Conflict in the Community

2021 ◽  
pp. 129-166
Author(s):  
Zoë Burkholder
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black History ◽  
Community Control ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Dress Code ◽  
Black Schools ◽  
Student Activists ◽  
The North ◽  
Black Institution

Chapter 4 charts the most contested phase of Black educational activism in the North as support for Black-controlled schools expanded alongside the Black Power movement, concurrent with the growth of court-ordered school desegregation across the urban North. “Community-control” activists, like those in New York City and Newark, New Jersey, saw separation as a rational response to what they viewed as the dismal failure of school integration. They called for community control over administration, curriculum, pedagogy, and hiring in majority Black schools and called for desegregation plans to be halted. Student activists demanded Black history courses, fairer discipline and dress code policies, and more respect for Black culture. Not everyone agreed with this renewed vision of autonomous Black institution-building, especially an older generation of civil rights warriors. Although briefly appealing, community control and Afrocentric curricula did not successfully equalize public education and receded in the early 1970s.

Teacher Power, Black Power, and the fracturing of Labor Liberalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Shelton
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Community Control ◽  
Teacher Strikes ◽  
American Federation ◽  
Community Institutions ◽  
American Federation Of Teachers ◽  
Black Populations

This chapter chronicles the growing conflict between the Black Power movement—an extension of the civil rights movement seeking the formation of black political and community institutions—and unionized public employees in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Beginning with the United Federation of Teachers strike in 1968 over community control in Ocean Hill-Brownsville (New York City), the chapter also shows how two teacher strikes in Newark (1970, 1971) drove apart the Black community and a majority white teacher union. A close examination of letters to the imprisoned President of the American Federation of Teachers shows that critics of both urban black populations and unionized teachers had begun to link the two groups together as “unproductive” threats to law and order and economic prosperity.

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.

A Powerful Weapon

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-128
Author(s):  
Zoë Burkholder
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
School Integration ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Black Schools ◽  
The North ◽  
Brown Decision

Chapter 3 highlights a resurgence of northern Black support for school integration alongside the expanding civil rights movement. The outbreak of World War II created economic opportunities that drew Black migrants North in a second wave and sparked more militant civil rights activism. NAACP leaders persuaded northern Black communities to reject school segregation. By citing anti-discrimination legislation and organizing petitions and boycotts, these activists won the formal desegregation of public schools in the North between 1940 and 1954. A potent combination of civil rights activism, the decline of scientific racism, and the emergence of the Cold War pushed school integration to the forefront of national politics. Following the Brown decision, northern Blacks demanded school integration. The process was contentious, especially when districts closed Black schools and fired Black teachers. By 1965, many Black northerners expressed frustration with school integration and what they viewed as its failure to improve the quality of education for Black youth.

The Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism

2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-109
Author(s):  
Timothy Shortell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
New York State ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Innovative Strategy ◽  
Black Newspapers ◽  
The North ◽  
Black Abolitionists ◽  
Computerized Content Analysis

In a span of thirty years, from 1832 to 1862, American abolitionists were able to reverse public opinion in the North on the question of slavery.Despite the dramatic political shift, the emergent hostility to “slave power” did not lead to an embrace of racial equality. Abolitionists, in the face of America’s long history of racism, sought to link opposition to slavery with a call for civil rights. For black abolitionists, this was not only a strategic problem, it was a matter of self-definition. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the meanings of liberty, labor, and independence were the basis of contentious republican politics. Black abolitionists used this rhetorical raw material to fashion “fighting words” with which to generate solidarity and deliver their moral claims to the nation. This research employs an innovative strategy for the analysis of the discursive field, in an exploratory content analysis of five black newspapers in antebellum New York State. Computerized content analysis coded for themes, rhetoric, and ideology in a sample of more than 36,000 words of newspaper text. Although the discourse of black abolitionism is a social critique, it also contains a positive assertion of what free blacks would become. As important as the theme of “slavery” was to the discourse, so too were “colored” and “brotherhood.” This analysis consistently showed the key features of political antislavery argumentation to be most common in the Douglass newspapers (theNorth StarandFrederick Douglass' Paper).

Community Development Corporations, Black Capitalism, and the Mainstreaming of Black Power

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Adam Davies
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Community Development ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Black History ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Community Development Corporations ◽  
Urban Crisis ◽  
Black Capitalism

This chapter explains how Kennedy's Community Development Corporation (CDC) program and Nixon's black capitalism initiatives evolved out of the apparent failures and limitations of the War on Poverty and looked to confront the deepening urban crisis, the growth of black radicalism, and increasing white hostility to the racial politics of Great Society liberalism. After examining the rationale and assumptions that guided this shift in policy, the chapter explores how inner-city African Americans engaged with the opportunities it presented. Focusing first on the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC), the nation's first CDC, and then on a number of similar black-controlled organizations in New York and Los Angeles, this chapter shows how Black Power ideology shaped the institution-building and community development efforts of those organizations, as they used programs to foster racial pride and unity, celebrate black history and culture, and promote greater community self-determination.

Frederick Douglass

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
The North ◽  
The Us ◽  
D 20 ◽  
The 19Th Century

Born enslaved on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Frederick Douglass (b. February 1818–d. 20 February 1895) became the most prominent African American of the 19th century. Although he escaped slavery under his own volition at the age of twenty, he has been often remembered as the nation’s most famous former slave. This is partly due to the sustained popularity of his first autobiography (of three), which became a “best seller” when it was first published in 1845. Even today it remains the most widely read narrative of enslavement. Douglass lived and strove for justice for fifty-seven years after reaching freedom. Just over two years after escaping to the North, he began his career as an antislavery lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. By 1847, he was widely recognized as an internationally known orator, abolitionist, and advocate for black freedom in America. That same year, Douglass began publishing his own weekly abolitionist paper and soon after moved his family to Rochester, New York, where he resided until 1872. By 1851 he parted ways with the radical Garrisonians, adopting the belief that the US Constitution was indeed an antislavery document. During the Civil War and after, he formed a staunch attachment to the Republican Party, while maintaining an active lecture and editing career pushing for African American suffrage and civil rights. He met with several presidents and held minor Republican posts. Eventually he served as US minister to Haiti from 1889 to 1891. Famous in his own time, Douglass was an exceptional American who remains representative of his 19th-century world and helps modern historians and ordinary citizens see the past more clearly. He was the most photographed American of the 19th century, and certainly he remains today the most quoted African American. Because of his outstanding record of achievements obtained in his lifetime, and the timeless resonance of his life and his words, Douglass remains one of the most studied figures in American history and culture.

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