Pedagogies of Protest: African American Teachers and the History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1940–1963

2011 ◽  
Vol 113 (12) ◽  
pp. 2777-2803 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Baker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Teachers ◽  
Black Educators ◽  
The South ◽  
Student Protest ◽  
African American Teachers ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
Extracurricular Programs

Background/Context Although the dominant narrative of the civil rights movement marginalizes the role of black educators, revisionist scholars have shown that a significant number of black teachers encouraged student protest and activism. There has, however, been little analysis of the work of black teachers inside segregated schools in the South. Purpose/Objective This study examines the courses that Southern African American teachers taught, the pedagogies they practiced, and the extracurricular programs they organized. Using Charleston's Burke Industrial School as a lens to illuminate pedagogies of protest that were practiced by activist educators in the South, this study explores how leading black educators created spaces within segregated schools where they bred dissatisfaction with white supremacy. Research Design This historical analysis draws upon archival sources, school board minutes, school newspapers and yearbooks, oral testimony, and autobiographies. Conclusions/Recommendations In Charleston, as elsewhere in the South, activist African American teachers made crucial contributions to the civil rights movement. Fusing an activist version of the African American uplift philosophy with John Dewey's democratic conception of progressive education, exemplary teachers created academic and extracurricular programs that encouraged student protest. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the 1960s, students acted on lessons taught in classes and extracurricular clubs, organizing and leading strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations. The pedagogies that leading African American educators practiced, the aspirations they nurtured, and the student activism they encouraged helped make the civil rights movement possible.

Paul Bunyan and the “Frozen Logger”

2020 ◽  
pp. 180-240
Author(s):  
Michael Goldfield
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The Other ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
Wood Industry ◽  
National Office

Chapter 5 highlights the wood industry, one of the largest industries in the country. Most of the woodworkers were located in the South, and half of those workers were African-American. Woodworkers successfully organized in the Northwest and Canada, the other two centers of the industry. Despite a perceived willingness of southern woodworkers to unionize, this did not happen. The chapter attributes most of the problems to an incompetent, right-wing, racially backward leadership, which was installed by the CIO national office before World War II. The chapter also argues that the successful organization of southern woodworkers had the potential to radically transform the civil rights movement.

Desegregating Dixie

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Newman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Secular Change ◽  
The South ◽  
Black Schools ◽  
Black Catholics ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Church

This book draws on a vast range of archives and many interviews to uncover for the first time the multifaceted and complex response of African American and white Catholics across the South to desegregation. In the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the southern Catholic Church contributed to segregation by confining Africans Americans to the back of white churches and black schools and churches. However, papal adoption and dissemination of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ in the mid-1940s, pressure from some black and white Catholics and secular change brought by the civil rights movement, sometimes with federal support, increasingly led the Church to address racial discrimination behind and outside its walls. Far from monolithic, white Catholics in the South divided between a moderate segregationist majority and minorities of hard-line segregationists and progressive racial egalitarians. While some bishops felt no discomfort with segregation, prelates appointed from the late 1940s tended to be more supportive of religious and secular change. Some bishops in the peripheral South began segregation before or in anticipation of secular change, while elsewhere, and especially in the Deep South, they often tied Catholic to secular desegregation. African American Catholics were diverse and more active in the civil rights movement than often assumed. While some black Catholics challenged racism in the Church, many were conflicted about the manner of Catholic desegregation generally imposed by closing black institutions. Tracing its impact through the early 1990s, Newman reveals how desegregation seldom brought integration.

Early Struggles

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sid Bedingfield
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Insurance Industry ◽  
The South ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
History Of ◽  
White Supremacists

This chapter introduces John Henry McCray, the young African-American editor whose newspaper would play a key role in reviving civil rights activism in the South Carolina. Raised in Lincolnville, an all-black village near Charleston, South Carolina, McCray gave up a relatively comfortable insurance-industry job to launch a newspaper in 1935. He teamed up with NAACP activists and used his newspaper to battle conservative forces in the black community who wanted to “accommodate” white supremacist rule. The chapter details the history of “accommodationism,” which re-gained strength in South Carolina after white supremacists crushed a nascent civil rights movement in the early 1920s.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 269-276
Author(s):  
Mark Newman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Secular Change ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
The South ◽  
American Catholic ◽  
The Catholic Church

Prelates appointed by the Vatican before the 1940s were more reluctant or cautious than later episcopal appointments regarding desegregation. Now screened for their racial attitudes by the apostolic delegate and with more exposure to Mystical Body teachings, prelates appointed when the civil rights movement achieved increasing success faced a more pressing issue than their predecessors that they could less easily avoid, down play, or slow peddle. Secular change, federal financial imperatives, the American Catholic hierarchy’s endorsement of desegregation and the efforts of progressive African American and white laity in the South exerted a growing pressure on ordinaries to act, but desegregation mostly involved closing black Catholic institutions. Most southern white Catholics no longer publicly defended or supported segregation, but many did not embrace racial integration based on inclusiveness, reciprocity and mutual understanding. The Catholic Church desegregated its institutions, but, for the most part, it had not truly integrated them.

Not as It Is Written

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
International Exhibition ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Made In

This article discusses an international exhibition that detailed the recent history of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Methodologically, the exhibition paired oral history excerpts with selected historic photographs to evoke a sense of Black life during the twentieth century. Thematically, showcasing the Black experience in Pittsburgh provided a chance to provoke among a wider public more nuanced understandings of the civil rights movement, an era particularly prone to problematic and superficial misreadings, but also to interject an African American perspective into the scholarship on deindustrializing cities, a literature which treats racism mostly in white-centric terms. This essay focuses on the choices made in reconciling these thematic and methodological dimensions when designing this exhibition.

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