scholarly journals “Remember Little Rock”: Racial (In)Justice and the Shaping of Contemporary White Evangelicalism

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 681
Author(s):  
Tammy Heise
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Flash Point ◽  
Little Rock ◽  
Religious Symbol ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Brown Decision ◽  
The U.S

In 1957, Little Rock became a flash point for conflict over the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown decision. This article examines Little Rock as a religious symbol for white southerners—especially white southern evangelicals—as they sought to exercise their self-appointed roles as cultural guardians to devise competing, but ultimately complementary, strategies to manage social change to limit desegregation and other civil rights expansions for African Americans. This history reveals how support for segregation helped to convert white southern evangelicals to conservative political activism in this period.

American Dream Deferred

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-260
Author(s):  
P. James Paligutan
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Coast Guard ◽  
Traditional Use ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Migratory Movement ◽  
Naval Officers ◽  
The U.S

This article examines a unique migratory movement of Filipinos to America: Filipino nationals recruited by the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard between 1952 and 1970. Such recruits were seen as a solution to a mounting labor problem stemming from the Navy’s traditional use of minorities to fulfill duties as servants for naval officers. With African Americans' demands for equal opportunity reaching a crescendo during the Civil Rights era, the U.S. Navy looked to its former colony to replenish its supply of dark-skinned servants. Despite expectations of docility, however, such Filipino sailors were able to forge a culture of resistance manifested through non-confrontational acts of defiance, protest through official channels, and labor stoppage. Such actions ultimately resulted in the reversal of naval policy that relegated Filipinos to servile labor.

Manning the Barricade

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gwyneth Mellinger
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Initial Resistance ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S

This chapter opens the ASNE story in the mid-1950s, when ASNE members began registering the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation ruling and the specter of more sweeping civil rights reforms. During the 1950s, the ASNE leadership was dominated by Southern editors and much of the organization's tension over civil rights was inflected with regionalism. Key moments in the decade examined by this chapter include the ASNE board's initial resistance to integrating the organization and the membership's discourteous reception of prominent civil rights leaders—the first African Americans invited to address the ASNE—at the 1964 convention.

To Build Something, Where They Are

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greta de Jong
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
Black Representation ◽  
Government Grants ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Development Initiatives

This chapter examines the efforts of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives to encourage cooperative enterprises and other economic development initiatives in rural southern communities. The services it provided to cooperatives ensured the survival of many black-owned businesses and encouraged African Americans to remain in the South instead of migrating away. The FSC’s activist staff continued the struggles for civil rights and social justice by working to increase black representation in economic development initiatives, encouraging black political participation, and organizing local communities to fight persistent racism. These efforts generated resistance from powerful white southerners. In 1979, accusations that the FSC was misusing government grants to fund political activities sparked an eighteen-month-long investigation that disrupted and weakened the organization, despite finding no evidence of wrongdoing.

Discovering the South

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ritterhouse
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Economic Problem ◽  
The South ◽  
Gone With The Wind ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The American South

During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. It was also a battlefield on which forces for and against social change were starting to form. For a white southern liberal like Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, it was a fascinating moment to explore. Attuned to culture as well as politics, Daniels knew the true South lay somewhere between Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. On May 5, 1937, he set out to find it, driving thousands of miles in his trusty Plymouth and ultimately interviewing even Mitchell herself. In Discovering the South historian Jennifer Ritterhouse pieces together Daniels’s unpublished notes from his tour along with his published writings and a wealth of archival evidence to put this one man's journey through a South in transition into a larger context. Daniels's well chosen itinerary brought him face to face with the full range of political and cultural possibilities in the South of the 1930s, from New Deal liberalism and social planning in the Tennessee Valley Authority, to Communist agitation in the Scottsboro case, to planters' and industrialists' reactionary worldview and repressive violence. The result is a lively narrative of black and white southerners fighting for and against democratic social change at the start of the nation's long civil rights era. For more information on this book, see www.discoveringthesouth.org.

“The Good Negroes”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Damion L. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Little Rock ◽  
Central High School ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
Symbolic Gestures ◽  
Central High ◽  
International Coverage

This chapter explores President Eisenhower's and President Kennedy's widespread use of symbolic gestures in the realm of civil rights—including the extensive use of African Americans as cultural ambassadors. It argues that both administrations waged an unsuccessful battle to alter international perceptions of U.S. race relations. To illustrate this point, this chapter focuses on the goodwill tours of Mal Whitfield and Rafer Johnson, both of whom were abroad touring in close proximity to the unrest in Little Rock, Arkansas, that was sparked by efforts to desegregate Central High School in 1957. By juxtaposing international coverage of Little Rock with the reception of Whitfield's and Johnson's tours, this chapter suggests that the propaganda campaigns were not able to drastically alter international perceptions of U.S. race relations.

scholarly journals Motion and the Noise

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-329
Author(s):  
Matthew Daniel Sutton
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Boundary Crossing ◽  
Acoustic Environment ◽  
Fisk University ◽  
Sociological Studies ◽  
Cultural Upheaval ◽  
The U.S

William Faulkner's dislike of unwanted sound is well documented. The acoustic environment of rural Mississippi amplified irreversibly after the introduction of the automobile, airplane, and automated farm machinery. In his Intruder in the Dust (1948), the jukebox and radio absorb pointed criticism for producing "canned" sounds outside of their "proper" environment. The narrowing gap between town square and dance hall signifies encroaching chaos, as noise drowns out the attenuated "harmony" that keeps elite whites in power and Intruder's African American protagonist Lucas Beauchamp out of the hands of the lynch mob. For Faulkner, the shift in the auditory environment presents both a disruption and an impediment to a system built on white bourgeois ideals. However, Faulkner's pessimism is counterpointed by sociological studies undertaken by Fisk University researchers. The Fisk study identifies the emergence of a blues culture in the Delta whose energy and boundary-crossing impulses illustrate the liberating possibilities of an expanding soundscape. By juxtaposing Faulkner's damning descriptions of "the motion and the noise" with the Fisk University researchers' illuminating fieldwork, this essay interprets a transformative period in the constantly shifting soundscape of the U.S. South. In line with Jacques Attali's dictum that "our music foretells our future," Intruder in the Dust anticipates the cultural upheaval that would energize the Civil Rights Movement. Both in fiction and in fact, the "noise" emanating from jukeboxes and radios in 1940s Mississippi accelerated social change at a volume much higher and a tempo much faster than Faulkner and other gradualists desired.

“This Independent Fight We Are Making Is Local”: The Election of 1920 and Electoral Politics in Black Baltimore

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-152
Author(s):  
Dennis A. Doster
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Party Affiliation ◽  
The U.S

In 1920, William Ashbie Hawkins, an esteemed lawyer and veteran of the struggle for civil rights, became the first African American to run for the U.S. Senate in Maryland. Hawkins’s independent campaign reflected a growing political insurgency among African Americans in the local Republican Party which built upon a longer tradition of independent political action with roots in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. For black Baltimoreans, this movement was part of a plan to force white Republicans to acquiesce to black demands revealing fluidity in political activity on the local level. Although African Americans may have identified and registered as Republicans, party affiliation did not prevent them from building and sustaining independent political movements on the local level to advance a civil rights agenda.

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