argues that the thesis of Black Power's de-Christianization must be tested on the ground, with scholars paying attention to local struggles as they evolved over time, and in response to changing social and economic conditions. It follows the religious contours of Cairo's black freedom struggle from the 1950s to the 1970s to illustrate that while Black Power's reliance upon the black church was consistent with earlier campaigns, the United Front's theology nevertheless reflected a significant departure from the established Civil Rights credo. Whereas civil rights leaders expressed a firm belief in the redemptive power of Christian nonviolence and moral suasion to topple the walls of segregation, Cairo's Black Power advocates were less optimistic.

Hostile Heartland

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brent M. S. Campney
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
World War ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
New Research

Hostile Heartland examines racial violence—or, more aptly, racist violence—against blacks (African Americans) in the Midwest, emphasizing lynching, whipping, and violence by police (or police brutality). It also focuses on black responses, including acts of armed resistance, the development of local and regional civil rights organizations, and the work of individual activists. Within that broad framework the book considers patterns of institutionalized violence in studies of individual states, like Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas over a number of decades; it also targets specific incidents of such violence or resistance in case studies representative of changes in these patterns like the lynching of Joseph Spencer in Cairo, Illinois, in 1854 and the lynching of Luke Murray in South Point, Ohio, in 1932. Significantly, Hostile Heartland not only addresses the years from the Civil War to World War I, which are the typical focus of such studies, but also incorporates the twenty-five years that precede the Civil War and the additional twenty-five that follow World War I. It pioneers new research methodologies, as exemplified by Chapter 4’s analysis of the relations between and among racist violence, family history, and the black freedom struggle. Finally, Hostile Heartland situates its findings within the historiography more broadly.

scholarly journals Striking at the Sacred: The Violence of Prayer, 1960-1969

Open Theology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobin Miller Shearer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThis essay explores the complex relationship between public prayer and violence during ten years of the Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s and throughout the long civil rights era, activists who used the race-based, highly performative act of public prayer incited violence and drew the nation’s attention to the black freedom struggle. Study of the public prayers that led to violence further suggests that the introduction of prayer into public space acted as a conduit of moral judgment even when intended as a bridge of connection, a pattern that suggests the exercise of public prayer can be a catalyst for violence.

The Midwest in the Late Lynching Period

2019 ◽  
pp. 161-186
Author(s):  
Brent M. S. Campney
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom

This chapter uses a lynching in South Point, Ohio, in 1932 as an example of the changing nature of this type of violence during its twilight in the Midwest, a change described as “underground lynching” in the late lynching period. It sketches the contours of the lynching, white motivations, the initial black campaign for justice, and the trial. It then explores the black political and legal struggles for justice, including the roles of local and national civil rights groups like the NAACP. Next, it addresses the characteristics of underground lynching, as exemplified by the Murray lynching and similar lynchings elsewhere. Last, it considers its substantive and historiographical implications for Midwestern mob violence and the black freedom struggle.

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