Inscrutable Zoot Suiters and Civil Rights Ambivalence in Flannery O’Connor and Toni Morrison

2020 ◽  
pp. 181-196
Author(s):  
Alison Arant
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Flannery O'connor ◽  
Zoot Suit

Alison Arant uses the zoot suit—an outfit that is simultaneously conspicuous and difficult to interpret—as a way to put the fiction of Flannery O’Connor in conversation with that of Toni Morrison. In their fiction set in the 1940s and 50s, including one unpublished story by O’Connor, both authors create zoot suited figures who are not quite visible to those around them. Arant reads O’Connor’s and Morrison’s works in the context of the zoot suit riots of 1943 and argues that both writers use these inscrutable zoot suiters as a way of exploring the fears, promises, and limits of racial integration. Together these texts demonstrate the persistence of white ideology, which persists both in individual minds and in social systems that purport to be free of it.

Federal Policy and the Racial Integration of Southern Industry, 1961–1980

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Federal Intervention

In the last two decades, one of the central debates of civil rights historiography has concerned the role that the federal government played in securing the gains of the civil rights era. Historians have often been critical of the federal government's inaction, pointing out that it was only pressure from the civil rights movement itself that prompted federal action against Jim Crow. Other scholars have studied the civil rights record of the federal government by analyzing a single issue during several administrations. In this vein, there have been studies of the federal government's involvement in areas as diverse as black voting rights and racial violence against civil rights workers. These studies have both recognized the importance of federal intervention and have also been critical of the federal government's belated and half-hearted endorsement of civil rights.

Assimilative Tendencies and Curricular Crosscurrents

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Gleason
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
National Organizations ◽  
American Society ◽  
Zoot Suit

Besides its massive impact on the institutional side of Catholic higher education, World War II affected the thinking of Catholic educators. We have already touched upon this dimension in noting how the war and postwar growth required them to expand their horizons and redouble their efforts in research, fundraising, and administration generally. Here we look more closely at how Catholics were affected by the great ideological revival of democracy that accompanied the war. This kind of influence was sometimes explicitly noted by Catholic leaders, as when Archbishop Richard Gushing of Boston called attention to the “neo-democratic mentality of returning servicemen and the university-age generation generally”; others recognized that it created problems since the Catholic church was so widely perceived as incompatible with democracy and “the American way of life.” We shall postpone examination of controversies stemming from this source to the next chapter, turning our attention in this one to the assimilative tendencies reflected in Catholics’ new appreciation for liberal democratic values, and to the major curricular concerns of the era which were also affected by the war. In no area did the democratic revival have a more profound long range effect than in the impetus it lent to the movement for racial equality and civil rights for African Americans. The publication in 1944 of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma marked an epoch in national understanding of what the book’s subtitle called “the Negro problem and modern democracy.” Myrdal himself stressed the importance of the wartime context, which made it impossible to ignore racial discrimination at home while waging war against Nazi racism. At the same time, increasing black militance, the massive migration of African Americans to northern industrial centers, and above all the great Detroit race riot of 1943—reinforced by the anti-Mexican “Zoot Suit” riots in Los Angeles the same summer—suddenly made the improvement of race relations an imperative for American society as a whole. By the end of the war, no fewer than 123 national organizations were working actively to “reduce intergroup tensions,” and the civil rights movement began a steady advance that led directly to the great judicial and political victories it won in the fifties and sixties.

scholarly journals National Self-consciousness in the Context of Multicultural Practices in Ukraine

2018 ◽  
pp. 60-67
Author(s):  
Tetiana Yereskova
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Public Life ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Cultural Self ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Multicultural Practices ◽  
Ukrainian Society

In this article the main tendencies of change of national self-consciousness due to global multiculturalism are investigated. There are three possible variations of manifestations of national consciousness by the members of the Ukrainian society in the context of multicultural practices. Firstly, it is the return to the restriction of civil rights and freedoms of the person, the desire for state and socio-cultural self-sufficiency. Secondly, it is the tendency towards a growing nationalist orientation. Thirdly, it is the purposeful orientation towards democratic values, accompanied by not only declarative but also real steps towards the ever-increasing democratization of public life, legal, civil society, integration with other social systems, peoples and states. Finally, the author shows that the national self-consciousness can serve as a kind of “challenge” for the formation and development of multicultural practices of the members of contemporary Ukrainian society, as it can be manifested either by a committed attitude to a particular ethnic group; or because of the characteristics of ethnocentrism; or through the properties of ethno-radicalism; and finally, due to the properties and characteristics of tolerance. However, national self-consciousness is intended to develop national and above all the essential, rational in it and overcome the nature of purely ethno-national. It is these “levers” of the management of ethno-national relations in the country, which ensure the harmonious integration of the individual, the community, the country into the intercultural space.

Taxpayers and Taxeaters

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camille Walsh
Keyword(s):  
School District ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Educational Opportunities ◽  
Equal Protection ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
High Point ◽  
Welfare Rights ◽  
Race And Class

Chapter Six focuses on how demands for racial integration in education after Brown also frequently deployed tax-based activism to achieve their ends, from busing cases to the important, though brief, extension of civil rights litigation logic from education to poverty and welfare rights. In this decade the effects of the War on Poverty and welfare activism worked together to generate the first combined race- and class-based equal protection claims. Response to the poverty jurisprudence of the court was largely filtered through the language of taxpayers' rights. Finally, this chapter examines the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District case in 1971 and the response of many angry "taxpaying citizens" at the thought of desegregation and busing. Swann was the high point for the judicial attempt at equalizing educational opportunities, even as the de jure/de facto distinction was beginning to break down.

Radical Christianity and Cooperative Economics in the Postwar South

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Collis Greene
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Black Farmers ◽  
White Backlash ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
Depression Era

This chapter tells a pair of stories—a grassroots beginning and a white backlash sparked by charges of outside agitation—that suggest an all-too-familiar civil rights narrative. Yet, in 1940s North Carolina, two communities—the black farmers and professionals in Tyrrell County and the multiracial network of leftist Protestants who applauded and supported their work—open up a new kind of civil rights story. Theirs is a story of interaction, interdependence, and partnerships built on a shared belief in the inseparability of economic and racial justice. Historians have long emphasized the turn from a Depression-era emphasis on economic and racial justice as two parts of a greater whole to a Cold War-era focus on civil rights and racial integration.

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