Assimilative Tendencies and Curricular Crosscurrents

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Gleason
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
National Organizations ◽  
American Society ◽  
Zoot Suit

Besides its massive impact on the institutional side of Catholic higher education, World War II affected the thinking of Catholic educators. We have already touched upon this dimension in noting how the war and postwar growth required them to expand their horizons and redouble their efforts in research, fundraising, and administration generally. Here we look more closely at how Catholics were affected by the great ideological revival of democracy that accompanied the war. This kind of influence was sometimes explicitly noted by Catholic leaders, as when Archbishop Richard Gushing of Boston called attention to the “neo-democratic mentality of returning servicemen and the university-age generation generally”; others recognized that it created problems since the Catholic church was so widely perceived as incompatible with democracy and “the American way of life.” We shall postpone examination of controversies stemming from this source to the next chapter, turning our attention in this one to the assimilative tendencies reflected in Catholics’ new appreciation for liberal democratic values, and to the major curricular concerns of the era which were also affected by the war. In no area did the democratic revival have a more profound long range effect than in the impetus it lent to the movement for racial equality and civil rights for African Americans. The publication in 1944 of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma marked an epoch in national understanding of what the book’s subtitle called “the Negro problem and modern democracy.” Myrdal himself stressed the importance of the wartime context, which made it impossible to ignore racial discrimination at home while waging war against Nazi racism. At the same time, increasing black militance, the massive migration of African Americans to northern industrial centers, and above all the great Detroit race riot of 1943—reinforced by the anti-Mexican “Zoot Suit” riots in Los Angeles the same summer—suddenly made the improvement of race relations an imperative for American society as a whole. By the end of the war, no fewer than 123 national organizations were working actively to “reduce intergroup tensions,” and the civil rights movement began a steady advance that led directly to the great judicial and political victories it won in the fifties and sixties.

Beyond Parish Boundaries: Black Catholics and the Quest for Racial Justice

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 (02) ◽  
pp. 264-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen J. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
Geographic Location ◽  
Black Catholics ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Black Equality ◽  
National Networks

Abstract According to most historians, the majority of northern urban Catholics before Vatican II (1962–1965) were ensconced in their parish boundaries, viewing their existence through the lens of the parish and focusing the majority of their attention on matters within their particular geographic location. As African Americans moved north during the Great Migration (1910s–1960s) and the racial dynamics of cities changed, some black Catholics began to organize for what they called “interracial justice,” a term that reflected their belief that black equality would benefit African Americans and whites. This article argues that the parish boundaries paradigm for understanding Catholicism prior to the reforms of Vatican II fails to account for the efforts of black Catholics working for interracial justice. This article considers four ways black Catholic interracialists moved beyond their parish boundaries: (a) the national networks they cultivated with white priests; (b) the theological doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ they used to support their work; (c) the local relationships they developed with non-Catholics; and (d) the connections they made with young white Catholics. By advancing this argument, this essay highlights the relationship between race and religion—both how the institutional Catholic church reinforced racial hierarchies and how black Catholics leveraged their faith to tear them down. Finally, this article reorients the history of Catholic interracialism by focusing on black laypeople and connects two bodies of literature that rarely comment on one another: that of Catholicism and the long civil rights movement.

scholarly journals Book Review: Black Power Encyclopedia: From “Black Is Beautiful” to Urban Uprisings.

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 193
Author(s):  
D. Singleton
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
African American History ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
American Society

The Black Power Movement was largely a youth-led effort that broke from past thinking and methods of confronting American society and marked an important evolution in how African Americans continued their struggle in the wake of hard-fought landmark legislation such as the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. There is no shortage of reference works on the Civil Rights Movement and African American history in general that include entries on facets of the Black Power Movement.

Atheism and Agnosticism

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
World War

Atheism and agnosticism among African Americans is a topic few scholars have explored and even fewer have explored in depth. The fact that roughly 90 percent of African Americans identify as believers, the role of religion in the Civil Rights Movement, and the ubiquity of religion in Black popular culture have made many scholars ignore a vital tradition of Black freethought, which includes atheism and agnosticism as well as nontraditional religious beliefs such as paganism and deism. Despite this scholarly neglect, freethought has been an important component of Black religious, political, and intellectual life from the 19th century to the present. Atheism was present among southern slaves and northern free Blacks as early as 1800 and grew more prominent during the late 19th century, which saw a greatly enhanced freethought movement more generally throughout American society. Key writers of the New Negro Renaissance, including Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, and Claude McKay, were atheists or agnostics, as were African American socialists and communists such as Hubert Harrison and Harry Heywood during the period between World War I and World War II. For these individuals, urban life helped to foster religious skepticism and their artistic, intellectual, and political commitments provided a sense of community with other skeptics that was lacking in rural southern communities or in regions such as the Caribbean, from where many Black migrants came to the United States. Contrary to popular and scholarly portrayals, atheism and agnosticism were likewise important components of the Civil Rights Movement, helping to shape the political thought and literary production of figures such as James Forman, Lorraine Hansberry, and James Baldwin. The end of the civil rights era would see the beginning of a new era for Black atheists and agnostics, especially with the institutionalization of Black freethought and the creation of organizations such as African Americans for Humanism, founded in 1989. While the number of Black atheists and agnostics remains a small proportion of the Black population in 2019, that number has doubled since the turn of the 21st century and more and more African Americans feel comfortable identifying as freethinkers.

The Reception of African American Literature in Prewar and Postwar Japan

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keiko Nitta
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The North

Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s gunboat diplomacy provided the Japanese with the first known opportunity to observe a major American performing art inspired by black culture: the minstrel show. The “Ethiopian entertainment,” held on the USS Powhatan, presented “Colored ‘Gemmen’ of the North” and “Plantation ‘Niggas’ of the South” to shogunate officials four times in 1854. While this performance initiated a binational cultural exchange, the 1878 tour of the Fisk Jubilee Singers was an epoch-making event; the group’s successful concerts, given in three cities, offered Japanese audiences their first opportunity to appreciate genuine African-American artistic pieces—spirituals, distinguished from blackface minstrelsy. The Japanese attitude toward African Americans at this initial stage was a mixture of pity and wonder. A growing self-awareness of Japan’s inferior status vis‐à‐vis Western nations, however, gave rise to a strong interest in slavery and racial oppression. The popularity of studies focused on American race problems since 1905, including multiple versions of the biography of Booker T. Washington, attests to prewar intellectuals’ attempt to define the position of the Japanese people by both analogy and contrast with African Americans. In the meantime, a partial translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), serialized from 1897 to 1898 in a liberal paper, the Kokumin, and a translation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) in 1921 paved the way for Japan’s introduction to the New Negro literature, the first major body of black writings gaining in popularity in the American literary market in the 1920s. Successive publications of works by W. E. B. DuBois, Walter White, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes in translation in the 1930s generated a distinctive artistic backdrop comparable to the American Jazz Age. Various authors of the era—from novelists to haiku poets—learned about literary motifs informed by blackness and began to elaborate their own racial representations to delineate the affectional substructure of modernity. Even though World War II briefly disrupted the expansion of the Japanese literary imagination through the creative inspiration of African Americans, a translation of Richard Wright’s Native Son within the year of the original publication (1940) signifies the persistence of interest throughout the war period. Indeed, defeat in 1945, resentment over the subsequent U.S. occupation, coincident remorse for their country’s imperial aggression, and anger at its eventual rearmament following the Korean War, in conjunction, reoriented postwar authors toward the development of black characters in diverse works over the following four decades. In addition, the civil rights movement facilitated studies in African-American literature in universities from the 1960s onward. Today, African-American literature is one of the most popular areas in English departments in Japan; one can find virtually every subject from the slave narrative to rap music in undergraduate course syllabi.

Promises to Keep

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald G. Nieman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Institutionalized Racism ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Us ◽  
Mass Protest

This book examines the influence of race in the development of the US Constitution and argues that African Americans have had a powerful influence creating constitutional rights. It examines the debate over slavery in the Revolutionary era and at the Constitutional Convention and how antislavery advocates, black and white, created constitutional ideas that promoted equality, and their role in ending slavery, securing adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and establishing civil rights protections during Reconstruction. By 1900, southern whites had reversed most of these changes through disfranchisement, segregation, and sharecropping, but African Americans continued to resist. Through organizations like the National Association for the Advancement for Colored People, they challenged segregation, discriminatory criminal justice, lynching, and disfranchisement. After World War II, the civil rights movement triumphed through legal victories (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education), legislation (the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act), and mass protest. Civil rights advocates won victories in the 1970s and 1980s challenging institutionalized racism, even though conservative political strength grew. However, from the 1980s to the 2010s, a conservative Supreme Court invoked color-blind constitutional principles to weaken civil rights protections. Continued economic disparities between blacks and whites as well as the war of drugs and mass incarceration undermined gains made by the civil rights movement, although new social movements like Black Lives Matter continued the quest for equal justice.

West of Jim Crow

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn M. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
White Schools ◽  
Black Bodies

This book follows California’s history of segregation from statehood to the beginning of the long civil rights movement, arguing that the state innovated methods to control and contain African Americans and other people of color. While celebrated in popular discourse for its forward-thinking culture, politics, and science, California also pioneered new ways to keep citizenship white. Schools, streetcars, restaurants, theaters, parks, beaches, and pools were places of contestation where the presence of black bodies elicited forceful responses from segregationists. Black Californians employed innovative measures to dismantle segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they borrowed some tactics from race rebels in the South, others they improvised. West of Jim Crow uses California to highlight the significance of African American resistance to racial restrictions in places often deemed marginal to mainstream civil rights histories. Examining segregation in the state sheds light on the primacy of gender and sexuality in the minds of segregationists and the significance of black women, black bodies, and racial science, in the years preceding the modern civil rights struggle. California has much to teach us about the lives of African Americans who crossed the color line and the variety of tactics and strategies employed by freedom fighters across the United States.

A Changing Workforce

2020 ◽  
pp. 210-236
Author(s):  
Jennifer A. Delton
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
National Association ◽  
Historically White ◽  
Right To Work ◽  
Workplace Rights ◽  
National Association Of Manufacturers

This chapter examines the overlap between African Americans' demands for jobs and conservatives' push for “right to work” laws. While compulsory union dues were very different from unions' exclusion of blacks, both movements targeted historically white unions and shared a language of workplace “rights.” Conservative “right to work” activists adopted the tactics of the civil rights movement and aligned themselves with blacks against exclusionary unions. Although this strategy failed to attract African Americans, it called attention to unions' historic and ongoing racism in a way that eventually divided the labor–liberal coalition. This dynamic is key to understanding the National Association of Manufacturers' complicated support for civil rights, equal opportunity, and affirmative action.

Fury in the “Promised Land”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Popular Narrative ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Willingness To Use

This chapter examines the development of comic rage after the civil rights movement. These works push back against the popular narrative of America’s colorblindness and that the 1980s initiated a period in which racism had ceased to exist. As part of a new artistic wave known as the New Black Aesthetic, these younger writers used their perspectives as the first post-integration generation to chronicle the new challenges facing African Americans. The unprecedented willingness to use humor as a central element in their work created a perfect site for comic rage to flourish and expand. The works that emerge focus on how cultural mulattoes—as many refer to the post-integration generation—attempt to achieve equality in a country attempting to assimilate them and erase the distinctiveness of their cultural traditions and identities.

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