Civil Rights, Free Speech, and Group Libel

2016 ◽  
pp. 65-101
Author(s):  
Cheryl Greenberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
The United States ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
World War ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
The Absolute

This chapter examines the contrasting efforts of organizations representing two marginalized groups, blacks and Jews, to counter defamation. In the end, civil rights advocates from both groups came to the conclusion, on a mixture of principled and pragmatic grounds, that it was wiser not to push for adoption of laws against “group libel,” such as those that characterize post-Holocaust Europe and Canada. Yet both groups were forced to wrestle with how to organize and justify protest campaigns against bigoted media representations, including threats of economic reprisals, while refuting charges of censorship. The chapter shows that the absolute embrace of free speech in the United States after World War II was far from inevitable.

Post-1965 Changes in Asian America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Hinnershitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian Immigrants ◽  
World War ◽  
Chinese Exclusion ◽  
The 1960S

After World War II and through the 1960s, Asian Americans began a transformative process, from being the “yellow peril” to becoming the model minority, and Asian Americans in the South experienced, to some degree, the same transformation. The war and its mottos of fighting for freedom and democracy at home and abroad affected the way Americans viewed their own hypocrisy toward minorities in the United States. African Americans were the largest minority group to use the aims of the war to demand attention to their plight with Jim Crow, prompting the growth of a nationwide civil rights movement, but Americans also came to view the century-old forms of legal discrimination against Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in a new light. Not only did Congress repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 (making it legal for some Chinese to naturalize and allowing a small number of Chinese immigrants to enter the United States), but Filipino Americans and Indian Americans received similar treatment during and after World War II. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act (or the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952), although designed to protect American security during the early Cold War by prohibiting and deporting subversive aliens, also made it possible for Asian immigrants of all ethnicities to become American citizens (while the number of Asians admitted to the United States did not drastically increase). Americans also viewed the ability of Japanese Americans to overcome the massive civil rights violations of wartime imprisonment and achieve economic and educational success as a model for all minorities to follow. Asian Americans came through the fires of World War II and proved that they were loyal Americans and deserving of equal treatment and respect, and while more subtle and sometimes not so subtle forms of racism and discrimination ...

United States

2019 ◽  
pp. 346-353
Author(s):  
David Sorkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Defense ◽  
American Jews ◽  
World War ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter looks at how the Great Migration from eastern Europe made the United States a center of world Jewry. The Nazis' murder of most of European Jewry magnified that status. While the migrants and their children were citizens, their rights were restricted. Thus, in the period after World War II, American Jewry's civil defense organizations engaged in a concerted emancipation campaign. Jews collaborated with African Americans, Catholics, and other minorities to end inequality. That campaign succeeded: from the 1940s to the 1960s, state and federal civil rights laws, and court rulings prohibiting discrimination, dismantled the structure of inequality. Those events constituted American Jews' second emancipation: it positioned the immigrant's children and grandchildren to realize the promise of American equality.

A New Day? Revolution, Cold War, and Decolonization, 1950–1965

2021 ◽  
pp. 71-92
Author(s):  
R. Keith Schoppa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
General Success

In the aftermath of World War II, global realities seemed to have been grouped into binary formats: the United States and the USSR in a policy the United States called “containment” and included the establishment of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the Berlin Airlift, the Cuban Missile Crisis; and the Korean War. Violent decolonization rose for Great Britain in Malaysia and Kenya and for France in Vietnam and Algeria. Another chapter dichotomy was the general success of the civil rights movement in the United States and the concomitant strengthening of apartheid in South Africa.

From Honor to Dignity: Criminal Libel, Press Freedom, and Racist Speech in Brazil and the United States

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Hoffman French
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
The United States ◽  
Press Freedom ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Human Rights Organizations ◽  
The U.S

Reports on violence against journalists in Brazil have captured the concern of international human rights organizations. This article discusses a case involving another such concern: the use of criminal defamation laws in Brazil to punish journalists for criticizing public officials. At the same time, Brazilian media sources regularly report on crimes of racism, which most often involve derogatory name-calling and hate speech. By examining the intersection of these apparently contradictory concerns, this article sheds new light on speech rights in Brazil and the United States and argues that a comparative perspective is crucial to contextualizing and harmonizing free speech and its limitations under modern democratic constitutions. By considering the infusion of traditional notions of honor and status with post-World War II views of dignity, this article argues for a comparative consideration of how best to combat racism and whether hate speech regulation in the U.S. should be reconsidered. As such, the type of law often used to protect the powerful in Brazil could come to be used to protect the vulnerable in the United States and opens the possibility that the irony of free speech could become more than just a scholarly debate.

Women, Gender, and World War II

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa A. McEuen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Gender Norms ◽  
Work Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Wage Earners

The Second World War changed the United States for women, and women in turn transformed their nation. Over three hundred fifty thousand women volunteered for military service, while twenty times as many stepped into civilian jobs, including positions previously closed to them. More than seven million women who had not been wage earners before the war joined eleven million women already in the American work force. Between 1941 and 1945, an untold number moved away from their hometowns to take advantage of wartime opportunities, but many more remained in place, organizing home front initiatives to conserve resources, to build morale, to raise funds, and to fill jobs left by men who entered military service. The U.S. government, together with the nation’s private sector, instructed women on many fronts and carefully scrutinized their responses to the wartime emergency. The foremost message to women—that their activities and sacrifices would be needed only “for the duration” of the war—was both a promise and an order, suggesting that the war and the opportunities it created would end simultaneously. Social mores were tested by the demands of war, allowing women to benefit from the shifts and make alterations of their own. Yet dominant gender norms provided ways to maintain social order amidst fast-paced change, and when some women challenged these norms, they faced harsh criticism. Race, class, sexuality, age, religion, education, and region of birth, among other factors, combined to limit opportunities for some women while expanding them for others. However temporary and unprecedented the wartime crisis, American women would find that their individual and collective experiences from 1941 to 1945 prevented them from stepping back into a prewar social and economic structure. By stretching and reshaping gender norms and roles, World War II and the women who lived it laid solid foundations for the various civil rights movements that would sweep the United States and grip the American imagination in the second half of the 20th century.

Civil Rights

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Pollard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
World War

Civil rights are rooted in the English laws that tried to protect citizens from abuses by the state. As the United States matured as a democracy, so did its citizens. Since World War II, there has been a virtual explosion in the awareness of citizens to the diverse needs and rights of individuals that require protection. Citizen awareness and actions have truly moved the civil rights struggle beyond a focus on color. Greater attention is being paid to fundamental protection and expanded understanding of human rights and responsibilities.

Bones of Contention: China’s World War II Military Graves in India, Burma, and Papua New Guinea

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linh D. Vu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Papua New Guinea ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Chinese State ◽  
International Status

Abstract Exploring the construction and maintenance of Nationalist Chinese soldiers’ graves overseas, this article sheds light on post-World War II commemorative politics. After having fought for the Allies against Japanese aggression in the China-Burma-India Theater, the Chinese expeditionary troops sporadically received posthumous care from Chinese veterans and diaspora groups. In the Southeast Asia Theater, the Chinese soldiers imprisoned in the Japanese-run camps in Rabaul were denied burial in the Allied war cemetery and recognition as military heroes. Analyzing archival documents from China, Taiwan, Britain, Australia, and the United States, I demonstrate how the afterlife of Chinese servicemen under foreign sovereignties mattered in the making of the modern Chinese state and its international status.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document