The Upheaval: Interposition and Moderation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kyle Day
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Socioeconomic Changes ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Bus Boycott

This chapter narrates the dramatic socioeconomic changes occurring in the former states of the Confederacy after World War II. The changes culminated with the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared public school segregation unconstitutional, as well as the early events in the American Civil Rights Movement, including the Emmitt Till Lynching and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The chapter then analyses the response of white southerners to these transformative events. The white South’s response channelled into two recognized programs. Southern leaders either outright refused to implement Brown, which became known as Interposition or, called for a gradual or piecemeal implementation, which became known as moderation.

scholarly journals Bodies on the Line: Contact Improvisation and Techniques of Nonviolent Protest

2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Congress Of Racial Equality ◽  
Contact Improvisation ◽  
White Males ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Face

On the morning of May 4, 1961, a brave and motley group of travelers—seven black males, three white males, and three white females, varying in age and professional standing but all trained in nonviolence—embarked on what they called the “Freedom Ride.” Designed by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the bus ride was meant to commemorate and further the organization's 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, a non-violent test of desegregation on interstate buses that quickly disintegrated in the face of staunch resistance. This time, riders would test the 1960 Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia, which prohibited segregation in the waiting rooms and restaurants of bus terminals (Branch 1989, 390). Departing from Washington, D.C., the Freedom Ride aimed to arrive in New Orleans on May 17, the seventh anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Explaining that they were merely exercising rights granted by the Supreme Court but that they knew the dangers, CORE director James Farmer said, “We were prepared for the possibility of death” (Cozzens 1997). Riding the momentum of the student sit-ins, the civil rights movement had become for many a matter of “putting your body on the line” (Branch 1989, 392).

scholarly journals Closing Ranks: Montgomery Jews and Civil Rights, 1954–1960

1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLIVE WEBB
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Public Transportation ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Martin Luther King

The arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955 provided the spark which ignited the long smouldering resentments of black Montgomerians. For 381 days they waged a boycott of the city bus lines, frustrating the opposition of white authorities and financially crippling the local transit company. More profoundly it resulted in a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on public transportation. Equally momentous was the emergence of the man who would serve as the spiritual figurehead of the civil rights movement: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.In the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott, one national black newspaper acclaimed King as “Alabama's Modern Moses.” Since the darkest days of slavery African-Americans had sought spiritual salvation by comparing their own condition to that of God's Chosen People, the Israelites of the Old Testament. Throughout their years of enslavement they prayed for the Moses who would deliver them from their suffering unto the Promised Land. During the boycott, the black citizens of Montgomery had similarly sustained their morale by singing the old slave spirituals, raising their voices at the nightly mass meetings in rousing renditions of “Go Down Moses, Way Down in Egypt Land.” “As sure as Moses got the children of Israel across the Red Sea,” King exhorted the black community, “we can stick together and win.” Others too drew the analogy between the historical experience of Jews and the contemporary predicament of African-Americans. Looking back on the boycott, white liberal activist Virginia Durr evoked the spectre of Nazi Germany in describing the strength of racist opposition.

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Church ◽  
African Ancestry ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
The Many ◽  
Southern City

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles interrogates Blackness and illustrates how it has been used as a basis to oppress, dismiss and exclude Blacks from societies and institutions in Europe, North America and South America. Employing uncharted analytical categories that tackle intriguing themes about borderless non-racial African ancestry, “traveling” identities and post-blackness, the essays provide new lenses for viewing the “Black” struggle worldwide. This approach directs the contributors’ focus to understudied locations and protagonists. In the volume, Charleston, South Carolina is more prominent than Little Rock Arkansas in the struggle to desegregate schools; Chicago occupies the space usually reserved for Atlanta or other southern city “bulwarks” of the Civil Rights Movement; diverse Africans in France and Afro-descended Chileans illustrate the many facets of negotiating belonging, long articulated by examples from the Greensboro Woolworth counter sit-in or the Montgomery Bus Boycott; unknown men in the British empire, who inverted dying confessions meant to vilify their blackness, demonstrate new dimensions in the story about race and religion, often told by examples of fiery clergy of the Black Church; and the theatres and studios of dramatists and visual artists replace the Mall in Washington DC as the stage for the performance of identities and activism.

Desegregation of City Parks and the Civil Rights Movement: The Case of Oak Park in Montgomery, Alabama

2019 ◽  
pp. 009614421987763
Author(s):  
Rebecca Retzlaff
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
City Parks ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
Public Facilities ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Battle

This article analyzes the history of desegregation of city parks in Montgomery, Alabama. The article chronicles the sixteen-year legal battle to desegregate parks in Montgomery and the efforts of city officials to keep parks segregated, including closing all of the parks for seven years, contracting with the Montgomery YMCA to operate segregated private recreation facilities, and allowing only segregated schools to use the parks. The article explores the connection between park segregation and the Montgomery Bus Boycott and school segregation, and questions why public officials fought to keep parks segregated after other public facilities began court-ordered desegregation, and why the story of park desegregation in Montgomery is largely unknown. The article concludes with a call to confront the history of park segregation in Montgomery.

White Evangelical Protestant Responses to the Civil Rights Movement

2009 ◽  
Vol 102 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Curtis J. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
Government Action ◽  
Social Patterns ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Black Employees ◽  
Heart And Mind

In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), Martin Luther King, Jr. reflected on the future struggle of African Americans after their successful Montgomery bus boycott. Among the “forces of good,” King saw the indispensable assistance of the federal government, cautioning critics and sympathizers that though government action was “not the whole answer,” it was an “important partial answer.”1 King was addressing one of the most common criticisms of black activism for civil rights. White conservative Protestants, in the South and North, insisted that race relations would worsen because agitation would only stoke the fears and hatreds of whites and that government action on behalf of blacks was only a form of coercion. King rejected this reasoning by noting that “morals cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated.” He argued that it was true, for example, that laws could never make employers love their black employees, but they could prevent them from refusing to hire blacks because of their skin color. King conceded that society ultimately must depend on “religion and education to alter the errors of the heart and mind,” but he emphatically argued that “it is an immoral act to compel a man to accept injustice until another man's heart is straight.”2 He added that the law was a form of education in that it instructed citizens about what society regarded as right and appropriate. King asserted that in any case the “habits if not the hearts of people have been and are being altered every day by federal action” and that it would be wrong to undervalue the efficacy and force of law in altering human behavior and social patterns.

scholarly journals Travelers, Strangers, and Jim Crow: Law, Public Accommodations, and Civil Rights in America

2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. K. Sandoval-Strausz
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Black People ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Just Society ◽  
Supreme Court Rulings

Public accommodations—hotels, trains, restaurants, steamboats, theaters, buses, motels, and the like—were for more than a century located at the epicenter of legal and political struggles for racial equality. From the age of Reconstruction to the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century, civil rights in public places stood alongside voting rights, school integration, and equal opportunity in employment and housing as conditions that black people and their allies claimed as necessary attributes of a just society. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 and the Supreme Court rulings in theCivil Rights Casesand especially inPlessy v. Fergusonwere critical episodes in the career of Jim Crow in the nineteenth century, followed in the twentieth by the Montgomery bus boycott, the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

scholarly journals W. E. B. Du Bois on Brown v. Board of Education

2004 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-31
Author(s):  
Stanley O. Gaines
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Political Contributions ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The 1960S

The 1960s have been described as the “civil rights decade” in American history. Few scholar-activists have been identified as strongly with the legal, social, economic, and political changes culminating in the 1960s as has African American historian, sociologist, psychologist W. E. B. Du Bois. Inexplicably, in 2003, the 100-year anniversary of Du Bois' classic, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), came and went with little fanfare within or outside of academia. However, in 2004, the 50-year anniversary of the initial U. S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) presents an opportunity for ethnic studies in general, and Black studies in particular, to acknowledge the intellectual and political contributions of Du Bois to the civil rights movement in the United States. In the post-Civil Rights Era, some authors have suggested that Du Bois opposed the initial Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruling. In contrast, I observe in the present paper that Du Bois (1957) opposed the U. S. Supreme Court's subsequent (1955) ruling that invoked the much-criticized term “with all deliberate speed,” rather than the initial (1954) ruling that rendered the “separate but equal” doctrine unconstitutional. Moreover, I contend that Du Bois' own values and attitudes were fully consistent with his position on the (1954, 1955) decisions.

The Role of Law in the Civil Rights Movement: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955–1957

1991 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jerome Glennon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Nonviolent Resistance ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Martin Luther King

Accompanying the national move to create a holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., and the commemoration of anniversaries of important episodes in the modern civil rights movement, has come a welcome literature by historians, political scientists, sociologists, journalists, and movement participants analyzing and interpreting the movement. Considerable attention has naturally focused on the Montgomery bus boycott that signaled the start of the modern civil rights movement in December, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. These recent works have reaffirmed the traditional interpretation of the boycott: Led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and sustained by the sacrifices of the thousands who refrained from using public buses, the boycott proved that, by acting collectively, an African-American community could demand and obtain an end to segregation. The technique of nonviolent resistance to oppression, it is said, successfully integrated Montgomery buses.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document