Mary, Dionne, and Alma

Author(s):  
Marcus Anthony Hunter ◽  
Zandria F. Robinson

The second of three chapters on the power of chocolate cities, this chapter centers the lives, activism, and pioneering efforts of three black women professionals, entertainers, and community activists: Mary Hill Sanders, Dionne Warwick, and Alma Burrell. Exploring their lives, health setbacks, and push against the glass ceiling and racial oppression, the authors highlight their sophisticated and politically informed racial geography of the United States. Detailing the movement of black people throughout the domestic diaspora, this chapter illustrates the how gender, place, race, and power collided in the lives of black people before and after the civil rights movement.

Author(s):  
Brian D. Behnken

African Americans and Latino/as have had a long history of social interactions that have been strongly affected by the broader sense of race in the United States. Race in the United States has typically been constructed as a binary of black and white. Latino/as do not fit neatly into this binary. Some Latino/as have argued for a white racial identity, which has at times frustrated their relationships with black people. For African Americans and Latino/as, segregation often presented barriers to good working relationships. The two groups were often segregated from each other, making them mutually invisible. This invisibility did not make for good relations. Latino/as and blacks found new avenues for improving their relationships during the civil rights era, from the 1940s to the 1970s. A number of civil rights protests generated coalitions that brought the two communities together in concerted campaigns. This was especially the case for militant groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Mexican American Brown Berets, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, as well as in the Poor People’s Campaign. Interactions among African Americans and Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban/Cuban American illustrate the deep and often convoluted sense of race consciousness in American history, especially during the time of the civil rights movement.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 267-277
Author(s):  
Leah Wright Rigueur ◽  
Anna Beshlian

AbstractThis paper offers a broad overview of Black citizenship within the United States, concentrating on the major shifts in Black life that have transpired since the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We examine several critical aspects of Black citizenship including economic status, education, criminal justice and mass incarceration, and political participation. Our report reveals that Black progress toward equal citizenship is inconsistent at best; at worst, it is stagnant and at times, regressive. As such, we conclude that dramatic solutions beyond traditional reformist approaches are needed in order to realize genuine citizenship and equal rights for Black people within the United States. In closing, we briefly highlight a specific example of a strategic approach to advancing substantive social and political change.


Author(s):  
Cat M. Ariail

In the post–World War II period, nations and territories used international sport to codify and communicate their ideal citizenries. For the United States, black women who competed in track and field complicated these efforts. This book analyzes the ideological influence of black women track stars, examining how they destabilized dominant ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. The strivings and successes of black American track women, such as Alice Coachman, Mae Faggs, and Wilma Rudolph, at the Olympic Games and other international sporting events from 1948 to 1962 repeatedly forced white and black sport cultures in the United States to wrestle with the meaning of black women’s athleticism. Both white and black sport cultures struggled to fit black women athletes into their respective visions for the postwar American nation, reflecting and reinforcing how the Cold War, civil rights movement, and their intersection encouraged broader reconfigurations of the racial, gender, and sexual associations of ideal American identity. Ultimately, these American sport cultures marshaled racialized gender expectations to contain the threat that black women track stars embodied, interpreting and reinterpreting the meaning of their athletic efforts in ways that bolstered established hierarchies of race and gender.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Scholes

Race, religion, and sports may seem like odd bedfellows, but, in fact, all three have been interacting with each other since the emergence of modern sports in the United States over a century ago. It was the sport of boxing that saw a black man become a champion at the height of the Jim Crow era and a baseball player who broke the color barrier two decades before the civil rights movement began. In this chapter, the role that religion has played in these and other instances where race (the African American race in particular) and sports have collided will be examined for its impact on the relationship between race and sports. The association of race, religion, and sports is not accidental. The chapter demonstrates that all three are co-constitutive of and dependent on each other for their meaning at these chosen junctures in American sports history.


Author(s):  
Lynn M. Hudson

This book follows California’s history of segregation from statehood to the beginning of the long civil rights movement, arguing that the state innovated methods to control and contain African Americans and other people of color. While celebrated in popular discourse for its forward-thinking culture, politics, and science, California also pioneered new ways to keep citizenship white. Schools, streetcars, restaurants, theaters, parks, beaches, and pools were places of contestation where the presence of black bodies elicited forceful responses from segregationists. Black Californians employed innovative measures to dismantle segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they borrowed some tactics from race rebels in the South, others they improvised. West of Jim Crow uses California to highlight the significance of African American resistance to racial restrictions in places often deemed marginal to mainstream civil rights histories. Examining segregation in the state sheds light on the primacy of gender and sexuality in the minds of segregationists and the significance of black women, black bodies, and racial science, in the years preceding the modern civil rights struggle. California has much to teach us about the lives of African Americans who crossed the color line and the variety of tactics and strategies employed by freedom fighters across the United States.


Author(s):  
Natsu Taylor Saito

In the 1960s, global decolonization and the civil rights movement inspired hope for structural change in the United States, but more than fifty years later, racial disparities in income and wealth, education, employment, health, housing, and incarceration remain entrenched. In addition, we have seen a resurgence of overt White supremacy following the election of President Trump. This chapter considers the potential of movements like Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock water protectors in light of the experiences of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and other efforts at community empowerment in the “long sixties.”


Author(s):  
Marcus Anthony Hunter ◽  
Zandria F. Robinson

The last of three chapters on the power of chocolate cities, this chapter centers the lives, activism, and pioneering efforts of Mos Def (a.k.a. Yasiin Bey) and W. E. B. Du Bois. Exploring their lives, legal setbacks, and push against global imperialism and racial oppression, the authors highlight their sophisticated and politically informed racial geography of the United States. Detailing the movement of black people throughout the domestic diaspora and into and throughout Africa, this chapter illustrates the how place, race, peace politics, and power collide in the lives of black people here, there, and everywhere around the globe.


Author(s):  
Elaine Allen Lechtreck

The introduction includes Bible verses cited by ministers to defend segregation and verses to oppose segregation. There are slices of the history of the United States, the Civil Rights Movement, and African American history. The southern states, where white ministers confronted segregation, are identified. The term “minister” is explained as well as the variety of labels given these ministers ranging from “Liberal,” Progressive,” “Neo-Orthodox,” “Evangelical Liberal,” “open conservative,” ‘Last Hurrah of the Social Gospel Movement” to “Trouble Maker,” “Traitor, “ “Atheist,” “Communist,” “N_____ Lover.” Rachel Henderlite, the only woman minister mentioned in the book, is identified. Synopses of the book’s seven chapters are included. Comments by historians David Chappell, Charles Reagan Wilson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ernest Campbell, and Thomas Pettigrew are cited.


Author(s):  
Keith Snedegar

Keith Snedegar explores the impact of the civil rights movement on decisions related to NASA facilities outside the United States. Snedegar maintains that when Charles C. Diggs Jr., one of the founders of the Black Congressional Caucus, visited the NASA satellite tracking station at Hartesbeesthoek, South Africa, in 1971, he discovered a racially segregated facility where technical jobs were reserved for white employees and black Africans essentially performed menial labor. Upon his return to the United States, the Detroit congressman embarked on a two-year struggle, first to improve workplace equity at the tracking station, and later, for the closure of the facility. NASA administration under James Fletcher was largely indifferent to demands for change at the station. It was only after Representative Charles Rangel proposed a reduction in NASA appropriations did the agency announce plans to end its working relationship with the white minority regime of South Africa. NASA’s public statements suggested that a scientific rationale lay behind the station’s eventual closure in 1975, but this episode clearly indicates that NASA was acting only under political pressure, and its management remained largely insensitive to global issues of racial equality.


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