"What My Generation Makes of America": American Youth Citizenship, Civil Rights Allies, and 1960s Black Freedom Struggle

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 422-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Eckelmann Berghel
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Youth Citizenship

“If the March Cannot Be Here, Then Where?”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aram Goudsouzian
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Methodist Church ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
National Office ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The City

This essay examines the role of Memphis in the Meredith March against Fear, a demonstration for black freedom that moved through Mississippi in June 1966. James Meredith began his journey from Memphis and was shot by Aubrey Norvell, who hailed from a suburb of the city. In the aftermath of the shooting, Memphis hosted important events that not only determined the character and success of the march but also influenced the course of the black freedom struggle. The titans of the civil rights movement orated from the pulpits of Memphis churches and engaged in contentious debates in the rooms of the Lorraine Motel. Even as the march continued south through Mississippi, its headquarters remained at Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, which achieved James Lawson’s vision of an activist church driven by grassroots pressure and militant nonviolence. The city’s whites exhibited both hostility and accommodation toward black protesters, demonstrating both connections to and distinctions from the racial patterns of Mississippi. For the Memphis branch of the NAACP, the demonstration presented an opportunity to assert its historic strength, even as the march highlighted the complicated dynamics between local branches and the national office.

Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Greene
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
White Male ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are the names that come to mind for most Americans if asked about the civil rights or Black Power movements. Others may point to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, both of whom backed pathbreaking civil rights legislation. However, recent scholarship suggests that neither black male leaders nor white male presidents were always the most important figures in the modern struggle for black freedom. Presidents took their cues not simply from male luminaries in civil rights organizations. Rather, their legislative initiatives were largely in response to grassroots protests in which women, especially black women, were key participants. African American women played major roles in local and national organizing efforts and frequently were the majority in local chapters of groups as dissimilar as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Black Panther Party. Even familiar names like Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King have become little more than sanitized national icons, while their decades-long efforts to secure racial, economic, and gender justice remain relatively unknown. Aside from activists and scholars, even fewer of us know much, if anything, about the female allies of the black freedom struggle, including white southerners as well as other women of color. A closer look at the women who made enormous contributions to both the modern civil rights and Black Power movements sheds new light on these struggles, including the historic national victories we think we fully understand, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In short, examining women’s participation in the “long civil rights movement,” which historians increasingly date to the New Deal and World War II, calls for a redefinition of more conventional notions of leadership, protest, and politics.

Black Power and Black Theology in Cairo, Illinois

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerry L. Pimblott
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Church ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Moral Suasion ◽  
Over Time

This chapter argues that the thesis of Black Power's de-Christianization must be tested on the ground, with scholars paying attention to local struggles as they evolved over time, and in response to changing social and economic conditions. It follows the religious contours of Cairo's black freedom struggle from the 1950s to the 1970s to illustrate that while Black Power's reliance upon the black church was consistent with earlier campaigns, the United Front's theology nevertheless reflected a significant departure from the established Civil Rights credo. Whereas civil rights leaders expressed a firm belief in the redemptive power of Christian nonviolence and moral suasion to topple the walls of segregation, Cairo's Black Power advocates were less optimistic.

Hostile Heartland

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brent M. S. Campney
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
World War ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
New Research

Hostile Heartland examines racial violence—or, more aptly, racist violence—against blacks (African Americans) in the Midwest, emphasizing lynching, whipping, and violence by police (or police brutality). It also focuses on black responses, including acts of armed resistance, the development of local and regional civil rights organizations, and the work of individual activists. Within that broad framework the book considers patterns of institutionalized violence in studies of individual states, like Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas over a number of decades; it also targets specific incidents of such violence or resistance in case studies representative of changes in these patterns like the lynching of Joseph Spencer in Cairo, Illinois, in 1854 and the lynching of Luke Murray in South Point, Ohio, in 1932. Significantly, Hostile Heartland not only addresses the years from the Civil War to World War I, which are the typical focus of such studies, but also incorporates the twenty-five years that precede the Civil War and the additional twenty-five that follow World War I. It pioneers new research methodologies, as exemplified by Chapter 4’s analysis of the relations between and among racist violence, family history, and the black freedom struggle. Finally, Hostile Heartland situates its findings within the historiography more broadly.

scholarly journals Striking at the Sacred: The Violence of Prayer, 1960-1969

Open Theology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobin Miller Shearer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThis essay explores the complex relationship between public prayer and violence during ten years of the Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s and throughout the long civil rights era, activists who used the race-based, highly performative act of public prayer incited violence and drew the nation’s attention to the black freedom struggle. Study of the public prayers that led to violence further suggests that the introduction of prayer into public space acted as a conduit of moral judgment even when intended as a bridge of connection, a pattern that suggests the exercise of public prayer can be a catalyst for violence.

The Midwest in the Late Lynching Period

2019 ◽  
pp. 161-186
Author(s):  
Brent M. S. Campney
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom

This chapter uses a lynching in South Point, Ohio, in 1932 as an example of the changing nature of this type of violence during its twilight in the Midwest, a change described as “underground lynching” in the late lynching period. It sketches the contours of the lynching, white motivations, the initial black campaign for justice, and the trial. It then explores the black political and legal struggles for justice, including the roles of local and national civil rights groups like the NAACP. Next, it addresses the characteristics of underground lynching, as exemplified by the Murray lynching and similar lynchings elsewhere. Last, it considers its substantive and historiographical implications for Midwestern mob violence and the black freedom struggle.

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