Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Amanda Brown
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Psychological Transformation ◽  
Early Expression ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Howard Thurman

This chapter introduces the African American intellectual and theologian Howard Thurman and the physical embodiment of his thought: the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. The Fellowship Church, which Thurman cofounded in San Francisco in 1944, was the nation’s first interracial, intercultural, and interfaith church. Amid the growing nationalism of the World War II era and the heightened suspicion of racial and cultural “others,” it successfully established a pluralistic community based on the idea “that if people can come together in worship, over time would emerge a unity that would be stronger than socially imposed barriers.” Rooted in the belief that social change was inextricably connected to internal, psychological transformation and the personal realization of the human community, it was an early expression of Christian nonviolent activism within the long civil rights movement. The Introduction locates the Fellowship Church within its historical context and argues that, rather than being “56 years ahead of his time” as the SF Gate reported in 2010, the Fellowship Church was actually right on time—a distinct product of its historical moment and a provocative expression of midcentury liberal American thought.

The Fellowship Church

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Brown
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Psychological Transformation ◽  
Early Expression ◽  
American Intellectual ◽  
American Intellectual History

The Fellowship Church explores the evolution of the American religious Left through a case study of the African American intellectual and theologian Howard Thurman, and the physical embodiment of his thought, the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. The Fellowship Church, which Thurman cofounded in San Francisco in 1944, was the nation’s first interracial, intercultural, and interfaith church. Amid the growing nationalism of the World War II era and the heightened suspicion of racial and cultural “others,” the Fellowship Church successfully established a pluralistic community based on the idea “that if people can come together in worship, over time would emerge a unity that would be stronger than socially imposed barriers.” Rooted in the belief that social change was inextricably connected to internal, psychological transformation and the personal realization of the human community, it was an early expression of Christian nonviolent activism within the long civil rights movement. The Fellowship Church was a product of evolving twentieth-century ideas and a reflection of the shifting midcentury American public consciousness. This book explores a broad scope of modern historical themes, including the philosophy of pragmatism; mysticism and Christian liberalism; racism and imperialism; cosmopolitanism and pluralism; war and pacifism; and nonviolence. It not only expands our understanding of twentieth-century American intellectual history and the origins of the civil rights movement, it offers and exciting look into underexplored methods of democracy-building that can inform contemporary social movements.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ritterhouse
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
Human Welfare ◽  
Franklin Roosevelt ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

This chapter shows how race-baiting, red-baiting, and white southern liberals' own ambivalence made it impossible for a broad-based coalition to lead an ongoing fight for democratic social change, despite the large number of people who had come together at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) in 1938. Activists like Virginia Durr lobbied for anti-poll tax bills in the early 1940s without success. Meanwhile, New Deal policies gave way to mobilization for World War II, which favoured the South with defense-related and infrastructure spending but did not challenge the Jim Crow system. Black civil rights activists like A. Philip Randolph and the lawyers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the lead in a Long Civil Rights Movement that earlier efforts to bring change to the South had helped to make possible. Jonathan Daniels was never an activist but became increasingly supportive of civil rights initiatives after working as an aide to Franklin Roosevelt from 1943-1945. The chapter describes his wartime work and briefly traces the remainder of his career, including the reissue of A Southerner Discovers the South in 1970 and his death in 1981.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Lowney
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Black Music ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Jazz History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Through inquiry into influential Marxist, Black Atlantic, and African diasporic studies of jazz literature and jazz history, the introduction explains how Jazz Internationalism is distinguished by its historical scope and attention to multiple genres of jazz literature. This introduction outlines not only a history of Afro-modernist jazz literature that corresponds with the Long Civil Rights Movement, it also underscores the intertextuality of jazz literature as it evolves through several generations of black music and writing. While the primary purpose of Jazz Internationalism is not one of recovering obscure writers or texts, it does make the case for a more expansive understanding of jazz writing for both African American literary history and African diasporic studies more generally.

Bringing the Moon to Mankind

2019 ◽  
pp. 44-58
Author(s):  
David Miguel Molina ◽  
P. J. Blount
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Space Exploration ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Space Program ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

In chapter 3, Molina and Blount offer a contextualization of NASA’s interlocutory role throughout the long civil rights movement by mobilizing these three themes to analyze a series of archival and cultural artifacts. The authors first analyze the rhetoric deployed by the Poor People Campaign’s various mobilizations to show that the American space program was viewed with deep skepticism by the African American community and particularly within the context of ongoing struggles for black freedom. Second, they discuss the “distance” between the tropes of spatial disenfranchisement represented in the civil rights movement and the Moon missions to show how space exploration was portrayed as an acceleration of the marginalization of black spaces.

Trouble in My Way

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-160
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
University President ◽  
State University ◽  
Campus Environment ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Jackson State University ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the strained history of Jackson State University during the aftermath of World War II and leading up to the modern civil rights movement. Located in the heart of Mississippi, Jackson State students carved out space to express their militancy as the war came to a close. However, they quickly felt that space collapse around them as segregationists tightened their grip on the Magnolia State as the burgeoning movement for black liberation challenged the oppressive traditions of the most socially and politically closed state in the country. Administrators such as Jackson State University president Jacob Reddix quickly fell in line with the expectations of his immediate supervisors and squared off against outspoken scholar-activists such as famed poet and novelist Margaret Walker. The standoff resulted in a campus environment fraught with tension yet still producing students and faculty determined to undermine Jim Crow.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-234
Author(s):  
Kurt Edward Kemper
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
College Athletics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Medium Size ◽  
World War ◽  
Multiple Pressures ◽  
Economic Elites

Throughout much of the NCAA’s first half century, the organization maintained an uneasy collection of commercialized schools that pursued highly competitive athletics for publicity and profit; liberal arts colleges that saw college athletics as a component of their educational and leadership missions; and smaller and medium-size state schools that wanted to play athletics for competitive glory but lacked the size, resources, and finances of the big-time powers. Unable to balance those three interests, the NCAA largely ignored the concerns of the latter two while devoting itself to the service of commercialized athletics. This fraught arrangement finally came asunder in the years after World War II when multiple pressures from scandals, racial criticisms, and growing pressure for access to the NCAA Basketball Tournament finally forced concessions. The concessions made in the mid- to late-1950s, however, did not reshape the balance of power in the NCAA, as the organization remained wholly committed to serving the interests of big-time commercialized athletics. In this regard the challenges faced by the NCAA mirrored the larger social and cultural upheaval in the United States following World War II. The civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and opposition to the war in Vietnam all challenged the authority of existing political and economic elites yet did not mark any fundamental shift in power in American life. The question, then, is not really how did the NCAA manage to survive but, rather, how did its critics ever hope to succeed?

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.

Integration or Separation? Malcolm X’s College Debates, Free Speech, and the Challenge to Racial Liberalism on Campus

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 1033-1059
Author(s):  
Garrett Felber
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Cumulative Effect ◽  
Youth Participation ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Nation Of Islam ◽  
Student Union ◽  
Racial Liberalism

Abstract Malcolm X participated in over thirty speaking engagements at prominent colleges and universities between 1960 and 1963. His popularity on campuses coincided with a new epoch of civil rights struggle as students became involved in Freedom Rides and sit-in campaigns to desegregate lunch counters and interstate travel. Most invitations were debates on the topic “Integration or Separation?” which pitted Malcolm against an integrationist opponent. The insertion of racial separatism into a discourse that took integration as an unquestioned aim of the movement pushed students to question and defend their own understandings of racial liberalism. Nearly a dozen invitations were extended by NAACP student chapters that had been revitalized amid the new flurry of student involvement. Years before the founding of the first Black Student Union (BSU) at San Francisco State, these chapters were far more ideologically diverse and active than their forbearers, and often invited Malcolm X to speak out of a commitment to students’ rights to free speech and academic freedom. When administrations blocked and cancelled his visits, students became politicized around issues of academic liberties, thereby situating the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X at the nexus of early debates within the student free speech movement. These became part of the early challenge to university paternalism. While these debates and lectures have often been discussed individually, this essay looks at their cumulative effect by situating them during the emergence of student radicalism on campus and the growth of youth participation in the civil rights movement.

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