scholarly journals The Journey to and After Alcatraz: The Legacy of the Occupation of Alcatraz for Native American Protest Movements

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen Ly
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Government ◽  
Government Action ◽  
National Debate ◽  
The Government

The Occupation of Alcatraz was a movement in 1969, which sparked National Debate in the United States. The Occupation lasted from 20, November 1969 till June 1971 when 15 last occupiers were peacefully escorted off the island. The protest did not end with a change in government policy but inspired other protests and an activist group to be created for Native American rights. Reflecting on why the occupation at Alcatraz was ineffective, Vine Deloria, Jr. argued in 1994, “we want change, but we do not know what change.” Deloria was a well-known activist during the 1960s and was invited to the island of Alcatraz during its occupation. The Occupation of Alcatraz was seen as an unsuccessful protest because it did not spur government action to address Native American grievances. The occupation occurred at a time when tensions between minority groups and the government were rising due to the civil rights movement. Native Americans were forcibly removed from reserves due to relocation and assimilation programs, and land was being taken away for resources as well. The Occupation was a response to what seemed to be the continuous cycle of abuse from the American government. Termination and assimilation policies divided and separated families and tribes, which created disconnections among Native Americans, making it hard to unify against the American government. Though the Occupation did not end with government action or policy change, it started a collaboration of Native American protests, which revived Native American identities for many people. Native Americans’ reactions to federal suppression at the Occupation of Alcatraz led to a legacy of protests that changed Native American life.

The Lumbee Indians

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malinda Maynor Lowery
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
History Of

Jamestown, the Lost Colony of Roanoke, and Plymouth Rock are central to America's mythic origin stories. Then, we are told, the main characters--the "friendly" Native Americans who met the settlers--disappeared. But the history of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina demands that we tell a different story. As the largest tribe east of the Mississippi and one of the largest in the country, the Lumbees have survived in their original homelands, maintaining a distinct identity as Indians in a biracial South. In this passionately written, sweeping work of history, Malinda Maynor Lowery narrates the Lumbees' extraordinary story as never before. The Lumbees' journey as a people sheds new light on America's defining moments, from the first encounters with Europeans to the present day. How and why did the Lumbees both fight to establish the United States and resist the encroachments of its government? How have they not just survived, but thrived, through Civil War, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and the war on drugs, to ultimately establish their own constitutional government in the twenty-first century? Their fight for full federal acknowledgment continues to this day, while the Lumbee people's struggle for justice and self-determination continues to transform our view of the American experience. Readers of this book will never see Native American history the same way.

Latinxs and the US Census

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Cristina Mora
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Census Data ◽  
The United States ◽  
Census Bureau ◽  
Census Count ◽  
Advocacy Groups ◽  
Size Growth ◽  
The Government ◽  
The 1960S

The question of how to classify and count Latinxs has perplexed citizens and state officials alike for decades. Although Latinxs in the United States have been counted in every census the nation has conducted, it was not until the 1930s that the issue of race came to the fore as the politics of who Latinxs were and whether the government should simply classify them as White became contested. These issues were amplified in the 1960s when Chicano and Boricua—Puerto Rican—activists, inspired by the Black civil rights movement, demanded that their communities be counted as distinct from Anglos. Decades of racial terror, community denigration, and colonialism, they contended, had made the Latinx experience distinct from that of Whites. A separate classification, activists argued, would allow them to have data on the state of their communities and make claims on government resources. Having census data on Hispanic/Latino poverty, for example, would allow Latinx advocacy groups to lobby for anti-poverty programs in their communities. Yet the issue of race and Latinxs continued to be thorny as the Census Bureau struggled with how to create a classification broad enough to encompass the immense racial, social, and cultural diversity of Latinxs. As of 2020, the issue remains unresolved as the Bureau continues to officially classify Latinxs as ethnically Hispanic/Latino but racially White, even though the bulk of research shows that about half of Latinxs consistently check the “some other race” box on census forms. More recent Latinx census politics centers on the issue of whether the Census Bureau should include a citizenship question on census forms. Latinx advocacy groups and academics have long argued that such a question would dampen Latinx census participation and effect the usefulness of census data for making claims about the size, growth, and future of the Latinx community. These politics came to a head in the months leading up to the 2020 census count as the Trump administration attempted to overturn decades of protocol and add a citizenship question to the decennial census form.

Obstacles to Equality: Government Responses to the Gay Rights Movement in the United States

1982 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. S. Cohan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Gay Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Government ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Gay Rights Movement

The Gay Rights movement in the United States, like other social movements, may achieve its goal of full equality before the law through actions by the legislatures or courts. Generally, action by the latter opens the door to concessions by the former. But the Gay Rights movement has not progressed as its adherents have wished for four reasons: (1) the unpopularity of homosexuals; (2) the disjointed nature of American government(s); (3) the absence of cohesiveness of the movement itself, possibly as a result of a lack of economic deprivation among homosexuals; and (4) most significant, the unwillingness of the Supreme Court to accord to homosexuals the same rights it has extended to other minority groups, thereby giving a lead to legislatures as they did in the area of civil rights for Blacks.

“South Africa is the Mississippi of the world”: Anti-Apartheid Activism through Domestic Civil Rights Law

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 843-881
Author(s):  
Joanna L. Grisinger
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Mobilization ◽  
Domestic Institutions ◽  
American Government ◽  
Policy Context ◽  
Legal Strategies

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a small group of antiapartheid activists, led by the American Committee on Africa and chair of the House Subcommittee on Africa Rep. Charles Diggs Jr., launched a campaign against South African Airways' new flights into the United States. Using the legal and political strategies of the American civil rights movement, and the fragmentation of power within the American political system, activists tried to turn South African apartheid into an American civil rights problem that American government institutions could address. The strategy was indebted to the political and legal strategies of the civil rights movement, but framing demands around existing civil rights law necessarily limited what activists could ask for and what domestic institutions could provide. In practice, the campaign's successes were limited and legalistic; where domestic civil rights law directly conflicted with apartheid law, airlines could comply with the former without really challenging the latter. And the foreign policy context meant more failures than successes, as domestic legal institutions were reluctant to involve themselves with foreign policy concerns. Their successes and failures nonetheless tell us much about legal mobilization and institutional behavior in a period of globalization where sovereignty and jurisdictional lines were overlapping and conflicting.

Lawyers as Activists

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Dorf ◽  
Michael S. Chu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Court Action ◽  
The Government ◽  
Trump Administration

Lawyers played a key role in challenging the Trump administration’s Travel Ban on entry into the United States of nationals from various majority-Muslim nations. Responding to calls from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which were amplified by social media, lawyers responded to the Travel Ban’s chaotic rollout by providing assistance to foreign travelers at airports. Their efforts led to initial court victories, which in turn led the government to soften the Ban somewhat in two superseding executive actions. The lawyers’ work also contributed to the broader resistance to the Trump administration by dramatizing its bigotry, callousness, cruelty, and lawlessness. The efficacy of the lawyers’ resistance to the Travel Ban shows that, contrary to strong claims about the limits of court action, litigation can promote social change. General lessons about lawyer activism in ordinary times are difficult to draw, however, because of the extraordinary threat Trump poses to civil rights and the rule of law.

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.

“I Hope to Hell Nothing Goes Back to The Way It Was Before”: COVID-19, Marginalization, and Native Nations

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Raymond Foxworth ◽  
Laura E. Evans ◽  
Gabriel R. Sanchez ◽  
Cheryl Ellenwood ◽  
Carmela M. Roybal
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Original Data ◽  
The United States ◽  
Federal Law ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
Native Communities ◽  
Tribal Health ◽  
Tribal Lands ◽  
Health Regulations

We draw on new and original data to examine both partisan and systemic inequities that have fueled the spread of COVID-19 in Native America. We show how continued political marginalization of Native Americans has compounded longstanding inequalities and endangered the lives of Native peoples. Native nations have experienced disproportionate effects from prior health epidemics and pandemics, and in 2020, Native communities have seen greater rates of infection, hospitalization, and death from COVID-19. We find that Native nations have more COVID-19 cases if they are located in states with a higher ratio of Trump supporters and reside in states with Republican governors. Where there is longstanding marginalization, measured by lack of clean water on tribal lands and health information in Native languages, we find more COVID-19 cases. Federal law enables non-members to flout tribal health regulations while on tribal lands, and correspondingly, we find that COVID-19 cases rise when non-members travel onto tribal lands. Our findings engage the literatures on Native American politics, health policy within U.S. federalism, and structural health inequalities, and should be of interest to both scholars and practitioners interested in understanding COVID-19 outcomes across Tribes in the United States.

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.

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