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.

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.

Fabricating black modernity: Fashion and African American womanhood during the first great migration

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-260
Author(s):  
Einav Rabinovitch-Fox
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
The North ◽  
American Society ◽  
Racial Progress

The early twentieth century was a time of great influx in America. Shifting demographics in the 1910s and 1920s, most notably the migration of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to the urban centres of the North, opened economic and leisure possibilities that provided new spaces to define black modernity and its role in shaping American identity. Debates over black women’s bodies, clothing, hair, and general appearance stood at the centre of public attention and political discourse over gender and race equality, forming a realm where African Americans could challenge white racist stereotypes regarding black femininity and beauty, as well as a means through which they could claim new freedoms and achieve economic mobility. Middle-class reformers, young black migrants, as well as new role models such as female performers and blues singers, all used dress and appearance to redefine notions of beauty, respectability and freedom on their own terms. For these women, fashions became intertwined with questions of racial progress and inclusion in American society, offering a way to lay claims for equal citizenship that moved beyond individual expressions and preferences. This article highlights the place of fashion as a critical political realm for African Americans, who were often barred from access to formal routes of power in the era of Jim Crow. Shifting the perspective beyond official forms of civil rights activism, it argues that fashion enabled black women to carve new positions of power from which they could actively participate in gender and racial politics, demanding their equal place in American society.

Recasting the Movement and Reframing the Law in Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (01) ◽  
pp. 243-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
National Association ◽  
Department Of Justice ◽  
Colored People ◽  
The North ◽  
Civil Rights Division ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

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.

Race and Representation in the United States: the Constitutional Validity of Majority–Minority Congressional Districts

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-507
Author(s):  
ROBERT J. McKEEVER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Equal Protection Clause ◽  
Congressional Districts ◽  
Constitutional Principle ◽  
Racial Lines

In an effort to maximize the representation of African Americans and Hispanics in the United States House of Representatives, many state legislatures have consciously sought to create so-called “majority–minority” congressional districts. This involves carving out districts in which African Americans or Hispanics constitute more than 50 per cent of the voting age population. The expectation is that such districts will elect a minority member of the House, which in turn will lead to a Congress that is more sensitive and responsive to the needs and interests of America's two largest ethnic minorities. Indeed, this expectation has become an article of faith for the mainstream civil rights movement and its white sympathizers.However, like other forms of affirmative action, majority–minority districting sits rather uncomfortably alongside the Constitutional principle of race-neutrality. In a series of recent cases, the United States Supreme Court has declared that, by subordinating traditional districting principles to the overriding need to draw boundaries along racial lines, states have violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Mortality, Incarceration, and African American Disenfranchisement in the Contemporary United States

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cottrell ◽  
Michael C. Herron ◽  
Javier M. Rodriguez ◽  
Daniel A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Right

On account of poor living conditions, African Americans in the United States experience disproportionately high rates of mortality and incarceration compared with Whites. This has profoundly diminished the number of voting-eligible African Americans in the country, costing, as of 2010, approximately 3.9 million African American men and women the right to vote and amounting to a national African American disenfranchisement rate of 13.2%. Although many disenfranchised African Americans have been stripped of voting rights by laws targeting felons and ex-felons, the majority are literally “missing” from their communities due to premature death and incarceration. Leveraging variation in gender ratios across the United States, we show that missing African Americans are concentrated in the country’s Southeast and that African American disenfranchisement rates in some legislative districts lie between 20% and 40%. Despite the many successes of the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights movement, high levels of African American disenfranchisement remain a continuing feature of the American polity.

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.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Laura Warren Hill
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
New York State ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
York State ◽  
The North ◽  
North And South

This chapter provides a background to the story of transformations brought by the rebellion of the Black community that happened first in Harlem, New York and then in Rochester on July 4, 1964. It points out that the rebellions in Rochester and Harlem shared a common spark: police brutality and misconduct. It also explains how the twin rebellions in New York State in 1964 were a foretaste of the Southern-based civil rights movement, which gave way to a different kind of Black political mobilization that centered largely in the urban North. The chapter reviews the consequences of the civil rights movement that dismantled Jim Crow as a system of legalized racism in the North and South. It emphasizes that the new Black political mobilization, which built on the energy arising from the rebellions and fashioning theories of a Black political economy, sought to address the structures of socioeconomic marginalization and impoverishment that survived the legal dismantling of Jim Crow.

Screening the Twenty-First-Century South

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-190
Author(s):  
Erich Nunn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Southern Literature ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
First Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Southern Culture ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Twenty First Century

Our understandings of early moments of southern literature and culture share some common frameworks. Representations (including self-representations) of the South in the nineteenth century, for example, revolve largely around plantation slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Similarly, we might think about the twentieth-century South as defined by Jim Crow segregation, the out-migration of blacks and working-class whites, and the civil rights movement and its aftermath. What are the issues, then, that structure the twenty-first-century southern imaginary? To what extent does it make sense to talk about “the South” as a unified conceptual, ideological, or geographic place? What does it mean to read, watch, listen to, study, and teach southern literature and culture in the twenty-first century? What do we mean by the terms southern and literature? What cultural forms and media are central to understanding twenty-first-century southern culture? What is the utility of the literary? How do southern literature and culture relate to the nation as a whole?

Teaching Brown: Reflections on Pedagogical Challenges and Opportunities: Introduction

2004 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Dougherty
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
List Type ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
The North ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities

These first-person reflective essays were written from our perspectives as educators who find it immensely rewarding, yet incredibly challenging, to teach about Brown vs Board of Education. Rarely do we address an issue in our classroom that is wrapped up in so many layers of racial meaning, people's lived experiences, ongoing policy debates, and historical mythology. Teaching Brown forces many of us to confront a number of dilemmas that have no easy answers: •How do we “keep the struggle alive” in our students' hearts and minds while simultaneously teaching them to think like historians, who do not uncritically accept simplistic or celebratory accounts of the civil rights movement?•How do we bridge the gap between two diverging bodies of historical scholarship: one that praises desegregation activists who courageously challenged White supremacy and another that celebrates the good qualities of Black segregated schools?•How can we help our students see connections between historical struggles and contemporary debates over race, education, and power without slipping into presentism, the unfortunate tendency to perceive the past solely through present-day lenses?•Or how do we connect any of this academic literature to everyday people's lived experiences in the communities around us, whether we teach in the South, the North, or the West?

Voices of Civil Rights Lawyers

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Deep South ◽  
The North ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Face ◽  
Big Events

Twenty-six contributors tell their stories about being civil rights lawyers in the Deep South. A thematic structure is employed to reflect these stories. Ten of the stories describe how children of the South and children of the North chose to become civil rights lawyers. The context of civil rights lawyering is explored from big events such as the 1965 Selma march to the everyday experiences of mass meetings and the recurring racism of Neshoba County. The misadventures of civil rights lawyers are described from arrests, to beatings, to a black lawyer being called by a racial epithet in court by a judge. The development of civil rights lawyer groups—the Legal Defense Fund, the LCDC (Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee), and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law—were crucial to the success of the civil rights movement. Voting rights dramatically spurred by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were crucial to the newly emerging status of blacks. The public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 broke barriers in hotels and eating places. School desegregation litigation changed the face of public schools forever. Employment discrimination litigation dramatically changed the workplace. The success of civil rights litigation led to using the federal courts to reform prisons and facilities for the mentally ill. Two authors discuss the contemporary language of race and the status of white supremacy.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document