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.

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.

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.

African American Catholics in the South and Desegregation, 1945–1970

2018 ◽  
pp. 169-200
Author(s):  
Mark Newman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Educational Quality ◽  
Black Schools ◽  
Black Catholics ◽  
Community Institutions ◽  
Self Worth ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

Recollections from former students often present a positive appreciation of black Catholic schools primarily for their educational quality but also, in many cases, for their emphasis on self-worth and also, occasionally, on black culture and heritage. African American Catholics valued black schools and churches as religious and community institutions. Prelates generally sought to achieve desegregation by closing or downgrading black Catholic institutions. African American Catholics differed in their response. While some black Catholics reluctantly accepted such action as a necessary price for desegregation, others opposed these measures, upset by the one-sided nature of Catholic desegregation and inspired by the rise of black con consciousness in the second half of the 1960s. Some disillusioned African Americans, especially younger Catholics, left the church.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Scott L. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Caste System ◽  
The South ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Frederick Law Olmsted

The introduction explores why the South became known as America’s “most documented” region beginning in the 1940s and into the twenty-first century. It argues that documentarians saw the region as a fertile place to do fieldwork for two main reasons. First, the region possessed unique and seemingly fragile folk cultures in need of preservation before modern influences erased them. Second, the region possessed seemingly endemic problems associated with its racial caste system and agricultural economies that needed documentation, study, and reform. The introduction also provides an overview of how historians and theorists defined “documentary” throughout the twentieth century and how and why some black and white southerners resisted the intrusion of documentarians into their lives. Additionally, it traces the history of documentary fieldwork in the South from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century and demonstrates how the tradition’s dominant themes developed during this time, particularly in the travel writings and sketches of Basil Hall, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jonathan Baxter Harrison and others. Finally, it highlights the distinguishing features of twentieth-century documentary by emphasizing the role of Progressive and New Deal reform impulses, the Folk Revival and Civil Rights Movement, and the development of portable recording technologies.

scholarly journals Trends in Black-White Church Integration

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Q. Yang ◽  
Starlita Smith
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Americans ◽  
White People ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
The Church

Historically, the separation of blacks and whites in churches was well known (Gilbreath 1995; Schaefer 2005). Even in 1968, about four years after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. still said that “eleven o'clock on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week” (Gilbreath 1995:1). His reference was to the entrenched practice of black and white Americans who worshiped separately in segregated congregations even though as Christians, their faith was supposed to bring them together to love each other as brothers and sisters. King's statement was not just a casual observation. One of the few places that civil rights workers failed to integrate was churches. Black ministers and their allies were at the forefront of the church integration movement, but their stiffest opposition often came from white ministers. The irony is that belonging to the same denomination could not prevent the racial separation of their congregations. In 1964, when a group of black women civil rights activists went to a white church in St. Augustine, Florida to attend a Sunday service, the women were met by a phalanx of white people with their arms linked to keep the activists out (Bryce 2004). King's classic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was a response to white ministers who criticized him and the civil rights movement after a major civil rights demonstration (King [2002]).

Religious Frames: U.S. Civil Rights Movement

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis C. Dickerson
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Church ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The American South

Religion provided an intellectual fulcrum, institutional support, and leadership to the U.S. civil rights movement. Whether through the eloquent and influential articulation of nonviolence, the deployment of mandates and maxims from the sacred texts of the world’s “living religions,” or the personification of crucial leadership in Black and White clergy and laity, civil rights activism became as much a matter of mobilized faith commitments as secular pursuits for civil equality and justice. Moreover, scholarly discourse about the role of religion in the civil rights movement, especially where the factor of nonviolent is considered, suggests that the idea of a “long civil rights movement” stirred in the decades immediately preceding the 1950s and 1960s. The discovery in the 1920s and 1930s of Mohandas K. Gandhi and the relevance of his moral methodology of satyagraha and ahimsa energized conversations among African American religious intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s about how nonviolence could be harnessed to the principles and praxis of the Black freedom struggle. A succeeding generation of religious-based activists, both Black and White in the 1940s and 1950s, seriously reckoned with nonviolent ideology and concretized it as the principal tactical thrust of such organizations as the Congress of Racial Equality, founded in 1942, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), launched in 1957. Without the involvement of pivotal African American churches, clergy, and laity, the interracial vanguard of religious-based organizations would have been less effective. Their energies were dispersed across a spectrum of movements and initiatives. Without the crucial lawsuit, Briggs v. Elliott, the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of 1954 would have rested on a less certain legal terrain. The crucial activism of Rosa Parks, a Martin Luther King Jr. colleague and an active local officer in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Rev. King Solomon Dupont, respectively a leading layperson and a pastor in the African Methodist Episcopal Church; and Dupont’s protégé, Baptist minister C. K. Steele, helped in the success of bus boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama, and Tallahassee, Florida, in 1955 and 1956. The church-based leadership of James M. Lawson Jr. of the Methodist Episcopal Church’s all Black Central Jurisdiction, and King, the Baptist pastor and founder of SCLC married the Black church to nonviolent ideology across the American South through the 1960s. Even as the integrationist civil rights movement after 1966 increasingly occupied discursive space with a nationalist Black Power ideology, religious voices affected how this new insurgency was articulated. The publication in 1969 of James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power placed Jesus unambiguously on the side of the oppressed. Like Howard Thurman’s 1949 publication, Jesus and the Disinherited that showed Jesus’s experience as a poor and oppressed Jew in the Roman Empire, Cone demonstrated that if Black Power eschewed the intellectual resources of radical Black religion, it would be far less effective. Such local movements as Rev. Charles Koen and the United Front in Cairo harnessed Black Power to the traditional activism of Black churches.

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