Introduction: The Desegregation Dilemma

1995 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Armor
Keyword(s):  
School Districts ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
State Court ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
State Constitutions ◽  
Current Events ◽  
The City

Despite nearly four decades of controversy and debate over school segregation, the desegregation dilemma is still largely unresolved. The “busing” problem has received less national attention in recent years, and there are no riots, bus burnings, and school boycotts, as witnessed in earlier decades. Yet current events reveal the depth of a dilemma that has divided educators, parents, jurists, social scientists, and many other groups since the beginning of the civil rights movement. Indicators of the current desegregation dilemma are numerous. Hundreds of school districts throughout the country still impose busing for desegregation purposes, many under court orders that are now more than twenty years old. Although the types of desegregation plans have evolved to some extent, with increased emphasis on school choice, many plans still compel children to attend schools that their parents would not choose, solely for the purpose of racial “balance.” Further, after a period of quiescence, school desegregation was again the subject of several major Supreme Court decisions in 1991 and 1992. The decisions affected the length of time and the conditions under which a school district has to maintain a court-ordered busing plan. Although these decisions dispelled a common misconception that school systems have to maintain desegregation plans “in perpetuity,” it is still unclear how many school districts can or will end their busing plans. Finally, new desegregation litigation and controversies continue to surface. In 1989 a lawsuit was initiated in a Connecticut state court by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to compel desegregation between the city of Hartford and its suburban districts. A similar city suburbs desegregation strategy failed in the federal courts, but the Hartford lawsuit seeks to build on the success of school equal-finance cases under state constitutions. In 1991 the school board of La Crosse, Wisconsin, adopted a busing plan to equalize economic (rather than race) differences among schools. Reminiscent of the busing controversies of the 1970s, all board members who supported the busing plan were voted out of office in a regular and a recall election, reflecting the widespread community opposition to busing for the purpose of achieving socioeconomic balance in schools.

“If the March Cannot Be Here, Then Where?”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aram Goudsouzian
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Methodist Church ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
National Office ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The City

This essay examines the role of Memphis in the Meredith March against Fear, a demonstration for black freedom that moved through Mississippi in June 1966. James Meredith began his journey from Memphis and was shot by Aubrey Norvell, who hailed from a suburb of the city. In the aftermath of the shooting, Memphis hosted important events that not only determined the character and success of the march but also influenced the course of the black freedom struggle. The titans of the civil rights movement orated from the pulpits of Memphis churches and engaged in contentious debates in the rooms of the Lorraine Motel. Even as the march continued south through Mississippi, its headquarters remained at Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, which achieved James Lawson’s vision of an activist church driven by grassroots pressure and militant nonviolence. The city’s whites exhibited both hostility and accommodation toward black protesters, demonstrating both connections to and distinctions from the racial patterns of Mississippi. For the Memphis branch of the NAACP, the demonstration presented an opportunity to assert its historic strength, even as the march highlighted the complicated dynamics between local branches and the national office.

“Busing It” in the City: Black Youth, Performance, and Public Transit

2004 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Fleetwood
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Public Transit ◽  
Black Youth ◽  
Mass Transportation ◽  
The City

In the years following the Civil Rights movement, the specter of racialized, specifically black, youth as thugs became a symbol of postindustrial anxiety and disappointment. Much of the activity of the young on mass transportation, which is interpreted as expressions of delinquency, is actually a performative engagement with adults' anxieties and with the cultural trope of urban, racialized youth as deviant.

Accommodating the Forces of Change

2019 ◽  
pp. 109-125
Author(s):  
Matthew L. Downs
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
State Government ◽  
Private Investment ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Civic Leaders ◽  
Local Space ◽  
The City ◽  
Local Leaders

Matthew Downs explores the impact of Sunbelt-era federal development and the response of civic and commercial leaders to the civil rights movement, demonstrating how local leaders worked closely with government officials to attract and maintain such installations and the accompanying public and private investment. When federal officials and their representatives in the city made clear that southern intransigence on civil rights would adversely affect the local, space-based economy, Huntsville’s civic leaders modulated their approach to civil rights in the hopes of ensuring continued support. Such action was particularly surprising, given the overtly hostile response to the movement by Alabama’s other local leaders and the state government. While Huntsville was not without conflict, the presence of the federal government, combined with the threat that southern resistance might lead to a withdrawal of federal support, led the city to a more moderate reaction when the city’s local movement pressured for equality.

Some Black Broadcasters Spoke Concerning the Civil Rights Movement

2019 ◽  
pp. 93-104
Author(s):  
Bala J. Baptiste
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Black Press ◽  
The Other ◽  
Public Meetings ◽  
Core Member ◽  
The City ◽  
Martin Luther King

The verdict is mixed concerning the extent black broadcasters in the city provided interpretation of issues related to the modern Civil Rights Movement between 1954–1968. The black press, owned by African Americans and relatively independent, covered civil rights news locally and nationally. For example Louisiana Weekly in New Orleans provided quotes from speeches, such as those delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. The paper also published commentary concerning the movement. Nevertheless, broadcaster Larry McKinley produced programming targeting blacks. He was so moved by a King speech in 1957 that he attempted to join the rights group CORE, but could not "turn the other cheek." CORE representatives asked him to go on air and broadcast times and locations of rallies and other public meetings. McKinley also interview foots soldiers such as CORE member Jerome Smith who was terribly brutalized by white terrorists in Birmingham during the Freedom Rides in 1961.

Fighting for Total Person Unionism

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Bussel
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Union Leader ◽  
Urban Revitalization ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Labor Leaders ◽  
The City

During the 1950s and 1960s, labor leaders Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway championed a new kind of labor movement that regarded workers as “total persons” interested in both workplace affairs and the exercise of effective citizenship in their communities. Working through Teamsters Local 688 and viewing the city of St. Louis as their laboratory, this remarkable interracial duo forged a dynamic political alliance that placed their “citizen members” on the front lines of epic battles for urban revitalization, improved public services, and the advancement of racial and economic justice. Parallel to their political partnership, Gibbons functioned as a top Teamsters Union leader and Calloway as an influential figure in St. Louis's civil rights movement. Their pioneering efforts not only altered St. Louis's social and political landscape but also raised fundamental questions about the fate of the post-industrial city, the meaning of citizenship, and the role of unions in shaping American democracy.

Free at Last: Post-Katrina New Orleans and the Future of Conspiracy

2010 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 601-611 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALLISON GRAHAM
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
First Year ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Guest Workers ◽  
The Us ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The City

In the first year following Hurricane Katrina and the breaking of the New Orleans levees, the New Orleans-based Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of eighty-two workers from South and Central America who were stranded in the city. By 2008, the consequences of the regional reliance on slavecatchers began attracting global attention, most notably in the case of the eighty-nine Indian workers at Signal International's Pasacagoula, Mississippi shipyard. This essay explores the invocation of the American civil rights movement in contemporary transcultural dramas and the fact that another “universal” movement has been marching alongside new protesters, and demonstrates that the Free Trade movement in the US has been not only the cause of many current civil rights struggles, but also the beneficiary of the older struggle's very definition of its “cause.” New laborers in the Deep South – Latin Americans and Asians – find themselves not just homeless, but placeless post-Katrina. Black Americans who were shipped out of the city in 2005 to provide a “cleansed” urban area open to new demographics now find themselves in permanent exile, as placeless as their replacements.

From Metaethicist to Bioethicist

2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 369-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT BAKER
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American Military ◽  
City College ◽  
Military Involvement ◽  
The City ◽  
Science Epistemology ◽  
Ongoing Dialogue

I was the graduate student that Albert Jonsen so aptly describes. Bronx born and educated at the City College of New York, I emigrated to the Midwest to study at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, where May Brodbeck, Herbert Feigl and other “logical positivists” were engaging in an ongoing dialogue with postpositivists like Paul Feyerabend and Karl Popper. In this environment, I studied philosophy of science, epistemology, and metaethics—the epistemology and logic of ethical concepts and language. I even wrote my thesis on the ur-text of the metaethical turn, G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica. Then, like other epistemologists and metaethicists, “a public disaster, the American military involvement in Southeast Asia,” as well as the burgeoning civil rights movement, drew me into the sphere of public debate.

An Unseen Light

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Reign Of Terror ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

In An Unseen Light, eminent and rising scholars offer a multidisciplinary examination of Memphis’s role in African American history during the twentieth century. The city was at the epicenter of the civil rights movement on April 4, 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel. But the essays in this book broaden the scholarly understanding of the black freedom struggle in Memphis. In chronicling the significant events that took place in the city and its citizens’ many contributions to the black freedom struggle, they show how Memphis has been largely overlooked by historians of the civil rights movement. In this volume, the authors investigate episodes such as black political resistance to the 1917 lynching of Ell Persons and the 1940 “Reign of Terror,” when black Memphians experienced a prolonged campaign of harassment, mass arrests, and violence at the hands of police. They also examine topics including the relationship between the labor and civil rights movements, the fight for economic advancement in black communities, and the impact of music on the city’s culture. Covering subjects as diverse as politics, sports, music, activism, and religion, An Unseen Light illuminates Memphis’s place in the long history of the struggle for African American freedom

scholarly journals The Silence of Our Friends by M. Long & J. Demonakos

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Wenger
Keyword(s):  
College Students ◽  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black College ◽  
Black College Students ◽  
White Family ◽  
Reluctant Readers ◽  
The City ◽  
Southern University

Long, Mark & Jim Demonakos. The Silence of Our Friends. New York: First Second, 2012.  Print. This story is told from the perspective of a boy whose father was a reporter in the city of Houston, Texas. In the year 1967, in the midst of the Civil Rights movement many families struggled to find freedom in their racist communities.  During a police riot that had been started after banning an organizational committee from Texas Southern University, an undercover officer was shot.  Out of the 489 students that were attested, all but 5 students were released the next day.  Those five black college students were accused of killing a policeman. Set in a time of racism and segregation, two families struggle with the events of the riot. With the support of these understanding neighbours, a white family took a risk in trying to win back the freedom of the accused students. The artwork by Nate Powell has created powerful imagery that allows readers to place themselves within the setting and events of that period in history. The combination of historical story elements and graphic images may hook reluctant readers.  The graphic nature of the story is engaging and will educate students of a period in history often presented in more traditional formats. Recommended: 3 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Pamela Wenger Pamela Wenger is a 4th year teacher-librarian working between two schools in Regina.  She is planning to complete a Masters of Education in Teacher-Librarianship in April 2013.

Segregation Does Not Die Gradually of Itself

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Myers Asch ◽  
George Derek Musgrove
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Professional Associations ◽  
World War ◽  
Racial Change ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The City ◽  
Demographic Context

This chapter describes the post-World War II civil rights movement in Washington. The years between the end of World War II in 1945 and the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Bolling v. Sharpe were the most decisive period in the city’s history since the 1860s. Suddenly, it seemed, segregation in the nation’s capital collapsed, half a decade or more before similar changes happened elsewhere in the South. But segregation in the city had not died gradually of itself – it was killed by the concerted efforts of an interracial group of activists, parents, lawyers, writers, federal workers, and others committed to an egalitarian capital. These civil rights advocates seized upon Washington’s changing political, economic, and demographic context to push federal authorities to support racial change. By the end of the 1950s, the institutions of public life in Washington – schools, hotels, restaurants, theaters, recreation facilities, government agencies, unions, professional associations – were no longer racially segregated.

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