The Man Don’t Need Me Anymore

Author(s):  
Greta de Jong

This chapter describes the extreme hardships facing plantation workers as a result of agricultural mechanization and economic reprisals against people who were involved in civil rights activism in the 1960s. Southern welfare and economic development policies were designed to encourage black out-migration from the region, enabling wealthy white families whose fortunes were built on exploiting black labor to avoid responsibility for those workers once they were no longer needed. At the same time, reducing the number of African Americans living in the plantation counties helped minimize the threat posed by black political empowerment. By the mid-1960s, these policies had forced hundreds of thousands of African Americans to leave the region and generated rising unemployment and poverty rates for those who remained.

Author(s):  
Jerry Gershenhorn

During the 1960s, Austin lent his talents and his newspaper in support of the direct action movement in Durham and throughout the state. Unlike many other black leaders in the city, he immediately and enthusiastically embraced an early sit-in in Durham that began in 1957, three years before the more celebrated Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins. He also aided a boycott of white retail businesses that refused to hire black workers by publishing the names of those businesses in the Carolina Times. This strategy was quite effective in forcing white businesses to hire African Americans. Austin’s efforts and those of countless civil rights activists led to major freedom struggle successes with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.


1999 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Wright

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.


2005 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Benson

Forty years ago, civil rights activists across the country rejoiced in the passing of the Voting Rights Act1 (“VRA” or “the Act”). The Act was a crowning achievement of the classical civil rights movement and the culmination of a bloody series of events seeking political empowerment for African-Americans in the United States.


2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (5) ◽  
pp. 961-979
Author(s):  
Eric C. Schneider ◽  
Christopher Agee ◽  
Themis Chronopoulos

Police abuse of African Americans was an immediate trigger for the urban uprisings of the 1960s, and civilian review of police actions became a central tenet of civil rights liberalism. The failure of Philadelphia’s Police Advisory Board (PAB), the nation’s first independent civilian review board (1958), to meliorate police–community tensions suggests the limitations of civil rights liberalism: an inability to confront the role of police as “dirty workers,” who performed the unacknowledged but widely demanded function of maintaining racial hierarchy in the postwar city. Working-class African Americans, the most frequent victims of police brutality, came to see civilian review as a charade and rejected the limited vision of civil rights liberals. The PAB’s failure shows that police reform is impossible without a broader commitment to overturning racial hierarchy.


Author(s):  
Greta de Jong

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.


Author(s):  
Eric Schickler

Few transformations in American politics have been as important as the integration of African Americans into the Democratic Party and the Republican embrace of racial policy conservatism. The story of this partisan realignment on race is often told as one in which political elites—such as Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater—set in motion a dramatic and sudden reshuffling of party positioning on racial issues during the 1960s. This book instead argues that top party leaders were actually among the last to move, and that their choices were dictated by changes that had already occurred beneath them. The book shows that the two parties' transformation on civil rights took place gradually over decades. The book reveals that Democratic partisanship, economic liberalism, and support for civil rights had crystallized in public opinion, state parties, and Congress by the mid-1940s. This trend was propelled forward by the incorporation of African Americans and the pro-civil-rights Congress of Industrial Organizations into the Democratic coalition. Meanwhile, Republican partisanship became aligned with economic and racial conservatism. Scrambling to maintain existing power bases, national party elites refused to acknowledge these changes for as long as they could, but the civil rights movement finally forced them to choose where their respective parties would stand. Presenting original ideas about political change, the book sheds new light on twentieth and twenty-first century racial politics.


Author(s):  
Peter Temin

Racism, or racecraft, began when African slaves first were brought to America. Slaves were not included in “all men” who were created equal, and the Civil War did not make African Americans equal citizens. Jim Crow laws and actions prevented them from voting and getting a decent education until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. The backlash from this movement led to a dual economy. Women also were not full citizens until the 20th century, and their right to full equality is still being contested. Latino immigrants more recently have entered racecraft on a par with blacks, as in pejorative statements about black and brown people.


Author(s):  
Roberta Gold

This chapter examines the rent strikes that erupted in Harlem and other ghettos in the 1960s. Ideologically, the rent strikes blur the line between civil rights liberalism and Black Power. Rent strikers renounced the liberal integrationist vision—moving out of the ghetto—that had animated the previous decade's black housing struggles. Instead they sought to improve conditions and build power within the segregated neighborhoods where they, like most African Americans, actually lived. This chapter considers the rent rebellion launched by ghetto residents, drawing inspiration from the burgeoning civil rights movement and support from New York's longtime tenant advocates. It shows that this rent rebellion won modest material improvements and contributed to a growing movement for community power in the ghettos. One of the strikes' main achievements was to galvanize tenants throughout New York City at a critical moment in the long-term fight over rent control. The chapter also discusses issues of gender and race in the Harlem rent strikes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-37
Author(s):  
Lidia Mierzejewska ◽  
Jerzy Parysek

Abstract The complexity of the reality studied by geographical research requires applying such methods which allow describing the state of affairs and ongoing changes in the best possible way. This study aims to present a model of research on selected aspects of the dynamics and structure of socio-economic development. The idea was to determine whether we deal with the process of reducing or widening the differences in terms of individual features. The article primarily pursues a methodological goal, and to a lesser extent an empirical one. The methodological objective of the paper was to propose and verify a multi-aspect approach to the study of development processes. The analyses carried out reveal that in terms of the features taken into account in the set of 24 of the largest Polish cities the dominating processes are those increasing differences between cities, which are unfavourable in the context of the adopted development policies aiming at reducing the existing disparities. In relation to the methodological objective, the results of the conducted research confirm the rationale of the application of the measures of dynamics and the feature variance to determine the character (dynamics and structure) of the socio-economic development process of cities. Comparatively less effective, especially for interpretation, is the application of principal component analysis and a multivariate classification, which is mainly the result of differences in the variance of particular features.


2000 ◽  
Vol 39 (4II) ◽  
pp. 1057-1073
Author(s):  
Abdul Hakem

Pakistan with an estimated population of around 142.5 million in mid 2001 is the seventh most populous country in the world and fourth in Asia and Pacific countries. The historical trends indicate a continuously increasing growth in population (Table 1). The population of the area now constituting Pakistan was 16.6 million in 1901. Since then the population has increased over eight-fold. Annual growth rates have risen from 1 percent in the first three decades of the century to around 2 percent in the next three decades and after peaking at little over 3 percent in the 1960s, has started showing a declining trend. Currently it is estimated that Pakistan’s population is growing at around 2.1 percent, still a very high rate of annual growth in population. Major contributing factor to the fast growth in population of Pakistan has been high fertility which has remained high for a very long period. It is evident that nearly 100 million population has been added to the population of Pakistan since 1961, that is, during the last four decades. Such rapid growth in population has several adverse implications for the socio-economic development of the country which has been offsetting the gains in social and economic development.


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