Sid Bedingfield. Newspaper Wars: Civil Rights and White Resistance in South Carolina, 1935–1965.

2018 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1696-1697
Author(s):  
Lauren Rebecca Sklaroff
2021 ◽  
pp. 95-114
Author(s):  
Peter Irons

This chapter covers the post-Reconstruction period and the Supreme Court’s rejection of laws to protect Blacks’ use of “public accommodations” on an equal basis with Whites, and the Court’s later upholding of Jim Crow laws that required segregation of Blacks and Whites. Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875, barring discrimination against Blacks’ access to places such as restaurants, theaters, hotels, and railway coaches. Ruling in 1883 in five cases from Kansas, California, Tennessee, New York, and Missouri under the caption of Civil Rights Cases, the Court struck down the “public accommodations” provision, holding that “private” businesses could not be regulated without a showing of “state action” in their operation. This ruling drew a sharp dissent from Justice John Marshall Harlan, who argued that businesses serving the public are subject to regulation. The chapter also recounts violent White resistance to Black voting, with South Carolina senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman as leader of a White group known as Red Shirts in murdering Blacks. The chapter concludes with discussion of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1895, holding that Louisiana could provide “separate but equal” railway coaches for Blacks and Whites, over another solitary dissent by Justice Harlan, arguing the Constitution is “color-blind” and protects Blacks from state-imposed discrimination.


Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles interrogates Blackness and illustrates how it has been used as a basis to oppress, dismiss and exclude Blacks from societies and institutions in Europe, North America and South America. Employing uncharted analytical categories that tackle intriguing themes about borderless non-racial African ancestry, “traveling” identities and post-blackness, the essays provide new lenses for viewing the “Black” struggle worldwide. This approach directs the contributors’ focus to understudied locations and protagonists. In the volume, Charleston, South Carolina is more prominent than Little Rock Arkansas in the struggle to desegregate schools; Chicago occupies the space usually reserved for Atlanta or other southern city “bulwarks” of the Civil Rights Movement; diverse Africans in France and Afro-descended Chileans illustrate the many facets of negotiating belonging, long articulated by examples from the Greensboro Woolworth counter sit-in or the Montgomery Bus Boycott; unknown men in the British empire, who inverted dying confessions meant to vilify their blackness, demonstrate new dimensions in the story about race and religion, often told by examples of fiery clergy of the Black Church; and the theatres and studios of dramatists and visual artists replace the Mall in Washington DC as the stage for the performance of identities and activism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 68-97
Author(s):  
J. Russell Hawkins

Chapter 3 highlights the continued influence of segregationist theology in evangelical circles even as explicit segregationist rhetoric began losing purchase outside that sphere in the mid-1960s. The centerpieces of this chapter are parallel narratives detailing the desegregation of Wofford College and Furman University, the respective flagship institutions of the Methodist and Baptist denominations in South Carolina. In describing the battles between school administrators who sought to desegregate their institutions and the laity of the state’s two largest denominations who resisted such measures, this chapter emphasizes white evangelicals’ continued opposition to black civil rights even as the broader southern culture was forced by the federal government to acquiesce on integration in institutions of higher education. Segregationist theology remained influential for a majority of white Baptists and Methodists who voted against desegregating the church schools in the mid-1960s and who withdrew their support when the colleges integrated against these Christians’ desires.


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