scholarly journals Never Together: Black and White People in the Postwar Economic Era

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Peter Temin
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Black Education ◽  
World War ◽  
White People ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Black Elite

This paper recounts American economic history for 60 years after World War II. The unusual part of this paper is that it focuses on not only the conventional tale, but also recounts what whites did to and for Blacks over this period. It starts from the unhappy experience of a Black American soldier, goes through the prosperity that followed the war and ends with the various changes that happened to the economy after 1970. The Civil Rights Movement is in the middle, and it gave rise to more Black education before racial segregation destroyed their gains. Some Blacks graduated from college and became a Black Elite. Obama’s election showed that the Black Elite could interact with relative equality with educated whites.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Women ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Elected Officials ◽  
World War ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Massive Resistance

Massive resistance to the civil rights movement has often been presented as sequestered in the South, limited to the decade between the Brown Decision and the Civil Rights Act, and attributed to the most vehement elected officials and the Citizens’ Councils. But that version ignores the long-standing work of white women who sustained racial segregation and nurtured both massive support for the Jim Crow order in the interwar period and who transformed support into massive resistance after World War II. Support for the segregated state existed among everyday people. Maintaining racial segregation was not solely or even primarily the work of elected officials. Its adherents sustained the system with quotidian work, and on the ground, it was often white women who shaped and sustained white supremacist politics.

Between Kennedy and Khrushchev

The Columnist ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 203-228
Author(s):  
Donald A. Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
World War ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
Nikita Khrushchev ◽  
New Frontier ◽  
1960 Election

During the 1960 election, the “Merry-Go-Round” ’s revelation of a suspicious loan from billionaire Howard Hughes helped to defeat Richard Nixon. Nevertheless, Drew Pearson remained an outsider in John Kennedy’s New Frontier, having accused Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Profiles in Courage, of having been ghost-written, and painted Joseph P. Kennedy as being sympathetic to Nazi Germany before World War II. Being a generation older than Kennedy, Pearson found himself more comfortable with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and scored a rare interview with him. Khrushchev insisted that he sought peace, which Pearson communicated to Kennedy and to his readers. Consequently, anti-communist groups assailed the column and picketed Pearson. At the same time, Pearson grew more appreciative of the civil rights movement. The column attacked the Ku Klux Klan and encouraged Kennedy to speak out more forcefully against racial segregation and inequality.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-234
Author(s):  
Kurt Edward Kemper
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
College Athletics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Medium Size ◽  
World War ◽  
Multiple Pressures ◽  
Economic Elites

Throughout much of the NCAA’s first half century, the organization maintained an uneasy collection of commercialized schools that pursued highly competitive athletics for publicity and profit; liberal arts colleges that saw college athletics as a component of their educational and leadership missions; and smaller and medium-size state schools that wanted to play athletics for competitive glory but lacked the size, resources, and finances of the big-time powers. Unable to balance those three interests, the NCAA largely ignored the concerns of the latter two while devoting itself to the service of commercialized athletics. This fraught arrangement finally came asunder in the years after World War II when multiple pressures from scandals, racial criticisms, and growing pressure for access to the NCAA Basketball Tournament finally forced concessions. The concessions made in the mid- to late-1950s, however, did not reshape the balance of power in the NCAA, as the organization remained wholly committed to serving the interests of big-time commercialized athletics. In this regard the challenges faced by the NCAA mirrored the larger social and cultural upheaval in the United States following World War II. The civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and opposition to the war in Vietnam all challenged the authority of existing political and economic elites yet did not mark any fundamental shift in power in American life. The question, then, is not really how did the NCAA manage to survive but, rather, how did its critics ever hope to succeed?

scholarly journals The Civil Rights Revolution as Economic History

1999 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Wright
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Southern Region ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Communism ◽  
The 1960S

This address urges Americanists to take the post–World War II era on board as economic history, using the Civil Rights Revolution to set an example. The speed and sweepof the movement's success illustrates the dynamics of an “unanticipated revolution” as analyzed by Timur Kuran, to be grouped with famous historical surprises such as the triumph of British antislavery and the fall of Soviet communism. The evidence confirms that the breakthroughs of the 1960s constituted an economic as well as a political revolution, in many respects an economic revolution for the entire southern region, as well as for African-Americans.

Quaker Brotherhood

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan W. Austin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Extensive Study ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Interracial Relations ◽  
History Of

This is the first extensive study of the American Friends Service Committee's interracial activism in the first half of the twentieth century, filling a major gap in scholarship on the Quakers' race relations work from the AFSC's founding in 1917 to the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the early 1950s. The book tracks the evolution of key AFSC projects, such as the Interracial Section and the American Interracial Peace Committee, that demonstrate the tentativeness of the Friends' activism in the 1920s, as well as efforts in the 1930s to make scholarly ideas and activist work more theologically relevant for Friends. Documenting the AFSC's efforts to help European and Japanese American refugees during World War II, the book shows that by 1950, Quakers in the AFSC had honed a distinctly Friendly approach to interracial relations that combined scholarly understandings of race with their religious views. Highlighting the complicated and sometimes controversial connections between Quakers and race during this era, the book uncovers important aspects of the history of Friends, pacifism, feminism, American religion, immigration, ethnicity, and the early roots of multiculturalism.

“The Negro Nurse—A Citizen Fighting for Democracy”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charissa J. Threat
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Male ◽  
African American Female ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
World War ◽  
Female Nurses

This chapter examines the efforts by black female nurses and white male nurses to claim a space for themselves in a profession that relegated them to the margins. It begins with a discussion of the founding of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses and the Army Nurse Corps (ANC), along with an overview of healthcare and home-front racial politics during World War II. It then turns to nurse shortages during World War I and World War II and proceeds by analyzing the World War II integration campaign by African American female nurses within the larger context of the civil rights movement. In an effort to break down racial barriers, the chapter shows that African American nurses co-opted traditional gender conventions to make the claim that the sex of the nurse, not race, should determine nursing care for soldiers. It also explores how African Americans used wartime rhetoric about equality and democracy on behalf of their campaign for equal rights, justice, and opportunity.

From Forced Tolerance to Forced Busing: Wartime Intercultural Education and the Rise of Black Educational Activism in Boston

2010 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-327
Author(s):  
Zoë Burkholder
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Teacher Resistance ◽  
Racial Tolerance ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Tolerance Education

In this article, Zoë Burkholder explores the historical interplay of the emergence of tolerance education in the United States and the rise of black educational activism in Boston. By uncovering a pointed lack of tolerance education in Boston and a widespread promotion of tolerance education in other cities in the early half of the twentieth century, the author reveals how racial, historical, and political factors complicated tolerance education's local implementation in Boston. Informed by local racialized politics in the 1940s, the predominantly Irish Catholic teaching force in Boston declined to teach lessons on racial tolerance that were popular nationwide during World War II. Burkholder argues that this site of active teacher resistance against tolerance education provided fertile ground for black educational activism in Boston during the civil rights movement. These findings presage the well-documented virulence of white protest to school integration in Boston and complicate our understanding of integration in today's educational context.

scholarly journals Trends in Black-White Church Integration

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Q. Yang ◽  
Starlita Smith
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Americans ◽  
White People ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Blacks And Whites ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
The Church

Historically, the separation of blacks and whites in churches was well known (Gilbreath 1995; Schaefer 2005). Even in 1968, about four years after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. still said that “eleven o'clock on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week” (Gilbreath 1995:1). His reference was to the entrenched practice of black and white Americans who worshiped separately in segregated congregations even though as Christians, their faith was supposed to bring them together to love each other as brothers and sisters. King's statement was not just a casual observation. One of the few places that civil rights workers failed to integrate was churches. Black ministers and their allies were at the forefront of the church integration movement, but their stiffest opposition often came from white ministers. The irony is that belonging to the same denomination could not prevent the racial separation of their congregations. In 1964, when a group of black women civil rights activists went to a white church in St. Augustine, Florida to attend a Sunday service, the women were met by a phalanx of white people with their arms linked to keep the activists out (Bryce 2004). King's classic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was a response to white ministers who criticized him and the civil rights movement after a major civil rights demonstration (King [2002]).

World War II Soldiers of Color in James Baldwin’s Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone and Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima

MELUS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-193
Author(s):  
Jose Fernandez
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
World War ◽  
War Effort ◽  
War Experiences

Abstract Critics have explored James Baldwin's Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968) and Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima (1972) through the emergence of their protagonists as artists, while other scholars have focused on Tell Me How Long's emphasis on black nationalism or Bless Me, Ultima's engagement with Mexican American identity; however, the tensions between art and social protest in both novels has not been explored by scholars in relation to the novels' treatment of the experience of soldiers of color in World War II. This article focuses on the novels' depiction of the military service by soldiers of color, their transformation by those experiences, and how the protests and activism against the racism and discrimination experienced by soldiers of color contributed to the long civil rights movement. I argue that through the war experiences of the protagonists' older brothers in Tell Me How Long and Bless Me, Ultima, both narratives similarly present the contributions and experiences of soldiers of color during the war effort as they faced the dilemma of fighting a war for their country only to be denied full citizenship rights at home, which increased their social activism. Tell Me How Long describes the heroic service of an African American in battle in the Italian front that has a historical antecedent in the 92nd Infantry Division known as the Buffalo Soldiers, while Bless Me, Ultima focuses on the effects of the mobilization period in Mexican American communities in the Southwest and the war's psychological effects on returning soldiers.

Rooted

2018 ◽  
pp. 159-173
Author(s):  
Theresa A. Case
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Black Education ◽  
Federal Policies ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Stable Family

This chapter establishes the importance of African American shop workers to Texas railroad hubs such as Marshall, Texas, and explores black responses to the 1922 National Railroad Shopmen’s Strike. Newspaper sources reveal that, while some Texas black and white shopmen cooperated in the 1922 walkout, 216 black shopmen in Marshall dramatically broke with the town’s white strikers and the mass of white citizens who supported them: the 216 petitioned the US government and the Texas & Pacific Railway for protection of their return to work against pro-strike violence and intimidation. The chapter contends that the Marshall petitioners found encouragement not only in WWI-era federal policies and civil rights activism but also in the opportunities for black education and stable family life in Marshall. In addition, an earlier rejection of interracial labor solidarity by Marshall’s white shopmen may have played a role. How, in the aftermath of the strike’s defeat, black shopmen and their families related to each other, and to the town’s developing civil rights movement, is a question ripe for investigation.

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