“Herself but Black”: Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, and the “Near Enemy” of Civil Rights

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-180
Author(s):  
Rachel Watson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Flannery O'connor ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
Jim Crow South

Rachel Watson takes up O’Connor’s role as a political thinker and writer by examining issues of racial hierarchy in O’Connor’s fiction and putting her work in conversation with that of Richard Wright. Watson notes that although O’Connor invokes the “manners” of the Jim Crow South, she does not offer a sentimental or abject form of pity for her characters, regardless of their race. It is in this pity, so often connected with Cold War totalitarianism, that Watson finds a connection between the work of Flannery O’Connor and Richard Wright. This chapter shows the commonality between two authors whose work had previously seemed disparate, as Watson highlights their mutual fear of a racial and economic hegemony. 

Flannery O’Connor and the Fascist Business: Plurality and the Possibility of Community

2020 ◽  
pp. 140-161
Author(s):  
Alison Staudinger
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Flannery O'connor ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Political Thinker

Recognizing O’Connor’s relevance as a political thinker, Political Scientist Alison Staudinger puts O’Connor in dialogue with Hannah Arendt in order to explore O’Connor’s approach to fascism, a pressing subject in the author’s Cold War context, as well as in our contemporary political moment. By engaging Arendt, Staudinger examines O’Connor’s relationship with fascism on three levels—as the practice of the artist, as the worldview of some fictional characters, and as an approach to her personal friendships. Staudinger argues that while O’Connor sees the temptations of fascism, she finally rejects it as a totalizing denial of human plurality. Staudinger suggests that O’Connor falls short of depicting an earthly community that could accept this plurality, especially regarding racial equality; at the same time she points out that O’Connor’s fiction demonstrates how it is the country’s deep-seated racial hierarchy that makes it vulnerable to fascism.

Braving Jim Crow to Save Willie McGee: Bella Abzug, the Legal Left, and Civil Rights Innovation, 1948–1951

2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (04) ◽  
pp. 1003-1041 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leandra Zarnow
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Legal Consciousness ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Legal Argument ◽  
Indelible Mark ◽  
Rape Case

This article considers the role of Bella Abzug, lead counsel for Willie McGee from 1948–1951, in shaping the defense of this Cold War era Mississippi rape case. Representing McGee left an indelible mark on Abzug: she made her first trip south, wrote her first Supreme Court petition, and faced her first death threat. Participation in the Left legal bar—especially the National Lawyers Guild and Left feminist circles—shaped Abzug's legal consciousness as she redirected the McGee defense significantly in 1950. By joining race and sex, Abzug's legal argument zeroed in on the taboo of interracial sexual relations at the heart of Southern rape cases, thereby exposing the innermost sexual color line. She urged the courts and cause lawyers—albeit unsuccessfully—to pursue a more radical civil rights agenda than outlawing public segregation, as ultimately achieved in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and typically recognized in Cold War civil rights scholarship.

Crawford Long, Alfred Blalock, Louis Wright, and Georgia's Surgical Heritage

2016 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-94
Author(s):  
Don K. Nakayama
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
History Of Surgery ◽  
American Medicine ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Jim Crow South ◽  
Blalock Taussig Shunt

Georgia and the Atlanta area are associated with three important figures in the history of surgery. Crawford Long (1815–1878) discovered the anesthetic effects of ether while in practice in Jefferson. Born in Culloden, Alfred Blalock (1899–1964) was a pioneer researcher in shock and resuscitation, and developed the Blalock–Taussig shunt for Tetralogy of Fallot. His technician, African-American Vivien Thomas (1910–1985), was a full partner in the landmark advances. Louis T. Wright (1891–1952) was born in LaGrange and grew up in the Jim Crow South. As the country's leading black surgeon, he led the integration of major hospitals and helped lay the groundwork for the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s that integrated American medicine. Their stories, with roots in small towns in Georgia, reveal the deep surgical traditions of the South.

A Cold War Cold Case: What Huldah Clark Can Teach Us about Teaching Soviet History

Slavic Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-306
Author(s):  
Brigid O'Keeffe
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Black American ◽  
Short Article ◽  
Soviet History ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Nikita Khrushchev

This short article reconstructs the forgotten story of Huldah Clark, a Black American teenager who studied in Moscow in the years 1961–1964 on a scholarship offered her by Nikita Khrushchev. It deploys her story to explore the complexities of Cold War racial politics and how ordinary people mobilized the superpowers’ competing slogans in creative ways. It shows how ordinary Black Americans found hope and even tangible support in Khrushchev's Soviet Union as they struggled for civil rights at home and sought avenues for asserting Black power and anti-racist protest on the global stage. Whereas the historiography on Black American sojourners to the USSR has focused on the interwar period, this article shows how the avowed Soviet commitment to racial equality and global anti-racism still had the power to inspire ordinary Black Americans in their struggle against Jim Crow and in their global pursuit of Black liberation.

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