Students Writing Race at Southern Public Women's Colleges, 1884–1945

2010 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-203
Author(s):  
David Gold
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
White Women ◽  
Regional Identity ◽  
Women's Colleges ◽  
World War ◽  
State College ◽  
Property Owners ◽  
Mississippi State College

Scholars have long debated the complicity of Southern white women after the Civil War in helping create a racialist and racist regional identity and denying or delaying civil rights for African Americans. These studies have largely focused on the activities of elite white women property owners, club members, and writers. Yet few scholars have examined college women's activities in this regard, particularly those of the eight public colleges for women established in the South between 1884 and 1908: Mississippi State College for Women (MSCW) (1884), Georgia State College for Women (1889), Winthrop College in South Carolina (1891), North Carolina College for Women (NCCW) (1891), Alabama College for Women (ACW) (1893), Texas State College for Women (TSCW) (1901), Florida State College for Women (FSCW) (1905), and Oklahoma College for Women (1908). Little studied today, these schools served as important centers of women's education in their states, collectively educating approximately 100,000 women before World War II and with combined enrollments exceeding that of the Seven Sisters schools for many years.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Women ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Elected Officials ◽  
World War ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Massive Resistance

Massive resistance to the civil rights movement has often been presented as sequestered in the South, limited to the decade between the Brown Decision and the Civil Rights Act, and attributed to the most vehement elected officials and the Citizens’ Councils. But that version ignores the long-standing work of white women who sustained racial segregation and nurtured both massive support for the Jim Crow order in the interwar period and who transformed support into massive resistance after World War II. Support for the segregated state existed among everyday people. Maintaining racial segregation was not solely or even primarily the work of elected officials. Its adherents sustained the system with quotidian work, and on the ground, it was often white women who shaped and sustained white supremacist politics.

The Power of Racial Rape Myths after World War II

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Rae Flood
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Women ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Male Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
Geographic Boundaries

This chapter reveals how African American men and their attorneys challenged assumptions about black criminality and forced urban authorities to confront these assumptions during the postwar years, when the civil rights movement expanded nationally. By World War II, instances of lynch mob violence had decreased significantly, but the specter of interracial sexual violence continued to govern trial proceedings, even outside the Jim Crow South. Many Americans continued to believe that black men were sexual predators and likely perpetrators of rape if accused, especially but not exclusively, by white women. Thus, these men specifically asserted that the trial system they faced in Chicago mirrored a Southern system of (in)justice that had not yet fully abandoned lynch-mob violence. Although they were not successful in gaining acquittals, their efforts expand current understandings of racial discrimination and re-imagine the geographic boundaries of the criminalized black male body.

“A Woman's World”: The University of California, Berkeley, During the Second World War

2008 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 534-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Dorn
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Female Students ◽  
Home Front ◽  
University Of California ◽  
World War ◽  
Young Women's Christian Association ◽  
Christian Fellowship ◽  
The University

The fairer sex takes over and the campus becomes a woman's world. They step in and fill the shoes of the departing men and they reveal a wealth of undiscovered ability. The fate of the A.S.U.C. [Associated Students of the University of California] and its activities rests in their hands and they assume the responsibility of their new tasks with sincerity and confidence. —Blue and Gold, University of California, Berkeley, 1943During World War II, female students at the University of California, Berkeley—then the most populous undergraduate campus in American higher education—made significant advances in collegiate life. In growing numbers, women enrolled in male-dominated academic programs, including mathematics, chemistry, and engineering, as they prepared for home-front employment in fields traditionally closed to them. Women also effectively opposed gendered restrictions on extracurricular participation, filling for the first time such influential campus leadership positions as the presidency of Berkeley's student government and editorship of the university's student newspaper. Female students at Berkeley also furthered activist causes during the war years, with the University Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) serving as one of the most popular outlets for their political engagement. Historically rooted in a mission of Christian fellowship, by the 1940s the University YWCA held progressive positions on many of the nation's central social, political, and economic issues. Throughout the war years, women dedicated to promoting civil liberties, racial equality, and international understanding led the organization in its response to two of the most egregious civil rights violations in U.S. history: racial segregation and Japanese internment.

The Anti-Aryan Moment: Decolonization, Diplomacy, and Race in Late Pahlavi Iran

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-702
Author(s):  
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Cold War

In 1946, the entertainer and activist Paul Robeson pondered America's intentions in Iran. In what was to become one of the first major crises of the Cold War, Iran was fighting a Soviet aggressor that did not want to leave. Robeson posed the question, “Is our State Department concerned with protecting the rights of Iran and the welfare of the Iranian people, or is it concerned with protecting Anglo-American oil in that country and the Middle East in general?” This was a loaded question. The US was pressuring the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops after its occupation of the country during World War II. Robeson wondered why America cared so much about Soviet forces in Iranian territory, when it made no mention of Anglo-American troops “in countries far removed from the United States or Great Britain.” An editorial writer for a Black journal in St. Louis posed a different variant of the question: Why did the American secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, concern himself with elections in Iran, Arabia or Azerbaijan and yet not “interfere in his home state, South Carolina, which has not had a free election since Reconstruction?”

Black Soldiers in World War II America

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert F. Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Military Training ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Establishment ◽  
Black Soldiers ◽  
American Military ◽  
The Military ◽  
American Racism

The history of the African American military experience in World War II tends to revolve around two central questions: How did World War II and American racism shape the black experience in the American military? And how did black GIs reshape the parameters of their wartime experiences? From the mid-1920s through the Great Depression years of the 1930s, military planners evaluated the performance of black soldiers in World War I while trying to ascertain their presence in future wars. However, quite often their discussions about African American servicemen in the military establishment were deeply moored in the traditions, customs, and practices of American racism, racist stereotypes, and innuendo. Simultaneously, African American leaders and their allies waged a relentless battle to secure the future presence of the uniformed men and women who would serve in the nation’s military. Through their exercise of voting rights, threats of protest demonstration, litigation, and White House lobbying from 1939 through 1942, civil rights advocates and their affiliates managed to obtain some minor concessions from the military establishment. But the military’s stubborn adherence to a policy barring black and white soldiers from serving in the same units continued through the rest of the war. Between 1943 and 1945, black GIs faced white officer hostility, civilian antagonism, and military police brutality while undergoing military training throughout the country. Similarly, African American servicewomen faced systemic racism and sexism in the military during the period. Throughout various stages of the American war effort, black civil rights groups, the press, and their allies mounted the opening salvoes in the battle to protect and defend the wellbeing of black soldiers in uniform. While serving on the battlefields of World War II, fighting African American GIs became foot soldiers in the wider struggles against tyranny abroad. After returning home in 1945, black World War II-era activists such as Daisy Lampkin and Ruby Hurley, and ex-servicemen and women, laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.

After World War II

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Mayhew
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Energy Supply ◽  
Industrial Structure ◽  
Economic Planning ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Demographic Patterns

This chapter considers three impulses of the post-World War II era. Two of them deal with the economy, bracketing its course from an inspiration flowing out of the war through an ideological and policy retake a generation later. The other impulse covers one of the major developments of American, not to mention transnational, history—the civil rights revolution of those times. In the three impulses detailed here, economic planning devices, energy supply, the cities, travel, infrastructure, the tax code, industrial structure, the workplace, immigration, demographic patterns, the electorate, rights standards, and relations among the races, gained lasting imprints from U.S. government participation, among others.

Integration or Disintegration

2018 ◽  
pp. 127-161
Author(s):  
Malinda Maynor Lowery
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
School Integration ◽  
Court Case ◽  
World War ◽  
State College ◽  
Federal Recognition ◽  
Robeson County ◽  
Heritage Building ◽  
The Town

For Robeson County Indians, choosing the tribal name “Lumbee” for themselves was a monumental act of self-determination. The “Lumbee” bill in 1956 granted the Robeson County a form of official, yet limited, federal acknowledgement. In Robeson County, World War II sparked exposure, awareness, and change. At its zenith as an Indian place in the 1950s, the town of Pembroke was remarkable in the otherwise biracial South as its Indian residents continuously found new ways to make the place more their own. Some Indians opposed school integration because it meant sacrificing their distinct independence, control over their identity, and the primary institution—the schools—that had sustained the recognition of that identity for a century. Indians expressed pride in their heritage through their actions and words. With the court case Maynor v. Morton, Tuscaroras defied the federal government’s insistence that they were not deserving of federal recognition. The legal victory against double voting showed that Indians would not be silenced at the ballot box. Rebuilding the Old Main heritage building at Pembroke State College, creating Lumbee Homecoming, and opening Lumbee Guaranty Bank showed that Indians would continue asserting control over their own affairs and celebrating themselves.

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