Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-25
Author(s):  
Emma J. Folwell
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Political Power ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
White Resistance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Black Empowerment

The introduction traces the intertwined history of racism and poverty in Mississippi and describes how civil rights activists used these experiences in shaping their fight for racial justice. It outlines the central argument of the book, explaining that from 1965 to 1973, there was both a war against poverty and a war against the war on poverty in Mississippi. The war on poverty provided a powerful tool for black empowerment, drawing on the vitality of Mississippi’s civil rights movement. At the same time, the fight against the war on poverty served as a template for white resistance and entrenchment, and as a way to undermine liberalism, marginalize black political power, and articulate a new conservatism.

The War on Poverty in Mississippi

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma J. Folwell
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
State Level ◽  
The State ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
Black Economic Empowerment ◽  
White Resistance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Antipoverty Programs ◽  
Black Empowerment

When President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty arrived in Mississippi in 1965, it was met with a ferocious response. The federally-funded war against poverty—the embodiment of 1960s liberalism—clashed explosively with Mississippi’s closed society. In the years between 1965 and 1973, the opposing forces of the war against poverty and a war against the war on poverty transformed the state. Through a state-level history of the war on poverty, this book traces the attempts of white and black Mississippians to utilize antipoverty programs to address the desperate poverty in the state. The war on poverty was, at times, a powerful tool for black empowerment. But more often, antipoverty programs became a potent mechanism of white resistance to black advancement. Through the war on poverty, both black activism and white opposition to black empowerment evolved following the momentous events of 1964. White Mississippians used massive resistance as a template for resistance to black economic empowerment, forging antipoverty programs into tools to marginalize black political and economic power. This book traces the grassroots war against the war on poverty that laid the foundation for the fight against 1960s liberalism, as Mississippi became a national model for resistance to social change through its evolving resistance to the war on poverty that lay at the heart of the emerging new conservatism. Many white Mississippians forged this resistance into the political, economic, and social structures of the state, contributing to the development of the state’s Republican Party and articulating a new conservatism.

You Can't Eat Freedom

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greta de Jong
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Free Market ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Political Empowerment ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
Mass Layoffs ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Relationship

Two revolutions roiled the rural South after the mid-1960s: the political revolution wrought by the passage of civil rights legislation, and the ongoing economic revolution brought about by increasing agricultural mechanization. Political empowerment for black southerners coincided with the transformation of southern agriculture and the displacement of thousands of former sharecroppers from the land. Focusing on the plantation regions of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, Greta de Jong analyzes how social justice activists responded to mass unemployment by lobbying political leaders, initiating antipoverty projects, and forming cooperative enterprises that fostered economic and political autonomy, efforts that encountered strong opposition from free market proponents who opposed government action to solve the crisis. Making clear the relationship between the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty, this history of rural organizing shows how responses to labor displacement in the South shaped the experiences of other Americans who were affected by mass layoffs in the late twentieth century, shedding light on a debate that continues to reverberate today.

Black Power in Philadelphia: Selective Patronage and the Effectiveness of Direct Action Protest

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 373-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Gammage
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Local Networks ◽  
The Core ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

Black Power during the 1960s is a shift in direct action protest with its aim at procuring power (economic, political, educational, etc.). The manifestation of Black Power in Philadelphia in the late 1960s provides us an elaborate model of direct action protest that included central components of the African American community. Moreover, the selective patronage movement successfully maintained organization and momentum without the prototypical one leader model that was prominent in the civil rights movement that preceded it. Much like the Black Lives Matter movement, the selective patronage movement in Philadelphia drew on the national outcry for racial justice but largely built the core of its strength on local networks. This article explores the history of the selective patronage movement in Philadelphia during the early 1960s. Next, it assesses the strengths and weakness of the movement. Lastly, it provides recommendations for future movements aimed at economic development.

Legal History and the Problem of the Long Civil Rights Movement

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (04) ◽  
pp. 1081-1107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

This essay offers a critical examination of use of the term “long civil rights movement” as a framework for understanding the legal history of the battle against racial inequality in twentieth-century America. Proponents of the long movement argue that expanding the chronological boundaries of the movement beyond the 1950s and 1960s allows scholars to better capture the diverse social mobilization efforts and ideas that fueled the black freedom struggle. While not questioning the long framework's usefulness for studying the social movement dynamics of racial justice activism, I suggest that the long framework is of more limited value for those who seek to understand the development of civil rights, as a legal claim, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. The tendency of long movement scholars to treat civil rights as a pliable category into which they can put any and all racial justice claims is in tension with historical understandings of the term. Susan Carle's Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880–1915 suggests an alternative approach. Her detailed and nuanced account of a period in American history when racial justice activists understood civil rights as a relatively narrow subset of legal remedies within a much broader struggle for racial equality indicates the need for an alternate history of civil rights—one that places the evolving, contested, and historically particularized concept of civil rights at the center of inquiry. “Civil Rights” is a term that did not evolve out of black culture, but, rather, out of American law. As such, it is a term of limitation. —Alice Walker (1983)

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.

Monumental Constructions: Statues, Identity, and Gabrielle Roy’s “L’arbre”

2021 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-117
Author(s):  
Holly Collins
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American South ◽  
Live Oak ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Significant Attention

Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans garnered significant attention for his book In the Shadow of Statues (2018), observing that many Confederate monuments were erected to buttress Jim Crow laws and serve as a warning to those who supported the civil rights movement. Likewise, there are a number of monuments in Québec that serve a particular political or religious purpose, seeking to reinforce a pure laine ideology. In this article, I explore the parallels between the literal and figurative construction and deconstruction of monuments that have fortified invented ideas on identity in francophone North America. Further, Gabrielle Roy’s short story “L’arbre,” which describes a “living monument,” tells the story of a racialized past in North America and unveils the falsities that have been preserved through the construction of statues that perpetuate racial myth. “L’arbre” examines the natural, unconstructed monument of the Live Oak: a tree that witnessed and holds the visible scars of the many terrible realities that took place in its shadows. I use Roy’s short story to show how she sought to deconstruct a whitewashed history of the post-Civil War American South and suggest that her broader corpus rejects determinism wholesale.

Introduction

Troublemakers ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Kathryn Schumaker
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Chicano Movement ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The introductionexplains how and why student protest became common in the United States in the late 1960s and places these protests in the context of shifts in the history of education and in broader social movements, including the civil rights movement, the Chicano Movement, and black power activism. The introduction also situates students’ rights within the context of children’s rights more broadly, explaining the legal principles that justified age discrimination and excluded children and students from the basic protections of American constitutional law. The introduction identifies the two decades between the 1960s and 1980s as a constitutional moment that revolutionized the relationship of students to the state. It also connects students’ rights litigation to the issue of school desegregation and the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education.

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