“Negroes Plan to Kill All Whites”

2021 ◽  
pp. 115-134
Author(s):  
Peter Irons
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Race Riots ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Black Intellectual ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Philadelphia Negro

This chapter, which covers the first three decades of the twentieth century, begins with an account of the life and career of W. E. B. Du Bois, the most influential Black intellectual and social scientist of that period. A classic insider/outsider in American society, Du Bois earned a Harvard PhD in sociology and wrote a pioneering study of systemic racism in The Philadelphia Negro. He was also an outspoken activist in the Socialist Party and NAACP. Du Bois’s work placed him at the forefront of struggles against racism, especially in northern cities into which 1.5 million southern Blacks moved in the Great Migration, lured by the prospect of steady, well-paid factory jobs. These Black migrants, however, were outnumbered two to one by southern White migrants to those cities, who forced Blacks into ghettos with rundown, overcrowded housing and inferior schools. Tensions between the races intensified after World War I, sparking the “Red Summer” of 1919, with major race riots—instigated by Whites—in Washington, D.C., and Chicago, leaving dozens dead and thousand with burned-out homes. The bloodshed culminated that fall with the massacre of some two hundred Black tenant farmers and their families in the town of Elaine, Arkansas, followed two years later by another massacre, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The decade of the 1920s offered northern Blacks little respite from the racism that kept them from escaping poverty.

Extraordinary Isolation? Woodrow Wilson and the Civil Rights Movement

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-217
Author(s):  
Nicholas F. Jacobs ◽  
Sidney M. Milkis
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Race Riots ◽  
Early Form ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
The Great Migration

This article explores the contentious and dynamic relationship between Woodrow Wilson and a nascent, diverse civil rights movement from 1912 to 1919. The pivotal relationship between Wilson and the early civil rights movement emerged out of two concurrent and related political developments: the increasing centrality of presidential administration in the constitutional order and the growing national aspirations of political strategies and goals among reform activists. Not only do we illustrate an early form of social movement politics that was largely antithetical to the administration's objectives, but we also trace how the strategies adopted by civil rights leaders were contingent on an early, still-to-be institutionalized administrative presidency. We highlight Wilson's involvement in the racial unrest that emerged from the debut of the film The Birth of a Nation and in the race riots that accompanied the Great Migration and World War I in his second term. These early twentieth-century episodes legitimized a form of collective action and helped to recast the modern presidency as an institution that both collaborated and competed with social movement organizations to control the timing and conditions of change.

From Multi-Industry Planning to Keynesian Planning: Gardiner Means, the American Keynesians, and National Economic Planning at the National Resources Committee

1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederic S. Lee
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Economic Planning ◽  
World War ◽  
National Planning ◽  
National Economic ◽  
Basic Characteristics ◽  
American Society ◽  
Industry Planning ◽  
The Impact ◽  
American Economy

In recent years we have witnessed a revival of interest in the National Resources Committee (NRC) and its work on national planning. The research shows that the roots of national planning at the NRC are found in the Progressive Era, when individuals sought, through city, regional, and economic planning, to bring order to American society, in the government's management of the economy during World War I, and in Hoover's attempt at macromanagement of the economy. The research also shows that national economic planning, as distinct from other forms of planning, was an important component of the committee's work. In regard to this, researchers have acknowledged that Gardiner Means, as director of the Industrial Section of the Industrial Committee and author of The Structure of the American Economy, Part I: Basic Characteristics, was an important and outspoken advocate of economic planning within the NRC, but they have been less clear as to his specific contributions to economic planning. Moreover, the researchers have not extensively investigated the NRC position toward national economic planning, the economic models from which national economic plans would be developed, and the impact of the Keynesian revolution on the NRC approach to national economic planning. These omissions are not surprising inasmuch as neither Warken's (1979) nor Clawson's (1981) general coverage of the NRC provided much more than a brief and superficial description of the Industrial Section and a listing of its most important publications. Kalish (1963), on the other hand, discussed Means and the Industrial Section in more depth but in such a disjointed manner that it is impossible to grasp the movement toward economic planning that took place in the NRC and the important role Means played in the process. Finally, neither Chapman's (1981 and 1983) nor Jeffries's (1987) discussions of the impact of the Keynesian revolution on the activities of the NRC dealt specifically with its impact on Means's work on economic planning.

scholarly journals ’Det er easy at tale engelsk også’. Amerikadansk i 1960’erne og 1970’erne

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (47) ◽  
pp. 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karoline Kühl
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War I ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Rapid Decline ◽  
Language Loss ◽  
World War ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Post War ◽  
American Society

The conditions for the Danish language among Danish emigrants and their descendants in the United States in the first half of the 20th century were tough: The group of Danish speakers was relatively small, the Danes did not settle together as other immigrant groups did, and demographic circumstances led many young, unmarried Danish men to marry non-Danish speaking partners. These were all factors that prevented the formation of tight-knit Danish-speaking communities. Furthermore, US nationalistic propaganda in the wake of World War I and the melting-pot effect of post-war American society in the 1950s contributed to a rapid decline in the use of Danish among the emigrants. Analyses of recordings of 58 Danish-American speakers from the 1970s show, however, that the language did not decline in an unsystematic process of language loss, only to be replaced quickly and effectively by English. On the contrary, the recordings show contactinduced linguistic innovations in the Danish of the interviewees, which involve the creation of specific lexical and syntactical American Danish features that systematically differ from Continental Danish. The article describes and discusses these features, and gives a thorough account of the socioeconomic and linguistic conditions for this speaker group.

Black Migration from the South in Historical Context

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Platt Boustan
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Labor Demand ◽  
Economic Returns ◽  
Birth Cohorts ◽  
The South ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
The North ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
European Immigration

This chapter explains that the mobility of black southerners began increasing in the birth cohorts born immediately after the Civil War. Many of these moves took place within the South. Despite plentiful industrial jobs in the “thousand furnaces” of northern cities at the turn of the twentieth century, the potential wage benefits of settling in the North was dampened by the absence of a migrant network that southern blacks could use to secure employment upon arrival. Large flows of northward migration awaited a period of abnormally high economic returns, which arose during World War I. Circa 1915, northern factories supplying the war effort experienced a surge in labor demand, coupled with a temporary freeze in European immigration, which encouraged northern employers to turn to other sources of labor.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mugambi Jouet
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Wealth Inequality ◽  
Vicious Circle ◽  
Global History ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
American Society

Jouet begins his book by describing his work as a human rights lawyer representing poor prisoners in New York at the time of mass incarceration on a scale unprecedented in global history. He goes on to describe how the degeneration of American justice embodies troubling dimensions of American exceptionalism, including acute wealth inequality, systemic racism, anti-intellectualism, Christian fundamentalism, and chronic human rights abuses. While the word “exceptional” can imply greatness or superiority, American exceptionalism historically referred to how America is “exceptional” in the sense of “unique,” “different,” “unusual,” “extraordinary” or “peculiar.” Ironically, scores of Americans equate “exceptionalism” with their nation’s superiority when it might be its Achilles Heel—a self-destructive vicious circle threatening admirable dimensions of American society.

Since 1945: New Amenities, New Hazards

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
William B. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
World History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Role ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Society ◽  
Service Employment

If the average citizen's surroundings defined the national climate, then the United States grew markedly warmer and drier in the postwar decades. Migration continued to carry the center of population west and began pulling it southward as well. The growth of what came to be called the Sunbelt at the "Snowbelt's" expense passed a landmark in the early 1960s when California replaced New York as the most populous state. Another landmark was established in the early 1990s when Texas moved ahead of New York. In popular discussion, it was taken for granted that finding a change of climate was one of the motives for relocating as well as one of the results. It was not until 1954, though, that an American social scientist first seriously considered the possibility. The twentieth-century flow of Americans to the West Coast, the geographer Edward L. Ullman observed in that year, had no precedent in world history. It could not be explained by the theories of settlement that had worked well in the past, for a substantial share of it represented something entirely new, "the first large-scale in-migration to be drawn by the lure of a pleasant climate." If it was the first of its kind, it was unlikely to be the last. For a set of changes in American society, Ullman suggested, had transformed the economic role of climate. The key changes included a growth in the numbers of pensioned retirees; an increase in trade and service employment, much more "footloose" than agriculture or manufacturing was; developments in technology making manufacturing itself more footloose; and a great increase in mobility brought about by the automobile and the highway. All in one way or another had weakened the bonds of place and made Americans far freer than before to choose where to live. Whatever qualities made life in any spot particularly pleasant thus attracted migration more than in the past. Ullman grouped such qualities together as "amenities." They ranged from mountains to beaches to cultural attractions, but climate appeared to be the most important, not least because it was key to the enjoyment of many of the rest. Ullman did not suppose that all Americans desired the same climate. For most people, in this as in other respects, "where one was born and lives is the best place in the world, no matter how forsaken a hole it may appear to an outsider."

W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and the City: The Philadelphia Negro and Its Legacy

2001 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 227
Author(s):  
David Levering Lewis ◽  
Michael B. Katz ◽  
Thomas J. Sugrue
Keyword(s):  
Du Bois ◽  
The Philadelphia Negro ◽  
The City
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