The Color-Blind Challenge to Civil Rights, 1990–Present

2020 ◽  
pp. 244-290
Author(s):  
Donald G. Nieman
Keyword(s):  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Institutionalized Racism ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
Color Blind ◽  
Black President ◽  
Voter Id

Since 1990, civil rights advocates have lost ground to conservative attacks on color-conscious remedies for institutionalized racism. Insisting that the Constitution is color-blind, a conservative Supreme Court has limited affirmative action, declared a key provision of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional, limited others, and affirmed state voter ID laws that limit minority voting. Despite electing the first black president in 2008, liberals have enjoyed limited success in defending civil rights protections. They secured passage of the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1991 to reverse damaging Supreme Court decisions, renewed the Voting Rights Act in 2006, and won cases defending affirmative action. Groups like Black Lives Matter have sparked a new grass-roots activism to protest police violence and pressed for an end to mass incarceration. While their success is limited, they continue a tradition that has shaped the nation since its inception.

Color-Blind Conservatism and the Great White Switch

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sid Bedingfield
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
New Rhetoric ◽  
Political Clout ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Color Blind

This chapter details the effort by former segregationist editors to unite whites against rising black political clout after passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The editors at the state’s two largest newspaper, Thomas R. Waring Jr. at the News & Courier in Charleston and William D. Workman Jr., at The State in Columbia, helped develop a rhetoric of “color-blind conservatism” to undermine black political activism. The new rhetoric accepted the end of segregation and legal equality for blacks in the South, but declared that racial issues should no longer be an acceptable topic for political debate. It identified blacks as special pleaders seeking aid from government that they did not deserve.

The Elusive Quest for Equality, 1969–1989

2020 ◽  
pp. 199-243
Author(s):  
Donald G. Nieman
Keyword(s):  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
School Segregation ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Employment Opportunities ◽  
Institutionalized Racism ◽  
Broad Interpretation ◽  
The 1960S

Although the nation became more conservative in the 1970s and 1980s, civil rights advocates built on legislative and legal victories of the 1960s to create race-conscious remedies to challenge institutionalized racism. Their position was strengthened by a growing women’s movement that became an important element of the civil rights coalition. Affirmative action and remedies against practices that had a disparate impact on minorities and women expanded employment opportunities; renewal and broad interpretation of the Voting Rights Act dramatically increased the number of black and Hispanic elected officials; and busing offered a new remedy for school segregation. Claiming that the Constitution was color-blind, Republicans attacked race-conscious remedies as “reverse racism” and used race as a wedge to make inroads among traditional Democratic constituencies. They used their growing strength to restrict busing and affirmative action and launch a war on drugs that led to mass incarceration of African Americans.

Nixon's Southern Strategy Revisited

1998 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean J. Kotlowski
Keyword(s):  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Minority Businesses

Recently, the story of President Richard M. Nixon's “southern strategy” and its relationship to school desegregation has become a ripe topic for historical revision. Ever wary of the shifty-eyed Nixon, contemporary critics argued that the president had retreated from civil rights to win the votes of conservative white southerners. Modifying this thesis, recent scholars have concluded that the president was neither a segregationist nor a conservative on the race question. These writers have shown that Nixon desegregated more schools than previous presidents, approved a strengthened Voting Rights Act, developed policies to aid minority businesses, and supported affirmative action.

Selma and the Place of Fiction in Historical Films

2018 ◽  
Vol 142 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-123
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Knapp
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Hybrid Nature ◽  
Historical Film ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Historical Films ◽  
Moral Certainty ◽  
Historical Reenactments

Every historical film must contend with the possibility that its viewers will be scandalized by its mixture of fact and fiction, but no recent historical film has faced such pressure to justify its hybrid nature as Selma has, in large part because no recent film has taken on so momentous and controversial a historical subject: the civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The renewed urgency of the issues Selma dramatizes, along with the film’s own commitment to the “moral certainty” of the civil rights movement, helps explain why Selma wavers in a self-defense that links the fictionality of its historical reenactments to the purposely theatrical element of the marches themselves. But politics are not the only problem for fiction in Selma, and to show why, this essay compares Selma to an earlier historical film, The Westerner (1940), that openly flaunts the commercial nature of its fictionality.

scholarly journals The Impact of the Voting Rights Act on American Political Parties

1994 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 565-575
Author(s):  
Howard A. Scarrow
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Legal Standards ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Impact

The weakening of American political parties has been a theme featured in the writings of political scientists for the past several decades. This essay is addressed to developments which may further that decline-developments which have undermined the very purpose which American political parties are said to serve. I refer to legal standards which were established by the Supreme Court in 1964, and which have since been expanded by the Court and then incorporated into the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its amendment in 1982.

The Gospel of the Sit-In

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Gershenhorn
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

During the 1960s, Austin lent his talents and his newspaper in support of the direct action movement in Durham and throughout the state. Unlike many other black leaders in the city, he immediately and enthusiastically embraced an early sit-in in Durham that began in 1957, three years before the more celebrated Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins. He also aided a boycott of white retail businesses that refused to hire black workers by publishing the names of those businesses in the Carolina Times. This strategy was quite effective in forcing white businesses to hire African Americans. Austin’s efforts and those of countless civil rights activists led to major freedom struggle successes with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Cultural Disenfranchisement and the Politics of Stigma

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Myra Mendible
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Citizenship ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Moral Geography ◽  
Exclusionary Policies ◽  
Physical Spaces

This article focuses attention on the pivotal role that stigmatization processes play on both legal and discursive fronts, that is, in justifying restrictive policies affecting ethnic minorities and in framing reactionary discourses in support of such measures. It argues that racial stigmatization is the key component in ongoing efforts to exclude Black and Latino citizens from full cultural citizenship in the United States, setting the groundwork for punitive and exclusionary policies aimed at disenfranchising and undermining their political agency. While legal documents record the rights and privileges accorded citizens within the nation’s physical spaces, the politics of stigma, I contend, maps a moral geography: it sets the contours and limits of communal obligation, disrupting affective bonds and attachments that can spur social change. As an instrument of power, stigmatizing processes today are helping to reinstate the kinds of policies and attitudes that the Voting Rights Act intended to redress, engendering a hostile climate for Blacks and Latinos in the United States and threatening hard-won civil rights and political gains.

Response to Commentaries

2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 443-450
Author(s):  
J. Morgan Kousser
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
The Body ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Chronological Order ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Long Time

The often kind and always interesting comments of Larry Griffin, David James, and Bradley Palmquist touch different aspects of Colorblind Injustice. Let me respond to them, in effect, in chronological order, according to which periods of history illuminate the comments the most. Palmquist points out that institutions like the Supreme Court may suddenly reverse their decisions, as the Court did in the !“switch in time that saved nine” after FDR had proposed to pack the body in 1937, or as it over-turned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). But as the Brown example suggests, it often takes a long time to overturn precedents, and that is the case with minority voting rights, as well. It was 25 years after Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” 24 years after Earl Warren ceased to be Chief Justice, and 23 years after Nixon proposed to water down the Voting Rights Act before the overwhelmingly Republican Supreme Court dared to seriously undermine African American and Latino political rights. Even then, they hesitated to attack the Voting Rights Act itself directly. Major institutions are tough in two senses: their policies often have large impacts, and the institutions, including those as tiny as the nine-member Supreme Court, are difficult to change.

Selma in the “Glaring Light of Television”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Television News ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
News Story ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
News Reporting ◽  
News Program ◽  
American Press ◽  
Television Coverage

This chapter examines television news' reporting of the Selma campaign for voting rights that led directly to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Television cameras present on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday March 7, 1965, were able to capture the beating, gassing, and brutalizing suffered by voting rights demonstrators as they attempted to march to Montgomery. The uproar generated by that footage generated more support, volunteers, and moral clout for the civil rights movement. This chapter considers how one news program, The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, presented the Selma campaign as an ongoing nightly news story, with particular emphasis on its coverage of the campaign's three martyrs: Jimmie Lee Jackson, Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo. It also discusses the response of white Selmians in the “glaring light of television” and the commentary in the African American press regarding the television coverage of the campaign.

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