Remembering Dorothy Cotton, 1930–2018

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Siegel
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Christian Leadership ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Effect Change ◽  
National Leaders ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
The 1960S

Civil rights pioneer Dorothy Foreman Cotton passed away on June 10, 2018, in Ithaca, New York, at the age of eighty-eight. On August 11, 2018, a Saturday afternoon, around seven hundred community members, friends, and local and national leaders gathered at Cornell University’s Bailey Hall to celebrate her life. Cotton was the highest-ranking woman in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) throughout the 1960s. She devoted her life to liberation and social justice. Remembered by many as an iconic feminist and grassroots innovator, she led an extraordinary life that undoubtedly transformed the lives of African Americans fighting for full citizenship and justice. Cotton was critical in opposing economic and social regimes of power, but she also ushered in a new sense of individual and collective subjectivity through political participation and mobilization in southern Black communities. Throughout her life, she reminded ordinary people of their vast power to effect change and transform society.

Dreams and Shadows

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvester A. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Christian Leadership ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
Politics Of Race ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
Radical Activism ◽  
Martin Luther King

This chapter explains how the FBI targeted Martin Luther King, Jr. as an exceptional and uniquely dangerous threat to the nation’s internal security. The author demonstrates the numerous efforts by the bureau to oppose the influential activism of King and the organization he led, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The chapter explains the important shifts in American culture that pitted the more radical activism of civil rights leaders against an increasingly strident FBI that was determined to thwart law abiding activists who challenged the nation’s mainstream racial politics. The author argues that the pivotal issue behind the FBI’s repression of King was not personal antagonism between King and Hoover but the politics of race and repression.

“Alone in a Sea of Rib-Tips”: Alvenia Fulton, Natural Health, and the Politics of Soul Food1

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Travis A Weisse
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Natural Food ◽  
Health Food ◽  
Star Power ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Food Movement

Abstract While the intersection between alternative medicine and the natural food movement in radical white communities of the 1960s and 1970s is well known, the connection between these traditions and the simultaneous revolution in the black foodscape has not received adequate attention. This paper addresses this gap by exploring how an alternative healer and minister from the rural South, Alvenia Fulton, rose to prominence in Chicago during the 1960s and 1970s as one of the major figures in the transformation of the black diet by harnessing the star power of her celebrity clients. Fulton hybridized her apprenticeship in slave herbalism with concepts from white Protestant health food lectures into a corrective nutrition program to bring health and renewal to black communities that were struggling under the burden of structural and medical racism. When, in the 1960s, coronary heart disease peaked for black Americans, soul food became the iconic diet of the civil rights movement. To help her community while respecting their culture, Fulton struck a careful bargain to encourage more black Americans to eat raw, natural, vegetarian food by subtly reimagining the historical contents of the slave diet.

Breaking White Supremacy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Dorrien
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Christian Leadership ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
Martin Luther King

Breaking White Supremacy analyzes the twentieth-century heyday of the black social gospel and its influence on the Civil Rights Movement. Asserting that Martin Luther King Jr. did not come from nowhere, it describes major figures who influenced King, offers a detailed analysis of King’s leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and his catalyzing and unifying role in the southern and northern Civil Rights Movements, and interprets the legacy of King and the black social gospel tradition.

The Birth of the Citizenship Schools: Entwining the Struggles for Literacy and Freedom

2004 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 388-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Levine
Keyword(s):  
Adult Education ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Education Program ◽  
Christian Leadership ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The People ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
Citizenship Schools

In a 1981 interview, civil rights leader Andrew Young commented, “If you look at the black elected officials and the people who are political leaders across the South now, it's full of people who had their first involvement in civil rights in the Citizenship Training Program.” Informally known as Citizenship Schools, this adult education program began in 1958 under the sponsorship of Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, which handed it over to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1961. By the time the project ended in 1970, approximately 2500 African Americans had taught these basic literacy and political education classes for tens of thousands of their neighbors. The program never had a high profile, but civil rights leaders and scholars assert that it helped to bring many people into the movement, cultivated grassroots leaders, and increased black participation in voting and other civic activities.

“In All Our Harlems”

2019 ◽  
pp. 124-150
Author(s):  
Carl Suddler
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Juvenile Justice System ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
Institutionalized Racism ◽  
Police Encounters ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Police Practices

This chapter recovers the case of the Harlem Six to attest to the firmness of race as a crucial determinant in American notions of crime and delinquency. The progress made in the decade of delinquency was met by systemic and institutionalized racism in the 1960s. Efforts to create a fair and impartial juvenile justice system became a thing of the past, and black youths in New York City bore the brunt of inordinate police practices and, consequently, endured the stigma of criminality henceforth. With anticrime laws such as “stop-and-frisk” and “no-knock,” which contributed to disparate arrest rates and increased police encounters in predominantly black communities, New York City officials established a police state that created a climate for dissension. This tale of criminal injustice reveals the extent to which the community was compelled to go to protect its youths from the overwhelming power of the state.

The Education That Is Their Due

2021 ◽  
pp. 46-86
Author(s):  
Zoë Burkholder
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Black Teachers ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
School Segregation ◽  
Scientific Racism ◽  
Black Intellectuals ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Black Populations

Chapter 2 identifies a distinct uptick in northern Black support for separate schools. The rise of scientific racism fueled anti-Black discrimination that accelerated alongside the first Great Migration and the Great Depression. Hostile whites segregated classrooms and buildings in defiance of state law as Black populations increased. At the same time, there is compelling evidence from New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan that Black families either passively accepted or actively requested separate classrooms and schools in order to access Black teachers. Many Black northerners believed separate schools would offer a higher quality education and more of the teaching and administrative jobs that sustained the Black middle class. Still, this position was far from universal, and many northern Black communities energetically resisted school segregation. A growing number of Black intellectuals and civil rights activists vehemently objected to any form of state-sponsored segregation and campaigned actively for school integration.

“Crucial to the Survival of Black People”

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-156
Author(s):  
Rowena Ianthe Alfonso
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Black People ◽  
Community Organization ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
Postindustrial City ◽  
Black Paper ◽  
Urban Issues

“This is a Black Paper,” declared BUILD’s statement criticizing the Buffalo Public School system for providing inferior education to black children in Buffalo, New York. Written in 1967 by the community organization, BUILD (which stood for Build Unity, Independence, Liberty, and Dignity), “BUILD Black Paper Number One” was a call for change. Like other black communities in late 1960s America, black Buffalo was caught up in the fervor of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. A “Rust Belt” city, Buffalo was hit hard by deindustrialization, which, coupled with unemployment, segregated housing and unequal education, adversely affected its black community. In 1967, a riot exploded in Buffalo’s predominantly black East Side. This article analyzes statements made by black Buffalonians and argues that Black Power thrived in Buffalo in the late 1960s, through community organizations which attempted to address urban issues that negatively affected African Americans in a postindustrial city.

The Fraternal Council of Negro Churches, 1934–1964

1990 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary R. Sawyer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Black Churches ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Religious Organizations ◽  
Christian Leadership ◽  
National Conference ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
Religious Landscape

In the years since the civil rights and black power movements cooperative black religious organizations have become a familiar feature of the religious landscape in America. Among these interdenominational bodies, in addition to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, may be noted the now defunct National Conference of Black Churchmen, the Black Theology Project, Partners in Ecumenism, and the Congress of National Black Churches. Little noted, however, is a precursor of these organizations which functioned for two decades prior to the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.

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