scholarly journals “We Charge Genocide”: Revisiting black radicals’ appeals to the world community 1

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Helps
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Racialized Violence ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

In 1951, black radical William Patterson presented the United Nations with a petition, emblazoned with the title We Charge Genocide . The document charged the US government with snuffing out tens of thousands of black lives each year, through police violence and the systemic neglect of black citizens’ well-being. While historians have tended to discuss We Charge Genocide as a remarkable but brief episode, the petition built on prior attempts to invoke international law on behalf of African Americans and resonated with later generations of black activists whose political activism transcended more limited and domestic notions of civil rights. These later invocations of the genocide charge spanned the black left, including the Black Panther Party, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, James Baldwin and black feminists. This essay explores how the historical memory of racial violence, including settler colonialism and the slave trade, inspired an ideologically diverse array of organizations to each connect their experience to global histories of racial oppression. It stresses the internationalist and anticolonial perspective of the genocide charge and its proponents’ economic and transnational critique, thereby contributing to the historiographies of the long civil rights movement and black radicalism. By invoking international law, these black radicals connected the civil rights movement in the US to the struggle for human rights worldwide. Finally, the essay considers how integrating the local, national and global scales of racialized violence and its response enables historians to transnationalize the long civil rights movement paradigm.

Rooted

2018 ◽  
pp. 159-173
Author(s):  
Theresa A. Case
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Black Education ◽  
Federal Policies ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Stable Family

This chapter establishes the importance of African American shop workers to Texas railroad hubs such as Marshall, Texas, and explores black responses to the 1922 National Railroad Shopmen’s Strike. Newspaper sources reveal that, while some Texas black and white shopmen cooperated in the 1922 walkout, 216 black shopmen in Marshall dramatically broke with the town’s white strikers and the mass of white citizens who supported them: the 216 petitioned the US government and the Texas & Pacific Railway for protection of their return to work against pro-strike violence and intimidation. The chapter contends that the Marshall petitioners found encouragement not only in WWI-era federal policies and civil rights activism but also in the opportunities for black education and stable family life in Marshall. In addition, an earlier rejection of interracial labor solidarity by Marshall’s white shopmen may have played a role. How, in the aftermath of the strike’s defeat, black shopmen and their families related to each other, and to the town’s developing civil rights movement, is a question ripe for investigation.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Lowney
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Black Music ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Jazz History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Through inquiry into influential Marxist, Black Atlantic, and African diasporic studies of jazz literature and jazz history, the introduction explains how Jazz Internationalism is distinguished by its historical scope and attention to multiple genres of jazz literature. This introduction outlines not only a history of Afro-modernist jazz literature that corresponds with the Long Civil Rights Movement, it also underscores the intertextuality of jazz literature as it evolves through several generations of black music and writing. While the primary purpose of Jazz Internationalism is not one of recovering obscure writers or texts, it does make the case for a more expansive understanding of jazz writing for both African American literary history and African diasporic studies more generally.

Bringing the Moon to Mankind

2019 ◽  
pp. 44-58
Author(s):  
David Miguel Molina ◽  
P. J. Blount
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Space Exploration ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Space Program ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

In chapter 3, Molina and Blount offer a contextualization of NASA’s interlocutory role throughout the long civil rights movement by mobilizing these three themes to analyze a series of archival and cultural artifacts. The authors first analyze the rhetoric deployed by the Poor People Campaign’s various mobilizations to show that the American space program was viewed with deep skepticism by the African American community and particularly within the context of ongoing struggles for black freedom. Second, they discuss the “distance” between the tropes of spatial disenfranchisement represented in the civil rights movement and the Moon missions to show how space exploration was portrayed as an acceleration of the marginalization of black spaces.

National Review and the Changing Narrative of Civil Rights Memory 1968–2016

2019 ◽  
pp. 174-189
Author(s):  
Robert Greene
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Conservative Movement ◽  
National Review ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Constitution ◽  
Historical Memories ◽  
Martin Luther King

This chapter analyzes the National Review’s shifting narratives and historical memories of the contentious relationship between the modern conservative movement, Martin Luther King Jr., and the US civil rights movement. National Review writers largely opposed the civil rights movement up until the mid-1960s, casting Black freedom activists and their goals as threats to civilized order and the spirit of the US Constitution. Yet, the National Review would ultimately take on a leading role in reconsidering the conservative movement’s animosity toward King and civil rights—drawing parallels between conservative principles and civil rights claims, and even making fraught color-blind conservative claims to King’s legacy.

5. The iconic Socrates

2019 ◽  
pp. 103-114
Author(s):  
C. C. W. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
The Us ◽  
Intellectual Integrity

‘The iconic Socrates’ considers Socrates’ role as a gay icon and an icon for civil disobedience. In the Platonism revival of the Florentine Renaissance, the high-minded picture of Platonic/Socratic love focused on the spiritual and intellectual perfection of the beloved, but in an alternative ancient tradition Socrates was presented as a sexual enthusiast, with a penchant for attractive boys. The context of Socrates’ emergence as a major political icon of the 20th century was provided by the US civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement, but there is no evidence that Socrates ever actually espoused civil disobedience as a political ideology or performed any act of civil disobedience. Socrates remains a pioneer of systematic ethical thought and a paragon of moral and intellectual integrity.

Foundational Invocations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angélica Maria Bernal
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Tea Party ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Normative Authority ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
Constitutional Thought

This chapter examines appeals to the authority of original founding events, founding ideals, and Founding Fathers in contemporary constitutional democracies. It argues that these “foundational invocations” reveal a window into the unique, albeit underexamined function that foundings play: as a vehicle of persuasion and legitimation. It organizes this examination around two of the most influential visions of founding in the US tradition: the originalist, situated in the discourses of conservative social movements such as the Tea Party and in conservative constitutional thought; and the promissory, situated in the discourses of social movements such as the civil rights movement. Though they might appear radically dissimilar, this chapter illustrates how these two influential conceptualizations of founding together reveal a shared political foundationalism that conflates the normative authority of a regime for its de facto one, thus circumscribing radical change by obscuring the past and placing founding invocations and their actors beyond question.

The History of Personnel and Vocational Testing

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Zickar
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Reliability And Validity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Us Military ◽  
Technological Advances ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Vocational Testing

Personnel and vocational testing has made a huge impact in public and private organizations by helping organizations choose the best employees for a particular job (personnel testing) and helping individuals choose occupations for which they are best suited (vocational testing). The history of personnel and vocational testing is one in which scientific advances were influenced by historical and technological developments. The first systematic efforts at personnel and vocational testing began during World War I when the US military needed techniques to sort through a large number of applicants in a short amount of time. Techniques of psychological testing had just begun to be developed at around the turn of the 20th century and those techniques were quickly applied to the US military effort. After the war, intelligence and personality tests were used by business organizations to help choose applicants most likely to succeed in their organizations. In addition, when the Great Depression occurred, vocational interest tests were used by government organizations to help the unemployed choose occupations that they might best succeed in. The development of personnel and vocational tests was greatly influenced by the developing techniques of psychometric theory as well as general statistical theory. From the 1930s onward, significant advances in reliability and validity theory provided a framework for test developers to be able to develop tests and validate them. In addition, the civil rights movement within the United States, and particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, forced test developers to develop standards and procedures to justify test usage. This legislation and subsequent court cases ensured that psychologists would need to be involved deeply in personnel testing. Finally, testing in the 1990s onward was greatly influenced by technological advances. Computerization helped standardize administration and scoring of tests as well as opening up the possibility for multimedia item formats. The introduction of the internet and web-based testing also provided additional challenges and opportunities.

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