Did The North Really Mean It?

2020 ◽  
pp. 230-244
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Constitutional Amendment ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
The North ◽  
Charles Sumner ◽  
Litmus Test ◽  
Second Reconstruction

This lecture details southern interest in northern elections. Woodward argues that white southerners viewed this as the litmus test to judge Northern commitment to racial equality. The bulk of northern states voted against black suffrage thus prompting charges of hypocrisy. After Ulysses S. Grant assumed the office of the presidency in 1869, Republicans began debating whether to pass a constitutional amendment supporting black suffrage. Moderates and conservatives, however, ultimately shaped the Fifteenth Amendment’s wording leading some to conclude that the North’s commitment to racial equality was tepid at best. Northern apathy encouraged white southern defiance which manifested itself in terrorism and violence. Woodward concludes that white northerners never fully committed to Reconstruction, Charles Sumner notwithstanding, and thus cautions scholars and activists not to look to it as inspiration for the modern Civil Rights Movement or what he called the Second Reconstruction.

scholarly journals Bringing the Law Back into the History of the Civil Rights Movement

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 657-669 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth W. Mack
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Life ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

It is a pleasure to comment on Nancy MacLean's hugely important book Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace as an example of what I might call “bringing the law back in” to the history of the civil rights movement. A generation ago, the idea that law needed to be introduced into this history would have seemed nonsensical. At that time, law provided one of the central touchstones in the historical narrative of the struggle for racial equality in American life. Scholarship in this area built on C. Vann Woodward's pioneering work on the rise of Jim Crow, which itself was written shortly after Woodward's participation in the Brown v. Board of Education litigation. The dominant narrative began with the legal construction of Jim Crow in the late nineteenth century and continued with the founding of the NAACP. Other actors came along at various points in the story, prominent among them New Deal–era racial liberals, World War II–era activists, midcentury social scientists, Southern civil rights leaders and movements, and eventually black power. The end point was marked by the litigation and legislative victories of the 1950s and '60s, which finally wrote back into law what had been taken away by segregationist white Southerners and a compliant Supreme Court in the late nineteenth century. The implicit methodological take on law was that state and federal statutes, as well as court decisions, provided an important impetus, or at the very least a validation, for racial change—first for white Southerners as they created the Jim Crow legal regime and later for segregation's opponents as they reinscribed racial equality onto the core narrative of American life.

Too Close for Comfort: Canada, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and the North American Colo(u)r Line

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Asa McKercher
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
North American ◽  
The North ◽  
The U.S

Too Close for Comfort: Canada, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and the North American Colo(u)r Line

Look Away! Dixie’s Landed!

2018 ◽  
pp. 123-154
Author(s):  
Nina Silber
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Gone With The Wind ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
The New Deal

The pro-Confederate Lost Cause memory of the Civil War continued to have considerable staying power during the 1930s, seen most notably in the popularity of the book and film versions of Gone With the Wind. At the same time, the Lost Cause was adapted to fit the sensibilities of this era. Many white Americans, for example, were drawn to the suffering of Civil War era white southerners in light of the economic trials of the 30s. Conservatives also doubled-down on the Lost Cause narrative as they pushed back against aspects of the New Deal agenda, as well as a reawakened civil rights movement and anti-lynching campaign. Finally, conservatives adapted the Lost Cause story to target Northern radicals and communists as the same kind of agitators who punished white southerners during Reconstruction. Black activists and communists tried to expose the racist and unpatriotic underpinnings of the Lost Cause but often fell short.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Scott L. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Caste System ◽  
The South ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Frederick Law Olmsted

The introduction explores why the South became known as America’s “most documented” region beginning in the 1940s and into the twenty-first century. It argues that documentarians saw the region as a fertile place to do fieldwork for two main reasons. First, the region possessed unique and seemingly fragile folk cultures in need of preservation before modern influences erased them. Second, the region possessed seemingly endemic problems associated with its racial caste system and agricultural economies that needed documentation, study, and reform. The introduction also provides an overview of how historians and theorists defined “documentary” throughout the twentieth century and how and why some black and white southerners resisted the intrusion of documentarians into their lives. Additionally, it traces the history of documentary fieldwork in the South from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century and demonstrates how the tradition’s dominant themes developed during this time, particularly in the travel writings and sketches of Basil Hall, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jonathan Baxter Harrison and others. Finally, it highlights the distinguishing features of twentieth-century documentary by emphasizing the role of Progressive and New Deal reform impulses, the Folk Revival and Civil Rights Movement, and the development of portable recording technologies.

Reluctant Radicals: How Moderates Shape Movements for Social Change

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (03) ◽  
pp. 720-741
Author(s):  
Joseph Mello
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Gay Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Silent Majority ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Modern Conservatism

This essay reviews three books within the southern history literature on the white moderate's response to the civil rights movement; Kevin Kruse's White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005), Matthew Lassiter's The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (2006), and Jason Sokol's There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975 (2006). I examine how white moderates impacted the struggle for African American civil rights, and explore how this dynamic can help us understand the trajectory of the current debate over gay rights in the United States. I argue that while the US public ultimately came to support equal rights for African Americans, and has grown more tolerant of gay rights recently, they have been willing to do so only when these rights claims are framed as benefiting “deserving” segments of these populations. This shows that rights are, to some extent, contingent resources, available primarily to those citizens who fit certain ideal types, and suggests that those individuals who are unwilling (or unable) to live up to this ideal may ultimately fail to benefit from these movements.

Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement.

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 306
Author(s):  
Harry S. Ashmore ◽  
David L. Chappell
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Southerners

Recasting the Movement and Reframing the Law in Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (01) ◽  
pp. 243-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
National Association ◽  
Department Of Justice ◽  
Colored People ◽  
The North ◽  
Civil Rights Division ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007) advances the historiographical idea that a long civil rights movement, beginning well before the mid‐1950s, had a robust and innovative legal dimension. Her study of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) itself, demonstrates that lawyers in those organizations took guidance from many working‐class clients to successfully deploy a conception of civil rights rooted on the farm and in the factory to challenge the economic and social edifice of Jim Crow, in the North as well as the South.

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