scholarly journals Battle Cry: the American Library Association and Its Southern Chapters during the Civil Rights Movement

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven R. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American South ◽  
American Library Association ◽  
Cultural Barriers ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
American Library ◽  
The American South

The historiography of civil rights and libraries tells us little about the desegregation of the profession. During the Civil Rights Movement librarians in the American South encountered barriers to their professional participation due to Jim Crow cultural restrictions in the region. Despite activism by a few individuals, the American Library Association was not successful in compelling state and regional affiliates of the Association to integrate their ranks. Four state associations (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgie) actually severed their ties with ALA. Only after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were the cultural barriers removed to permit the southern associations to open their membership to all librarians. Soon after the signing of that legislation, ALA readmitted those southern chapters.

Book Reviews

2013 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 911-912
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American South ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
The American South ◽  
William Robertson

Explores the economic gains experienced across racial boundaries in the wake of the civil rights movement of the American South. Discusses civil rights, economics, and the American South; the political economy of the Jim Crow South; southern business and public accommodations—an economic–historical paradox; desegregating southern labor markets; the economics of southern school desegregation; the economic consequences of voting rights; the downside of the civil rights revolution; and civil rights economics—historical context and lessons. Wright is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Economic History at Stanford University.

The American South

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Reagan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
American South ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Racial Tension ◽  
The American South

The American South: A Very Short Introduction explores the American South, a distinctive place with a dramatic history. It is a cultural crossroads, where Western Europe met West Africa in a colonial slave society. The Civil War and civil rights movement transformed the South and remain a part of a vibrant and contested public memory. Moreover, the South's pronounced traditionalism in customs and values have always contended with the forces of modernization and the continuing challenges of racial tension. This VSI looks at Southerners' diverse creative responses to these experiences, in literature, film, music, and cuisine, which have had worldwide influence.

Monumental Constructions: Statues, Identity, and Gabrielle Roy’s “L’arbre”

2021 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-117
Author(s):  
Holly Collins
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American South ◽  
Live Oak ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Significant Attention

Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans garnered significant attention for his book In the Shadow of Statues (2018), observing that many Confederate monuments were erected to buttress Jim Crow laws and serve as a warning to those who supported the civil rights movement. Likewise, there are a number of monuments in Québec that serve a particular political or religious purpose, seeking to reinforce a pure laine ideology. In this article, I explore the parallels between the literal and figurative construction and deconstruction of monuments that have fortified invented ideas on identity in francophone North America. Further, Gabrielle Roy’s short story “L’arbre,” which describes a “living monument,” tells the story of a racialized past in North America and unveils the falsities that have been preserved through the construction of statues that perpetuate racial myth. “L’arbre” examines the natural, unconstructed monument of the Live Oak: a tree that witnessed and holds the visible scars of the many terrible realities that took place in its shadows. I use Roy’s short story to show how she sought to deconstruct a whitewashed history of the post-Civil War American South and suggest that her broader corpus rejects determinism wholesale.

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.

“Just a Bunch of Agitators”: Kneel-Ins and the Desegregation of Southern Churches

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-261
Author(s):  
Joseph Kip Kosek
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Southern Baptist ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American South ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Activities ◽  
Baptist Church ◽  
American Students ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Church

AbstractCivil rights protests at white churches, dubbed “kneel-ins,” laid bare the racial logic that structured Christianity in the American South. Scholars have investigated segregationist religion, but such studies tend to focus on biblical interpretation rather than religious practice. A series of kneel-ins at Atlanta's First Baptist Church, the largest Southern Baptist church in the Southeast, shows how religious activities and religious spaces became sites of intense racial conflict. Beginning in 1960, then more forcefully in 1963, African American students attempted to integrate First Baptist's sanctuary. When they were alternately barred from entering, shown to a basement auditorium, or carried out bodily, their efforts sparked a wide-ranging debate over racial politics and spiritual authenticity, a debate carried on both inside and outside the church. Segregationists tended to avoid a theological defense of Jim Crow, attacking instead the sincerity and comportment of their unwanted visitors. Yet while many church leaders were opposed to open seating, a vibrant student contingent favored it. Meanwhile, mass media—local, national, and international—shaped interpretations of the crisis and possibilities for resolving it. Roy McClain, the congregation's popular minister, attempted to navigate a middle course but faced criticism from all sides. The conflict came to a head when Ashton Jones, a white minister, was arrested, tried, and imprisoned for protesting outside the church. In the wake of the controversy, the members of First Baptist voted to end segregation in the sanctuary. This action brought formal desegregation—but little meaningful integration—to the congregation.

scholarly journals The multiple mobilities of civil rights in Jeanine Tesori’s Violet and Caroline, or Change

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-253
Author(s):  
Allan Kilner-Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American History ◽  
American South ◽  
Tony Kushner ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
The World ◽  
The American South

This article centres on Jeanine Tesori’s Violet (book and lyrics by Brian Crawley) and Caroline, or Change (book and lyrics by Tony Kushner), both of which are set in the American south during a crucial period in American history running between the assassination of John F. Kennedy on 22 November 1963 and the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Both works musically capture the imaginative traditions of the American south through gospel, country, Motown, and blues in order to detail the complex negotiations of the titular female protagonists through challenges of isolation, entrapment and liberation in the months following Kennedy's assassination. This article argues that the promise and affordance of mobility within these musicals are rooted in an uncanny spiritual fervour expressed by Violet and Caroline, both of whom have defined a distinctive, and, as will be recognized by each musical’s conclusion, mistaken theology of personal devotion and faith that runs precisely counter to the liberating potentials in the world around them.

Staging Diaspora

2019 ◽  
pp. 120-163
Author(s):  
Rebekah J. Kowal
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American South ◽  
American Identity ◽  
African Dance ◽  
Sierra Leonean ◽  
Dance Company ◽  
The American South ◽  
Nigerian Students

Chapter 3 focuses on the artistic, cultural and political significance of Sierra-Leonean choreographer Asadata Dafora’s work in the mid-1940s. The first part of the chapter examines the import of three African dance festivals that Dafora directed and produced at Carnegie Hall on behalf of the African Academy of Arts and Research (AAAR), a pro-nationalist and anti-colonialist organization founded by Nigerian students living in New York City at the time. Seen in this light, Dafora’s performance of diaspora makes visible practices of black creativity and resistance, seeking to bridge Africanist solidarities toward the formation of a black American identity defined in global terms. The second part of the chapter analyzes the importance of a tour Dafora took with his dance company, Shogola Oloba African Dance Group, across the American South and Midwest, performing “Africa” for largely African American audiences on the eve of the civil rights movement.

The Voter Education Project, 1962–1964

Poll Power ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 57-89
Author(s):  
Evan Faulkenbury
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American South ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Voting Power ◽  
Education Project ◽  
Grassroots Movements ◽  
The American South

This chapter explores how the VEP empowered 129 separate African American voter campaigns during this period, spending over a million dollars, and registering 688,000 black southerners. This chapter argues that this surge of black voting power paved the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Wiley Branton led the VEP during this period, and their support, with philanthropic backing, energized thousands of black civil rights activists across the American South. This chapter chronicles how VEP money and support empowered grassroots movements across the South, and how the civil rights movement relied on the VEP.

Building Toward Major Policy Change: Congressional Action on Civil Rights, 1941–1950

2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffery A. Jenkins ◽  
Justin Peck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Supreme Court Decision ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Constitution ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
Legislative Proposal

The mid-1960s witnessed a landmark change in the area of civil rights policy in the United States. After a series of tortuous internal battles, with Southern legislators using all available procedural tools to maintain their states' discriminatory Jim Crow legal systems, the United States Congress adopted two statutes—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—which insured civil and political equality for all Americans. The Acts of 1964 and 1965 were the culmination of a decade-long struggle by black Americans to secure the citizenship rights that had been denied to them for more than a half century. Beginning with the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Supreme Court decision, the civil rights movement built momentum, as formal organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) grew in strength and informal (grass roots) organizations spread throughout the South and the Nation. As national public opinion shifted increasingly toward providing new civil rights guarantees for blacks, Congress responded with new legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (the first civil rights law since 1875), the Civil Rights Act of 1960, and a legislative proposal to prohibit the poll tax in 1962 (which would be ratified by three-quarters of the states in 1964 and become the 24th Amendment to the United States Constitution).

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