The Civil Rights Movement in the Urban South

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudrena N. Harold
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Federal Spending ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
Urban South ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Economic Boycotts

The civil rights movement in the urban South transformed the political, economic, and cultural landscape of post–World War II America. Between 1955 and 1968, African Americans and their white allies relied on nonviolent direct action, political lobbying, litigation, and economic boycotts to dismantle the Jim Crow system. Not all but many of the movement’s most decisive political battles occurred in the cities of Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama; Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee; Greensboro and Durham, North Carolina; and Atlanta, Georgia. In these and other urban centers, civil rights activists launched full-throttled campaigns against white supremacy, economic exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence against African Americans. Their fight for racial justice coincided with monumental changes in the urban South as the upsurge in federal spending in the region created unprecedented levels of economic prosperity in the newly forged “Sunbelt.” A dynamic and multifaceted movement that encompassed a wide range of political organizations and perspectives, the black freedom struggle proved successful in dismantling legal segregation. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 expanded black southerners’ economic, political, and educational opportunities. And yet, many African Americans continued to struggle as they confronted not just the long-term effects of racial discrimination and exclusion but also the new challenges engendered by deindustrialization and urban renewal as well as entrenched patterns of racial segregation in the public-school system.

Forced Confessions

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-78
Author(s):  
Silvan Niedermeier
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
High Profile ◽  
White Allies ◽  
Criminal Suspects ◽  
Bureaucratic State ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

This chapter studies two high-profile cases in which police officers used torture to extract confessions from black criminal suspects. In these cases, African Americans, aided by prominent white allies and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), appealed to the courts to protest acts of torture, contest forced confessions, and challenge legal discrimination. The chapter places these protests within the context of the “long Civil Rights movement” to illuminate the tensions between the demands of white supremacy and the demands of a “color-blind” law characteristic of the modern bureaucratic state.

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.

Race Over Party

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
The Face

In late nineteenth-century Boston, battles over black party loyalty were fights over the place of African Americans in the post–Civil War nation. In his fresh in-depth study of black partisanship and politics, Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood demonstrates that party politics became the terrain upon which black Bostonians tested the promise of equality in America’s democracy. Most African Americans remained loyal Republicans, but Race Over Party highlights the actions and aspirations of a cadre of those who argued that the GOP took black votes for granted and offered little meaningful reward for black support. These activists branded themselves “independents,” forging new alliances and advocating support of whichever candidate would support black freedom regardless of party. By the end of the century, however, it became clear that partisan politics offered little hope for the protection of black rights and lives in the face of white supremacy and racial violence. Even so, Bergeson-Lockwood shows how black Bostonians’ faith in self-reliance, political autonomy, and dedicated organizing inspired future generations of activists who would carry these legacies into the foundation of the twentieth-century civil rights movement.

Women’s Activism in the Modern Movement for Black Liberation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aisha A. Upton ◽  
Joyce M. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Modern Movement

This chapter examines women’s activism in the modern movement for Black liberation. It examines women’s roles across three phases of mobilization. Starting with an exploration of women’s participation in the direct action phase of the U.S. civil rights movement (1954–1966), the chapter discusses the key roles that women played in the fight for legal equality for African Americans. Next it examines women’s central role in the Black Power movement of 1966–1974. The authors argue that Black women found new roles in new struggles during this period. The chapter ends with a look at the rise of radical Black feminism between 1974 and 1980, examining the codification of intersectional politics and discussing the continuation of issues of race, privilege, and diversity in contemporary feminism.

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.

Racial Realities

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Natsu Taylor Saito
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Structural Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Empowerment ◽  
American Indian Movement ◽  
The 1960S

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.”

A Changing Workforce

2020 ◽  
pp. 210-236
Author(s):  
Jennifer A. Delton
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
National Association ◽  
Historically White ◽  
Right To Work ◽  
Workplace Rights ◽  
National Association Of Manufacturers

This chapter examines the overlap between African Americans' demands for jobs and conservatives' push for “right to work” laws. While compulsory union dues were very different from unions' exclusion of blacks, both movements targeted historically white unions and shared a language of workplace “rights.” Conservative “right to work” activists adopted the tactics of the civil rights movement and aligned themselves with blacks against exclusionary unions. Although this strategy failed to attract African Americans, it called attention to unions' historic and ongoing racism in a way that eventually divided the labor–liberal coalition. This dynamic is key to understanding the National Association of Manufacturers' complicated support for civil rights, equal opportunity, and affirmative action.

Fury in the “Promised Land”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Popular Narrative ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Willingness To Use

This chapter examines the development of comic rage after the civil rights movement. These works push back against the popular narrative of America’s colorblindness and that the 1980s initiated a period in which racism had ceased to exist. As part of a new artistic wave known as the New Black Aesthetic, these younger writers used their perspectives as the first post-integration generation to chronicle the new challenges facing African Americans. The unprecedented willingness to use humor as a central element in their work created a perfect site for comic rage to flourish and expand. The works that emerge focus on how cultural mulattoes—as many refer to the post-integration generation—attempt to achieve equality in a country attempting to assimilate them and erase the distinctiveness of their cultural traditions and identities.

From Absence to Flight

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Black Power Movement

This chapter explores radicalization of comic rage in Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada. Emerging in the middle of the transition from the integrationist period of the civil rights movement to the nationalism of the Black Power movement, both works openly challenge fundamental concepts about race. In addition to targeting fundamental assumptions of Western superiority, these works also question simplistic counter-representations that African Americans present to combat racist stereotypes. Using forms increasingly important in African American literature, like drama and neo-slave narratives, these works enact comic rage as way to depict unique and powerful forms of resistance.

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