scholarly journals The Violence of Nonviolence: Contextualizing the Movements of King and Gandhi

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Mileski
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
African American Civil Rights

King and Gandhi: two names that have come to be synonymous with nonviolence. And yet, the movements they led responded to and, in some cases with, significant violence. In a recent paper (2016), August H. Nimtz analyzes the role of violence in the movement of Dr. King, concluding that violence played a significant role in the success of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. Using Nimtz’s work as a starting point, this paper analyzes King’s movement and views, comparing definitions of “principled nonviolence” versus “pragmatic nonviolence.” From there, this paper analyzes the role of violence in the struggle for Indian independence from British colonialism and Gandhi’s own views on when, if ever, violence is appropriate. This paper concludes that, indeed, violence—that of sanctioned, state-sponsored violence and that of non-sanctioned actors—has had significant roles in both of these movements. In what way, then, could these movements be said to be nonviolent? Finally, this paper asks why there remains such an impetus to identify these movements, and their leaders, with “principled nonviolence.”

The Role of Law in the Civil Rights Movement: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955–1957

1991 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jerome Glennon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Nonviolent Resistance ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Martin Luther King

Accompanying the national move to create a holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., and the commemoration of anniversaries of important episodes in the modern civil rights movement, has come a welcome literature by historians, political scientists, sociologists, journalists, and movement participants analyzing and interpreting the movement. Considerable attention has naturally focused on the Montgomery bus boycott that signaled the start of the modern civil rights movement in December, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. These recent works have reaffirmed the traditional interpretation of the boycott: Led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and sustained by the sacrifices of the thousands who refrained from using public buses, the boycott proved that, by acting collectively, an African-American community could demand and obtain an end to segregation. The technique of nonviolent resistance to oppression, it is said, successfully integrated Montgomery buses.

scholarly journals Collective memory and historical narratives: The African American civil rights movement

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Hughes ◽  
Sarah Drake Brown
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
African American Civil Rights

This study explores how undergraduates, as historical thinkers, learn to interact with history and construct their understanding of the past, and examines the role that primary and secondary sources play in narrative construction and revision. Using the African American civil rights movement as a content focus, participants used images to create initial narratives that reflected their understanding of the movement. Half the participants then read an essay on the movement written by a prominent historian, and the other half examined 18 primary sources that reflected the historian’s interpretation of the movement. Participants then each created a second narrative, again selecting images to depict their understanding of the movement. The results of the study suggest that even as students work with primary sources, they need an effective narrative framework based on recent scholarship to forge powerful counter-narratives that transcend outdated interpretations and historical myths. In terms of teaching and learning about the lengthy struggle for racial justice in the United States, simply encouraging teachers and students to ‘do history’ and conduct their own online research is unlikely to change persistent narrative structures that continue to enable and excuse systemic racism.

The Relationship Between the “Invisibility” of African American Women in the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s and Their Portrayal in Modern Film

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 331-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Lott
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
American Women ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Women's Role

This research argues that the representation of African American women in modern civil rights film is a result of the “invisibility” that they faced during the civil rights movement in America during the 1950s and 1960s. To make its argument, this article contends that the media’s scant but negative coverage of women activists along with male leaders, such as Malcolm X’s attitude toward African American women during the period of the movement, is the reason why ultimately African American women activists received lack of recognition for their involvement in the movement. This work also argues that the lack of recognition for these women is evident in modern civil rights film and they negatively portray African American women’s role during the movement. This is shown by examining two films— Selma and The Help. This work also debates whether using film as a historical source is correct. This work touches upon the ongoing stereotypical role of “Mammy” in films such as The Help and argues that overall, by studying various arguments, and as historian Peniel Joseph believes, that many prestigious movies take dramatic license with historical events, arguing that films are not scholarly books and people should not learn about historical events through films.

A Newspaper Joins the Movement

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sid Bedingfield
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Public School Teachers ◽  
Equal Pay ◽  
Black And White ◽  
State Capital

This chapter details the rise of McCray’s Lighthouse and Informer newspaper. It chronicles the role of civil rights activists Modjeska Monteith Simkins and Osceola E. McKaine in persuading McCray to link his newspaper to the NAACP and the push for civil rights. McCray moves the newspaper to the state capital of Columbia and uses its statewide distribution to rally support for the NAACP and overcomew cautious accommodationism in the African-American community. The chapter provides a detailed look at the early days of the Lighthouse and Informer, when McCray’s paper pushed the boundaries of what a black newspaper could publish in a Deep South state. By 1945, the civil rights movement had gained traction and won a resounding victory: a court decision demanding equal pay for black and white public school teachers.

Conceptions of Agency in Social Movement Scholarship: Mack on African American Civil Rights Lawyers

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (02) ◽  
pp. 522-546 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan D. Carle
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Professional Role ◽  
Identity Performance ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
New Generation ◽  
African American Civil Rights

This essay examines the theory of individual agency that propels the central thesis in Kenneth Mack's Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (2012)—namely, that an important yet understudied means by which African American civil rights lawyers changed conceptions of race through their work was through their very performance of the professional role of lawyer. Mack shows that this performance was inevitably fraught with tension and contradiction because African American lawyers were called upon to act both as exemplary representatives of their race and as performers of a professional role that traditionally had been reserved for whites only. Mack focuses especially on the tensions of this role in courtrooms, where African American lawyers were necessarily called upon to act as the equals of white judges, opposing counsel, and witnesses. Mack's thesis, focused on the contradictions and tensions embodied in the performance of a racially loaded identity, reflects the influence of postmodern identity performance theory as articulated by Judith Butler and others. Mack and others belong to a new generation of civil rights history scholars who are asking new questions about contested identities related to race, gender, sexuality, and class. This essay offers an evaluation of this new direction for civil rights scholarship, focusing especially on its implicit normative orientation and what it contributes to the decade‐old debate over how to conceive of agency in social movement scholarship.

Not as It Is Written

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
International Exhibition ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Made In

This article discusses an international exhibition that detailed the recent history of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Methodologically, the exhibition paired oral history excerpts with selected historic photographs to evoke a sense of Black life during the twentieth century. Thematically, showcasing the Black experience in Pittsburgh provided a chance to provoke among a wider public more nuanced understandings of the civil rights movement, an era particularly prone to problematic and superficial misreadings, but also to interject an African American perspective into the scholarship on deindustrializing cities, a literature which treats racism mostly in white-centric terms. This essay focuses on the choices made in reconciling these thematic and methodological dimensions when designing this exhibition.

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