Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Women ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Elected Officials ◽  
World War ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Massive Resistance

Massive resistance to the civil rights movement has often been presented as sequestered in the South, limited to the decade between the Brown Decision and the Civil Rights Act, and attributed to the most vehement elected officials and the Citizens’ Councils. But that version ignores the long-standing work of white women who sustained racial segregation and nurtured both massive support for the Jim Crow order in the interwar period and who transformed support into massive resistance after World War II. Support for the segregated state existed among everyday people. Maintaining racial segregation was not solely or even primarily the work of elected officials. Its adherents sustained the system with quotidian work, and on the ground, it was often white women who shaped and sustained white supremacist politics.

The Power of Racial Rape Myths after World War II

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Rae Flood
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Women ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Male Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
Geographic Boundaries

This chapter reveals how African American men and their attorneys challenged assumptions about black criminality and forced urban authorities to confront these assumptions during the postwar years, when the civil rights movement expanded nationally. By World War II, instances of lynch mob violence had decreased significantly, but the specter of interracial sexual violence continued to govern trial proceedings, even outside the Jim Crow South. Many Americans continued to believe that black men were sexual predators and likely perpetrators of rape if accused, especially but not exclusively, by white women. Thus, these men specifically asserted that the trial system they faced in Chicago mirrored a Southern system of (in)justice that had not yet fully abandoned lynch-mob violence. Although they were not successful in gaining acquittals, their efforts expand current understandings of racial discrimination and re-imagine the geographic boundaries of the criminalized black male body.

Washington Is a Giant Awakened

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Myers Asch ◽  
George Derek Musgrove
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Survival ◽  
White Resistance ◽  
War Effort

As the city boomed during the New Deal and World War II, a new generation of black activists and their allies arose to challenge Jim Crow, find decent housing, and fight for economic survival. They used new forms of protest, including boycotts, union organizing, and sit-ins, and they formed interracial alliances with a growing number of white people, in Washington and around the country, who saw racial inequality in the nation’s capital as a stain on America’s reputation. This experimentation produced mixed results at the time, but the community activism and interracial organizing of the 1930s and 1940s helped lay the foundation for the postwar civil rights movement. Nonetheless, determined white resistance at the local and federal levels largely preserved segregation in the nation’s capital during the war years. In fights against employment discrimination, segregated public spaces, and inadequate housing, racial egalitarians often achieved symbolic or small-scale victories but ultimately failed to defeat Jim Crow. Despite the sweeping rhetoric about freedom, democracy, and the “American Way” that accompanied the U.S. war effort, World War II stalled racial progress in D.C.

Mothers of Massive Resistance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
School Choice ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
White Mothers ◽  
Brown Decision ◽  
National Networks

Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s, this book argues that white segregationist women constituted the grassroots workforce for racial segregation. For decades, they censored textbooks, campaigned against the United Nations, denied marriage certificates, celebrated school choice, and lobbied elected officials. They trained generations, built national networks, collapsed their duties as white mothers with those of citizenship, and experimented with a color-blind political discourse. Their work beyond legislative halls empowered the Jim Crow order with a flexibility and a kind of staying power. With white women at the center of the story, massive resistance and the rise of postwar conservatism rises out of white women’s grassroots work in homes, schools, political parties, and culture. Their efforts began before World War II and the Brown Decision and persisted past the removal of “white only” signs in 1964 and through the anti-busing protests. White women’s segregationist politics involved foreign affairs, economic policy, family values, strict constitutionalism, states’ rights, and white supremacy. It stretched across the nation and overlapped with and helped shape the rise of the New Right. In the end, this history compels us to confront the reign of racial segregation as a national story. It asks us to reconsider who sustained the Jim Crow order, who bears responsibility for the persistence of the nation’s inequities, and what it will take to make good on the nation’s promise of equality.

Pruning Knife Busy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jackson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
American Film ◽  
World War ◽  
Film Censorship ◽  
Southern Film ◽  
American Film Industry

Chapter 7 addresses film censorship in the South, and places this history in the larger context of the American film industry as a whole. From early boxing films such as the Johnson-Jeffries fight of 1910, which led southern politicians to ban interracial boxing films (and, in some cases, all boxing films) to the prodigious work of individual southern censors including Lloyd T. Binford of Memphis and Evan R. Chesterman of the State of Virginia, this history reveals the embeddedness of Jim Crow ideology within all sorts of film institutions. In the years after World War II, when film censorship practices came under greater scrutiny and legal threat, the work of southern film censors largely petered out, anticipating some of the coming confrontations of the Civil Rights Movement.

scholarly journals Never Together: Black and White People in the Postwar Economic Era

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Peter Temin
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Black Education ◽  
World War ◽  
White People ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Black Elite

This paper recounts American economic history for 60 years after World War II. The unusual part of this paper is that it focuses on not only the conventional tale, but also recounts what whites did to and for Blacks over this period. It starts from the unhappy experience of a Black American soldier, goes through the prosperity that followed the war and ends with the various changes that happened to the economy after 1970. The Civil Rights Movement is in the middle, and it gave rise to more Black education before racial segregation destroyed their gains. Some Blacks graduated from college and became a Black Elite. Obama’s election showed that the Black Elite could interact with relative equality with educated whites.

Between Kennedy and Khrushchev

The Columnist ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 203-228
Author(s):  
Donald A. Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
World War ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
Nikita Khrushchev ◽  
New Frontier ◽  
1960 Election

During the 1960 election, the “Merry-Go-Round” ’s revelation of a suspicious loan from billionaire Howard Hughes helped to defeat Richard Nixon. Nevertheless, Drew Pearson remained an outsider in John Kennedy’s New Frontier, having accused Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Profiles in Courage, of having been ghost-written, and painted Joseph P. Kennedy as being sympathetic to Nazi Germany before World War II. Being a generation older than Kennedy, Pearson found himself more comfortable with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and scored a rare interview with him. Khrushchev insisted that he sought peace, which Pearson communicated to Kennedy and to his readers. Consequently, anti-communist groups assailed the column and picketed Pearson. At the same time, Pearson grew more appreciative of the civil rights movement. The column attacked the Ku Klux Klan and encouraged Kennedy to speak out more forcefully against racial segregation and inequality.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ritterhouse
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
Human Welfare ◽  
Franklin Roosevelt ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

This chapter shows how race-baiting, red-baiting, and white southern liberals' own ambivalence made it impossible for a broad-based coalition to lead an ongoing fight for democratic social change, despite the large number of people who had come together at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) in 1938. Activists like Virginia Durr lobbied for anti-poll tax bills in the early 1940s without success. Meanwhile, New Deal policies gave way to mobilization for World War II, which favoured the South with defense-related and infrastructure spending but did not challenge the Jim Crow system. Black civil rights activists like A. Philip Randolph and the lawyers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the lead in a Long Civil Rights Movement that earlier efforts to bring change to the South had helped to make possible. Jonathan Daniels was never an activist but became increasingly supportive of civil rights initiatives after working as an aide to Franklin Roosevelt from 1943-1945. The chapter describes his wartime work and briefly traces the remainder of his career, including the reissue of A Southerner Discovers the South in 1970 and his death in 1981.

Trouble in My Way

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-160
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
University President ◽  
State University ◽  
Campus Environment ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Jackson State University ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the strained history of Jackson State University during the aftermath of World War II and leading up to the modern civil rights movement. Located in the heart of Mississippi, Jackson State students carved out space to express their militancy as the war came to a close. However, they quickly felt that space collapse around them as segregationists tightened their grip on the Magnolia State as the burgeoning movement for black liberation challenged the oppressive traditions of the most socially and politically closed state in the country. Administrators such as Jackson State University president Jacob Reddix quickly fell in line with the expectations of his immediate supervisors and squared off against outspoken scholar-activists such as famed poet and novelist Margaret Walker. The standoff resulted in a campus environment fraught with tension yet still producing students and faculty determined to undermine Jim Crow.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-234
Author(s):  
Kurt Edward Kemper
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
College Athletics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Medium Size ◽  
World War ◽  
Multiple Pressures ◽  
Economic Elites

Throughout much of the NCAA’s first half century, the organization maintained an uneasy collection of commercialized schools that pursued highly competitive athletics for publicity and profit; liberal arts colleges that saw college athletics as a component of their educational and leadership missions; and smaller and medium-size state schools that wanted to play athletics for competitive glory but lacked the size, resources, and finances of the big-time powers. Unable to balance those three interests, the NCAA largely ignored the concerns of the latter two while devoting itself to the service of commercialized athletics. This fraught arrangement finally came asunder in the years after World War II when multiple pressures from scandals, racial criticisms, and growing pressure for access to the NCAA Basketball Tournament finally forced concessions. The concessions made in the mid- to late-1950s, however, did not reshape the balance of power in the NCAA, as the organization remained wholly committed to serving the interests of big-time commercialized athletics. In this regard the challenges faced by the NCAA mirrored the larger social and cultural upheaval in the United States following World War II. The civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and opposition to the war in Vietnam all challenged the authority of existing political and economic elites yet did not mark any fundamental shift in power in American life. The question, then, is not really how did the NCAA manage to survive but, rather, how did its critics ever hope to succeed?

The Age of Segregation, 1900–1950

2020 ◽  
pp. 117-152
Author(s):  
Donald G. Nieman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
World War ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter argues that segregation generated organized opposition from African Americans and a small group of whites that challenged the system. Segregation was rigid, capricious, and designed to demonstrate white power. While it kept most blacks in menial positions, a small black middle class emerged that produced leaders who attacked Jim Crow. The organization leading the charge was the NAACP, which developed publicity, lobbying, and litigation campaigns. The effort gained steam in the 1930s, as a cadre of black lawyers challenged segregated education, the CIO and the Communist party championed civil rights, and the New Deal gave blacks a voice in federal policy. It further accelerated during World War II as the federal government challenged workplace discrimination, membership in civil rights organizations swelled, black veterans demanded their rights, and the Supreme Court became more aggressive on civil rights.

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