Steeped in the Blood of Racism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy K. Bristow
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Black College ◽  
State University ◽  
Kent State University ◽  
State College ◽  
Civil Suit ◽  
Traditional Patterns

This book recounts the death of two young African Americans, Phillip Gibbs and James Earl Green and the wounding of twelve others when white police and highway patrolmen opened fire on students in front of a dormitory at Jackson State College, a historically black college (HBCU) in May 1970. It situates this story in the broader events of the civil rights and black power eras, emphasizing the role white supremacy played in causing police violence and shaping the aftermath. A state school controlled by an all-white Board of Trustees, Jackson State had a reputation as a conservative campus where students faced expulsion for activism. By 1970, students were pushing back, responding to the evolving movement for African American freedom. Law enforcement attacked this changing campus, reflecting both traditional patterns of repression and the new logic and racially coded rhetoric of “law and order.” After, the victims and their survivors struggled unsuccessfully to find justice or a place in the nation’s public memory. Despite multiple investigations, two grand juries, and a civil suit, no officers were charged, no restitution was paid, and no apologies were offered. Overshadowed by the shooting of white students at Kent State University ten days earlier, the violence was routinely misunderstood as similar in cause, a story that evaded the essential role of race in causing it. Few besides the local African American community proved willing to remember. This book provides crucial context for situating the ongoing crisis of state violence against people of color in its long history.

The Sit-In Movement

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
High School Students ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Leading Edge ◽  
Black College ◽  
School Students ◽  
A Chain

One of the most significant protest campaigns of the civil rights era, the lunch counter sit-in movement began on February 1, 1960 when four young African American men sat down at the whites-only lunch counter of the Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina. Refused service, the four college students sat quietly until the store closed. They continued their protest on the following days, each day joined by more fellow students. Students in other southern cities learned what was happening and started their own demonstrations, and in just weeks, lunch counter sit-ins were taking place across the South. By the end of the spring, tens of thousands of black college and high school students, joined in some cases by sympathetic white students, had joined the sit-in movement. Several thousand went to jail for their efforts after being arrested on charges of trespass, disorderly conduct, or whatever other laws southern police officers believed they could use against the protesters. The sit-ins arrived at a critical juncture in the modern black freedom struggle. The preceding years had brought major breakthroughs, such as the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation ruling in 1954 and the successful Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956, but by 1960, activists were struggling to develop next steps. The sit-in movement energized and transformed the struggle for racial equality, moving the leading edge of the movement from the courtrooms and legislative halls to the streets and putting a new, younger generation of activists on the front lines. It gave birth to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the most important activist groups of the 1960s. It directed the nation’s attention to the problem of racial discrimination in private businesses that served the public, pressured business owners in scores of southern cities to open their lunch counters to African American customers, and set in motion a chain of events that would culminate in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations across the nation.

An Entire World in Motion

2021 ◽  
pp. 53-90
Author(s):  
Erin R. Pineda
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Entire World

This chapter develops an alternative framework for understanding the civil disobedience of civil rights activists: as a decolonizing praxis that linked their dissent to that of anticolonial activists and tied the context of Jim Crow to global white supremacy. If the constitutional, democratic state formed the normative horizon for liberal understandings of civil disobedience, activists’ horizon was defined by processes of imaginative transit—the process of thinking and traveling across boundaries and disparate contexts, through which activists in motion constructed civil disobedience as a means of transforming worldwide structures of racist imperialism, colonial rule, apartheid, and Jim Crow. Between 1920 and 1960, African American, Indian, South African, and Ghanaian activists proposed, debated, and wielded nonviolent direct action as a means of self-liberation from white supremacy’s structures of fear and violence, and way of disrupting and transforming the practices that held those structures in place.

Introduction: “Everybody knows about Mississippi goddam”

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Nancy K. Bristow
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Board Of Trustees ◽  
Racial Consciousness ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
State College ◽  
Campus Law Enforcement

The introduction offers an overview of the shootings of May 15, 1970, and the effort by students to protect the evidence and memory of what happened. An HBCU in the most racially repressive state, Jackson State College opened in the midst of the counterrevolution against Reconstruction and was determined to provide a first-rate education. The school struggled against white supremacy from the beginning. Activism following World War Two, the Brown decision, and the civil rights movement produced an epic backlash, including violence against activists, leading to the growing dominance of Black Power as an organizing philosophy. Activism on campus had long been repressed by the administration, acting on behalf of the all-white Board of Trustees, but by the end of the decade the campus was changing, influenced by Black Power and a new president, and opportunities to grow and express racial consciousness emerged. It was this campus law enforcement assaulted.

A History of African American Autobiography

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Personal Essays ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

This History explores innovations in African American autobiography since its inception, examining the literary and cultural history of Black self-representation amid life writing studies. By analyzing the different forms of autobiography, including pictorial and personal essays, editorials, oral histories, testimonials, diaries, personal and open letters, and even poetry performance media of autobiographies, this book extends the definition of African American autobiography, revealing how people of African descent have created and defined the Black self in diverse print cultures and literary genres since their arrival in the Americas. It illustrates ways African Americans use life writing and autobiography to address personal and collective Black experiences of identity, family, memory, fulfillment, racism and white supremacy. Individual chapters examine scrapbooks as a source of self-documentation, African American autobiography for children, readings of African American persona poems, mixed-race life writing after the Civil Rights Movement, and autobiographies by African American LGBTQ writers.

“Don’t Crash the Gate but Stand on Your Own Feet!”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reginald K. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Higher Learning ◽  
Black College ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Learning ◽  
Black Institutions ◽  
Professional Class ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

Scholars often consider the Brown decision of 1954 as the chief legal victory for African Americans in the twentieth century. Although the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s legal team achieved their goal of gaining access to public education for black citizens, historians studying this movement generally praise the outcome of Brown while not focusing on the unintended consequences of that victory. Such circumstances as the ultimate demise of many southern-based black institutions in the name of integration. Researchers have often labelled the leaders of such institutions as obstructionist, gradualists, accommodationist or even worse, “Uncle Toms.” Much of this criticism came from individuals who did not carry the burden of leading either a southern-based institution or community during the early 1900s. Despite these negative labels, black college administrators such as Shepard were responsible for creating a southern black professional class, and future Civil Rights leaders through their institutions of higher learning. Consequently, this essay will explore how Shepard navigated the currents of southern white supremacy, and northern black radicalism while creating an institutional legacy that remains today despite his “gradualist” approach during the long Civil Rights Movement.

A Seedbed of Activism

2019 ◽  
pp. 18-48
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Black College ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
State University ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
Key Players ◽  
History Of

This chapter discusses the history of the first black college established – The Institute for Colored Youth (ICY). The ICY would later be renamed Cheyney State University. Founded in 1837, the ICY became a critical staging ground for both the abolitionist movement and the early civil rights movement. With key players such as Ebenezer Bassett, Octavius Catto, and Fanny Jackson Coppin leading the school, the ICY set the template for how black educational institutions would create a pedagogy and praxis that encouraged and radicalized generations of youth to serve their communities as agents for change. Tragically, the most pivotal event of the school’s early years was the assassination of its beloved teacher and alum Octavius Catto in 1871 who was murdered in the streets of Philadelphia after playing a critical role in organizing support for the 15th amendment.

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