Braving Jim Crow to Save Willie McGee: Bella Abzug, the Legal Left, and Civil Rights Innovation, 1948–1951

2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (04) ◽  
pp. 1003-1041 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leandra Zarnow
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Legal Consciousness ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Legal Argument ◽  
Indelible Mark ◽  
Rape Case

This article considers the role of Bella Abzug, lead counsel for Willie McGee from 1948–1951, in shaping the defense of this Cold War era Mississippi rape case. Representing McGee left an indelible mark on Abzug: she made her first trip south, wrote her first Supreme Court petition, and faced her first death threat. Participation in the Left legal bar—especially the National Lawyers Guild and Left feminist circles—shaped Abzug's legal consciousness as she redirected the McGee defense significantly in 1950. By joining race and sex, Abzug's legal argument zeroed in on the taboo of interracial sexual relations at the heart of Southern rape cases, thereby exposing the innermost sexual color line. She urged the courts and cause lawyers—albeit unsuccessfully—to pursue a more radical civil rights agenda than outlawing public segregation, as ultimately achieved in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and typically recognized in Cold War civil rights scholarship.

“These Women Really Did the Work”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lucander
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Food Service ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Color Line ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Access To Food

This chapter describes a series of sit-ins during 1944. Led by largely forgotten African American women, this interracial direct-action campaign sought to challenge the color line at department-store lunch counters. Integrating, or at least improving, access to food service at major downtown retailers was an important step in the process of breaking down elements of Jim Crow segregation in St. Louis. That same year, the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) shifted its attention toward obtaining and retaining jobs for black workers in publicly funded workplaces. Gaining access to jobs operating switchboards and in the local administration of Southwestern Bell Telephone offices was presented as a stride toward securing sustainable employment for a largely female contingent of working-class African Americans who wanted long-term white- and pink-collar employment. This sort of local women's activism, juxtaposed against national men's leadership, is consistent with a gendered pattern of activism in civil rights campaigns that persisted through the 1960s.

“Herself but Black”: Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, and the “Near Enemy” of Civil Rights

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-180
Author(s):  
Rachel Watson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Flannery O'connor ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
Jim Crow South

Rachel Watson takes up O’Connor’s role as a political thinker and writer by examining issues of racial hierarchy in O’Connor’s fiction and putting her work in conversation with that of Richard Wright. Watson notes that although O’Connor invokes the “manners” of the Jim Crow South, she does not offer a sentimental or abject form of pity for her characters, regardless of their race. It is in this pity, so often connected with Cold War totalitarianism, that Watson finds a connection between the work of Flannery O’Connor and Richard Wright. This chapter shows the commonality between two authors whose work had previously seemed disparate, as Watson highlights their mutual fear of a racial and economic hegemony. 

Divided by Law: The Sit-ins and the Role of the Courts in the Civil Rights Movement

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Court Ruling ◽  
Supreme Court Ruling ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations ◽  
Student Control

A central goal of the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960, the protests that launched the direct-action phase of the Civil Rights Movement, was to give new meaning to the very idea of “civil rights.” To the students who took part in the protests, civil rights work entailed litigation and lobbying. It required relying on the older generation of civil rights activists and working through established civil rights organizations. It meant surrendering student control over the demonstrations. And, as the great unrealized promise of the then 6-year-old Supreme Court ruling inBrown v. Board of Educationmade painfully clear, it meant patience. For the thousands of students who joined the sit-in movement, reliance on their elders, litigation, and patience—the stuff of civil rights, traditionally understood—was precisely what they wanted to avoid.

A Cold War Cold Case: What Huldah Clark Can Teach Us about Teaching Soviet History

Slavic Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-306
Author(s):  
Brigid O'Keeffe
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Black American ◽  
Short Article ◽  
Soviet History ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Nikita Khrushchev

This short article reconstructs the forgotten story of Huldah Clark, a Black American teenager who studied in Moscow in the years 1961–1964 on a scholarship offered her by Nikita Khrushchev. It deploys her story to explore the complexities of Cold War racial politics and how ordinary people mobilized the superpowers’ competing slogans in creative ways. It shows how ordinary Black Americans found hope and even tangible support in Khrushchev's Soviet Union as they struggled for civil rights at home and sought avenues for asserting Black power and anti-racist protest on the global stage. Whereas the historiography on Black American sojourners to the USSR has focused on the interwar period, this article shows how the avowed Soviet commitment to racial equality and global anti-racism still had the power to inspire ordinary Black Americans in their struggle against Jim Crow and in their global pursuit of Black liberation.

Psychoanalysis and anti-racism in mid-20th-century America: An alternative angle of vision

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110427
Author(s):  
Tom Fielder
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
History Of

The conventional historiography of psychoanalysis in America offers few opportunities for the elaboration of anti-racist themes, and instead American ‘ego psychology’ has often been regarded as the most acute exemplar of ‘racist’ psychoanalysis. In this article, consistent with the historiographical turn Burnham first identified under the heading of ‘the New Freud Studies’, I distinguish between histories of psychoanalytic practitioners and histories of psychoanalytic ideas in order to open out an alternative angle of vision on the historiography. For psychoanalytic ideas were in fact omnipresent within American culture at mid-century, and they played a fundamental role in the psychological reworking of race that unfolded in the work of social scientists, literary artists, and cultural critics in the 1940s and early Cold War years, culminating in the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954, a major landmark in the civil rights narrative. By pursuing the implications of psychoanalysis in anti-racist struggles at mid-century, and with particular attention to Richard Wright and his autobiographical novel Black Boy, I move towards unearthing an alternative historical account of the intersection between psychoanalysis and race, which offers new ways for psychoanalysis and the history of the human sciences to think about this period.

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