New Directions

2018 ◽  
pp. 144-168
Author(s):  
Elaine Allen Lechtreck
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Catholic Bishop ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Sanitation Workers ◽  
Bobby Seale

This chapter depicts directions far removed from the nonviolent civil rights movement. It includes the rhetoric and actions of New Leaders such as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale, and James Forman, descriptions of incendiary riots, ministerial responses to the riots, the efforts of Rev. Frank McRae to end the Sanitation Workers Strike in Memphis, King’s assassination, and the dramatic Demand for Reparations. Significant were the responses to the events from Episcopal Bishop John Hines, Rev. Dr. Ralph Sockman, John Morris of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU), W. W. Finlator, Rev. Ed King, and Rabbi James Wax. Also significant were the transformation of Roman Catholic Bishop Joseph Durick, the changes in the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC), and the new directions of Will Campbell who began to see that the racist was perhaps the greatest challenge of the day.

Integration or Separation? Malcolm X’s College Debates, Free Speech, and the Challenge to Racial Liberalism on Campus

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 1033-1059
Author(s):  
Garrett Felber
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Cumulative Effect ◽  
Youth Participation ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Nation Of Islam ◽  
Student Union ◽  
Racial Liberalism

Abstract Malcolm X participated in over thirty speaking engagements at prominent colleges and universities between 1960 and 1963. His popularity on campuses coincided with a new epoch of civil rights struggle as students became involved in Freedom Rides and sit-in campaigns to desegregate lunch counters and interstate travel. Most invitations were debates on the topic “Integration or Separation?” which pitted Malcolm against an integrationist opponent. The insertion of racial separatism into a discourse that took integration as an unquestioned aim of the movement pushed students to question and defend their own understandings of racial liberalism. Nearly a dozen invitations were extended by NAACP student chapters that had been revitalized amid the new flurry of student involvement. Years before the founding of the first Black Student Union (BSU) at San Francisco State, these chapters were far more ideologically diverse and active than their forbearers, and often invited Malcolm X to speak out of a commitment to students’ rights to free speech and academic freedom. When administrations blocked and cancelled his visits, students became politicized around issues of academic liberties, thereby situating the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X at the nexus of early debates within the student free speech movement. These became part of the early challenge to university paternalism. While these debates and lectures have often been discussed individually, this essay looks at their cumulative effect by situating them during the emergence of student radicalism on campus and the growth of youth participation in the civil rights movement.

Does the Movement Need a King?

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 465-470 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER J. LING
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
Cornel West ◽  
Martin Luther King

Not every book sent for review comes with two pages of endorsements from the great and the good. Stokely is accompanied by glowing approval from such familiar names as Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, Robin D. G. Kelley, Michael Eric Dyson, Gerald Horne, Charles Oglethorpe, and David Levering Lewis. Even without the para-textual apparatus to guide one's judgement, however, there is enough in this biography of Stokely Carmichael for any scholar of the civil rights movement to relish. This may not be the “definitive biography” that John Stauffer declares it to be, but it is indisputably important. In essence, Joseph argues that Stokely is the missing panel in a triptych of heroes, flanked on either side by the already canonized Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. In key respects, he insists, Stokely was the synthesis of Malcolm and Martin.

Beginnings

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-48
Author(s):  
Johanna Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Black Panthers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Federal Housing ◽  
Young Lords ◽  
The City

In 1968, José “Cha Cha” Jiménez sat in solitary confinement wrestling with his record of recidivism. He was the leader of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican and Mexican gang, which he’d joined to survive Chicago’s mean streets. But his life was about to change. Like other Puerto Rican, Mexican and black American youth, Cha Cha’s people were recent migrants to the city who’d been displaced by urban renewal— structural racism in the form federal housing policy —which forced them to settle in densely populated blocks on the edges of white ethnic neighborhoods. Outnumber, they faced hostility, reaction, and even terror from white resident who resented their presence in Chicago. But with the new confidence produced by the civil rights movement, street organizations like the Young Lords desegregated public spaces with brawn and asserted the rights of racialized people to the city. The social movements also opened up possibilities for self-transformation. Like Malcolm X, Cha Cha was politicized in prison. He transformed the gang into the Black Panthers’ Puerto Rican counterpart—a herculean feat made possible by a series of unforeseen circumstances and conscious interventions, including that of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and his Rainbow Coalition.

James Baldwin’s Apocalypse

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Dan Sinykin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Ishmael Reed ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Sun Ra ◽  
Economic Liberalism ◽  
Aesthetic Form

In the 1970s, critics asked, what happened to James Baldwin? In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin called for a moral revolution in which each American would radically transform and save America from racial warfare. A decade later, in No Name in the Street, Baldwin delivered an analysis of the failures of economic liberalism that heralded a generic shift in his literary career, transforming him from a prophet of the jeremiad—the nationalist holding out hope for American exceptionalism through individual reformation—to an apocalyptic visionary. The chapter shows how Baldwin’s apocalyptic turn—yet unregistered in the scholarship—emerged from a milieu of apocalypticism among black writers and artists in the mid- to late 1960s, including Amiri Baraka, Sun Ra, Ishmael Reed, and Malcolm X, all searching for an aesthetic form to solve a problem of political agency for black Americans in the wake of the civil rights movement.

scholarly journals The Warrior and the Poet

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-121
Author(s):  
Nicholas Binford
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Martin Luther King

Artists, scholars, and popular media often describe James Baldwin as revolutionary, either for his written work or for his role in the civil rights movement. But what does it mean to be revolutionary? This article contends that thoughtlessly calling James Baldwin revolutionary obscures and erases the non-revolutionary strategies and approaches he employed in his contributions to the civil rights movement and to race relations as a whole. Frequent use of revolutionary as a synonym for “great” or “important” creates an association suggesting that all good things must be revolutionary, and that anything not revolutionary is insufficient, effectively erasing an entire spectrum of social and political engagement from view. Baldwin’s increasing relevance to our contemporary moment suggests that his non-revolutionary tactics are just as important as the revolutionary approaches employed by civil rights leaders such as Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, Jr.

Organizational Opportunity and Social Movement Mobilization: A Comparative Analysis of Four Religious Movements

1998 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Kurzman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Movement Mobilization

When do nonactivist organizations become committed to social movement goals? Building on critiques of the "iron law of oligarchy," this article develops and tests the concept of organizational opportunity, analogous to political opportunity. It divides the concept along two dimensions, the attitudes and authority of organizational leaders. The article examines organizational opportunity in four religious organizations and the social movements that challenged their political quiescence: the civil rights movement in the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc.; Liberation Theology in the Latin American Roman Catholic Church; the Iranian revolutionary movement in the Shi`i Muslim ruhaniyat; and prodemocracy activism in the Burmese Buddhist sangha. Activist mobilization of these organizations since the 1950s and 1960s appears to be strongly related to variation in organizational opportunity.

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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