“Just Listen to What the Panthers Are Saying”

2020 ◽  
pp. 98-127
Author(s):  
Valeria Carbone
Keyword(s):  
Structural Racism ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Grassroots Organization ◽  
Black Panthers ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
American Black ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Black Movement ◽  
The 1960S

Within the American Black Movement, the Black Panther Party (BPP) became the most prominent and influential organization of the 1960s and 1970s. The movement initiated in Oakland (California) and captured the attention of politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and scholars. From a documentary corpus that shows its protagonists' perspective, this chapter aims to focus on the actions, goals, and development of the Black Panthers: what they did, how and why they did it, and what they represented to the Black freedom struggle. It offers an analysis of their tactics and strategies of struggle against police brutality, poor housing and living conditions, unemployment, poverty, and structural racism. The authors aim to show how the BPP went from being a local grassroots organization to a national and highly popular political party for collective action, much more complex and influential than what the collective memory and the dominant historiography have shown.

scholarly journals Striking at the Sacred: The Violence of Prayer, 1960-1969

Open Theology ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobin Miller Shearer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
The Public ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThis essay explores the complex relationship between public prayer and violence during ten years of the Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s and throughout the long civil rights era, activists who used the race-based, highly performative act of public prayer incited violence and drew the nation’s attention to the black freedom struggle. Study of the public prayers that led to violence further suggests that the introduction of prayer into public space acted as a conduit of moral judgment even when intended as a bridge of connection, a pattern that suggests the exercise of public prayer can be a catalyst for violence.

Walk the Way of Free Men

2018 ◽  
pp. 181-227
Author(s):  
D'Weston Haywood
Keyword(s):  
Black Men ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Media Campaign ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Manhood ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Rapid Changes ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Voice

This chapter reinterprets the rise of black radicalism as a moment of competing “voices” across competing mass medias amid rapid changes in the black freedom struggle and media landscape of the 1960s. It also reinterprets Malcolm X as a newspaper publisher, a rather underanalyzed side of Malcolm. Black publishers had long considered their papers the “voice” of the race, and Malcolm’s founding of Muhammad Speaks in 1960 to amplify the voice of Elijah Muhammad signified this. Yet, the paper’s founding also marked the beginning of the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) robust media campaign to use various medias—radio, books, and albums of Muhammad’s speeches—to promote Muhammad’s vision for racial advancement over others. His vision promised to redeem black manhood by renewing their lives, a vision displayed through salesmen for Muhammad Speaks. Thus, readers could read both the paper and their bodies. Malcolm, however, made his display through television. But when he began to gain a voice through television that rivaled that of Muhammad’s in print, the NOI’s media campaign turned from promising to renew the lives of black men to promising to take it away. Malcolm became a newspaperman cut short of his full publishing potential.

Making Sense of the Messy Sixties: Introduction to a Review Symposium on Risa Goluboff's Vagrant Nation

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (04) ◽  
pp. 1634-1645
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Significant Achievement ◽  
The 1960S

This essay provides a summary and critical appraisal of Risa Goluboff's Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s, a book that interweaves the stories of an eclectic cast of characters who were the targets of vagrancy law prosecutions with stories of the lawyers who challenged these prosecutions. In charting the demise of what she terms a “vagrancy law regime,” Goluboff provides insights on the major social and political developments of the 1940s through the 1970s, including the labor movement, the black freedom struggle, the antiwar movement, and the sexual revolution. Goluboff's most significant achievement is her ability to identify in seemingly scattered challenges to vagrancy law a coherent and historically significant episode of constitutional change. Although I question whether the book delivers on its promise to reframe the way we understand the “long 1960s,” Vagrant Nation nonetheless offers a model of how to integrate social history and doctrinal history into a compelling narrative of constitutional change.

scholarly journals THE RESPONSE OF THE MODERATE WING OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT TO THE WAR IN VIETNAM

2003 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 669-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
SIMON HALL
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Peace Movement ◽  
Urban League ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Lyndon Johnson ◽  
The 1960S

This article explores the response of the moderate wing of the civil rights movement to the war in Vietnam. The moderates, made up of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and leaders such as Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, were initially opposed to the civil rights movement taking a stand against the war. This reluctance was the result of a number of factors, including anti-communism and their own closeness with the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. Crucially, it also resulted from their own experiences of the black freedom struggle itself. The article also documents and analyses the growing anti-war dissent amongst the moderates, culminating in the decision of both the NAACP and the Urban League to adopt an anti-war stance at the end of the 1960s. Despite this, they remained unenthusiastic about participating in peace movement activities, and the reasons for this are explained. Finally, the article suggests that the war was important in exposing existing divisions within the civil rights movement, as well as in generating new ones.

The Rising Tide of Equality and Democratic Reform

The 1970s ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Borstelmann
Keyword(s):  
Equal Rights ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Democratic Reform ◽  
The Social ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
American Society ◽  
Almost All

This chapter describes the beginnings of the equal rights movement in the 1970s. During this decade, gender—the social and cultural roles associated with a particular sex—became a crucial and widely used term, as millions of women and men began to reconsider all sorts of previously unexamined assumptions about femaleness and maleness. The implications of this kind of rethinking were enormous. The segregation by sex that had pervaded American society no longer looked so natural. Moreover, the weakening of traditional gender hierarchies marked the largest shift of the decade toward formal equality, since it encompassed slightly more than half of American citizens. But other old hierarchies also began to crumble in the 1970s as the reforming spirit of egalitarianism, spilling out from the black freedom struggle of the previous decade, seeped into almost all corners of American life.

“If the March Cannot Be Here, Then Where?”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aram Goudsouzian
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Methodist Church ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
National Office ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The City

This essay examines the role of Memphis in the Meredith March against Fear, a demonstration for black freedom that moved through Mississippi in June 1966. James Meredith began his journey from Memphis and was shot by Aubrey Norvell, who hailed from a suburb of the city. In the aftermath of the shooting, Memphis hosted important events that not only determined the character and success of the march but also influenced the course of the black freedom struggle. The titans of the civil rights movement orated from the pulpits of Memphis churches and engaged in contentious debates in the rooms of the Lorraine Motel. Even as the march continued south through Mississippi, its headquarters remained at Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, which achieved James Lawson’s vision of an activist church driven by grassroots pressure and militant nonviolence. The city’s whites exhibited both hostility and accommodation toward black protesters, demonstrating both connections to and distinctions from the racial patterns of Mississippi. For the Memphis branch of the NAACP, the demonstration presented an opportunity to assert its historic strength, even as the march highlighted the complicated dynamics between local branches and the national office.

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