scholarly journals We Might ‘Overcome Someday': West Tennessee’s Rural Freedom Movement

2020 ◽  
pp. 002200942096144
Author(s):  
Katherine Ballantyne

After white landowners evicted black sharecroppers in late 1960 for registering to vote, activists in Fayette and Haywood Counties organized ‘Tent Cities' in a bid to focus national media attention on their plight. Over the decade, it developed into a wide-reaching campaign for desegregation in public accommodations and education, welfare reform, voting rights, and sustained community improvement measures. This little-known episode significantly advances scholarly understanding of rural civil rights activism. Notably this story reveals complex dualities including: a local grassroots movement bolstered by a national framework of organizations and social networks; leadership on national, state and local levels; collaboration despite tensions along race, age, class and gender lines; coexistence of nonviolent strategies and armed self-defense; and varied initiatives demonstrating activists’ focus on local needs.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rachel (Rachel Lindsey) Grant

"Mary Church Terrell, Black female journalist and civil rights activist, stood in front of the United Nations board in Lake Success, New York, on Sept. 21, 1949, to present a brief on Rosa Lee Ingram. Ingram and her two sons had been sentenced in 1948 to life in prison after they were accused of murdering John Stratford, their white neighbor who attacked Ingram after her livestock ventured onto his Georgia property. As a mother of 14 children, Ingram believed she acted in self-defense, but the Southern justice of an all-white jury convicted her. In front of an audience of 75 people, Terrell stated: "Under similar circumstances it is inconceivable that such an unjust sentence would have been imposed upon a white woman and her sons." She went further in noting the role that both race and gender played in the Ingram case." -- Introduction


2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1740-1749
Author(s):  
Leke OKE

Globally, crave for sustainable development and increasing women participation in governance have been on unabated. This is premised on the belief that sustainable development is attainable where and when there is good governance and gender justice. Making use of library research and content analysis methodologies, the paper detailed in a systematic manner the missing link in sustainable development in Africa with particular emphasis on Nigeria. It analyses the current practice ofsextortion among the women in decision- making processes and leadership at the national, state and local levels and its impact on development. More so, the paper discusses the conditions that facilitate womens representation in decision-making processes within the context of the current socio-economic and political transformations. It also examines the linkages between womens presence in critical decision-making positions and sustainable development. The paper contends that most states in Africa are yet to attain development to be sustained. It blames the African leaders and the patriarchal states for the precarious pace at which the region develops. The paper concludes that sustainable development will remain a pie in the sky in Africa for as long as greed, self-centeredness and emperornic disposition of African leaders as well as mass poverty and infrastructural decay continue.


Author(s):  
James Hudnut-Beumler

From a national congressional map the political makeup of the southern United States appears to be solidly red, or Republican, with a few small urban blue, or Democratic, districts surrounding state capitols and major cities. At the state and local levels, however, contemporary religion and politics continues to be an interesting contest between remnants of the old civil rights coalition on the left and the family values coalition religious right. This chapter focusses on former Alabama jurist Roy Moore as an example of the religious right, on Rev. William J. Barber’s Moral Monday’s in North Carolina as a revival of the coalition politics associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., and on the remarkable stand of four Protestant and Catholic bishops in Alabama against making rendering humanitarian aid to undocumented immigrants a felony. The bishops won by appealing to the religious obligations to follow the teachings of their faith—to the frustration of some of their own coreligionists.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nihad El-Kayed ◽  
Ulrike Hamann

This article examines how state regulations, market barriers, racist discrimination as well as NGOs interact and create internal border regimes by enabling, as well as restricting, access to social and civil rights connected to housing and the freedom of movement and settlement for refugees. Our contribution builds on an analysis of federal and state regulations on housing for refugees who are either in the process of seeking asylum or have completed the process and have been granted an asylum status in Germany. The analysis aims to dissect the workings of these regulations in order to develop a detailed understanding of how these internal border regimes define barriers and access to social and civil rights. In addition to legal and regulatory barriers at the federal, state, and local levels, we identify several other barriers that affect if, how, and when refugees are able to enter local housing markets. We will examine these barriers based on an exemplary analysis of the situation in the cities of Berlin and Dresden, whereby we will apply concepts from border as well as citizenship studies to obtain a deeper understanding of the processes at hand. While contributions to the realm of border studies have so far mostly concentrated on national or EU borders, our approach follows recent literature that emphasises the need to analyse the workings of borders <em>internal to</em> nation-states but has so far not addressed local variations of the ways in which refugees are able to access their right to housing. In taking up this approach, we also stress the need to look at local dimensions of an increasing civic stratification of refugee rights, which past research has also conceptualised primarily on the national level. In both cities, we have collected administrative documents and conducted interviews with refugees, NGOs, and representatives from the local administration. Based on this material, we analyse the workings of administrative barriers at the state and local levels along with market barriers and discriminatory practices employed by landlords and housing companies at the local level. In most cases, these conditions restrict refugees’ access to housing. We will contrast these obstacles with insight into the strategies pursued by refugees and volunteers in their efforts to find a place to live in the city.


Author(s):  
V. V. Vagin ◽  
N. A. Shapovalova

The article is devoted to the actual issue – institutional analysis of initiative budgeting and territorial public selfgovernment, as well as the possibility of their integration. Over the past few years, a system of civil participation in budget decisions has been built in Russia, the regulatory framework of practices has been created, thousands of employees of state and local government bodies have been trained, project centers have appeared for ensuring development of initiative budgeting. Citizen participation in budget decisions can significantly accelerate the development of the lower level of local government. Initiative budgeting is an innovative instrument of public finance and at the same time a social technology allowing for the real involvement of citizens in the issues of state and municipal governance. Initiative budgeting development programs make it possible to transfer financing of projects aimed at solving local issues with the participation of citizens onto a systemic basis. The results and materials of this study can serve a foundation for theoretical understanding of the institutional development of public finances at the regional and local levels. At the same time, this practical area that was intensively developing in recent years requires deep institutional analysis.


Author(s):  
Susanne Schröter

The aims of Islamic feminism are at once theological and socially reformist. Its proponents are often activists, as well as authors and scholars. It is linked to democratic reform movements within the Islamic world as well as to civil rights movements in Europe and the USA, and is supported by actors who resist the advances of patriarchal religious positions as well as Western secular definitions of modernity. Unlike secular feminists, proponents of Islamic feminism see the justification for their fight for women’s rights and gender equality in their own interpretation of Islam’s sacred text, the statements attributed to the Prophet, and his supposed life circumstances. In addition, they draw on approaches taken from new Islamic historiography. This chapter deals with the foundations of Islamic feminism and its transnational political dimension, and asks in what national and local transformation processes its proponents were able to have an impact.


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