Transnational Diffusion and The African American Reinvention of Gandhian Repertoire

2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Chabot
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Diffusion Theory ◽  
Critical Mass ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Historical Case Study ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Starting Point

Why did American civil rights activists fail to fully implement the Gandhian repertoire before the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and 1956? How did transnational diffusion of the Gandhian repertoire proceed over time? Classical diffusion theory provides a useful starting point for answering these questions, but it does not fully capture the twists and turns occurring in the transnational diffusion of a collective action repertoire. To account for the non-linear and contingent aspects of transnational diffusion between social movements, this article proposes an alternative theoretical framework and applies it to the case of diffusion between the independence movement in India and the civil rights movement in the United States. The historical case study emphasizes collective reinvention of the Gandhian repertoire by American civil rights networks, instead of critical mass or individual thresholds; and the intergenerational transfer of relevant knowledge and experience from these implementation pioneers to the new generation of civil rights movement activists. Finally, the article examines whether its alternative theoretical framework only applies to this particular instance of transnational diffusion or whether it has more general relevance for social movement theory.

scholarly journals Martin Luther King, Jr.

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN A. KIRK
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
50Th Anniversary ◽  
The United States ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Martin Luther King

Early histories of the civil rights movement that appeared prior to the 1980s were primarily biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr. Collectively, these works helped to create the familiar “Montgomery to Memphis” narrative framework for understanding the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. This narrative begins with King's rise to leadership during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, and ends with his 1968 assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. Since the 1980s, a number of studies examining the civil rights movement at local and state levels have questioned the usefulness and accuracy of the King-centric Montgomery to Memphis narrative as the sole way of understanding the civil rights movement. These studies have made it clear that civil rights struggles already existed in many of the communities where King and the organization of which he was president, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), ran civil rights campaigns in the 1960s. Moreover, those struggles continued long after King and the SCLC had left those communities. Civil rights activism also thrived in many places that King and the SCLC never visited. As a result of these local and state studies, historians have increasingly framed the civil rights movement within the context of a much longer, ongoing struggle for black freedom and equality, unfolding throughout the twentieth century at local, state and national levels. More recently, a number of books have sought to place the civil rights movement within the larger context of international relations. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott next year, the event that launched King's movement leadership, it seems an appropriate point to return to the existing literature on King and to assess what has already been done, as well as to point to the gaps that still need to be filled, in what remains important field of study.

Religion, Race, and Sports

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Scholes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Baseball Player ◽  
Sports History ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
African American Race

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.

West of Jim Crow

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn M. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
White Schools ◽  
Black Bodies

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.

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.

Racial Realities

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Natsu Taylor Saito
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Structural Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Empowerment ◽  
American Indian Movement ◽  
The 1960S

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.”

Introduction

Troublemakers ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Kathryn Schumaker
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Chicano Movement ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The introductionexplains how and why student protest became common in the United States in the late 1960s and places these protests in the context of shifts in the history of education and in broader social movements, including the civil rights movement, the Chicano Movement, and black power activism. The introduction also situates students’ rights within the context of children’s rights more broadly, explaining the legal principles that justified age discrimination and excluded children and students from the basic protections of American constitutional law. The introduction identifies the two decades between the 1960s and 1980s as a constitutional moment that revolutionized the relationship of students to the state. It also connects students’ rights litigation to the issue of school desegregation and the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 3-10
Author(s):  
Elaine Allen Lechtreck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Southern States ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Martin Luther King

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.

The Congressional Black Caucus and the Closure of NASA’s Satellite Tracking Station at Hartebeesthoek, South Africa

2019 ◽  
pp. 167-180
Author(s):  
Keith Snedegar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Satellite Tracking ◽  
Global Issues ◽  
Tracking Station ◽  
Minority Regime ◽  
The Impact

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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