Civil Rights, Culture Wars

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles W. Eagles
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
School Curriculum ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
The State ◽  
School Segregation ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
The 1950S

Just as Mississippi whites in the 1950s and 1960s had fought to maintain school segregation, they battled in the 1970s to control the school curriculum. Educators faced a crucial choice between continuing to teach a white supremacist view of history or offering students a more enlightened multiracial view of their state’s past. In 1974, when Random House’s Pantheon Books published Mississippi: Conflict and Change (written and edited by James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis), the defenders of the traditional interpretation struck back at the innovative textbook. Intolerant of its inclusion of African Americans, Native Americans, women, workers, and subjects like poverty, white terrorism, and corruption, the state textbook commission rejected the book, and its action prompted Loewen and Sallis to join others in a federal lawsuit (Loewen v. Turnipseed) challenging the book ban.

Epic Cruelty: On Post-Pandemic Performance

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-136
Author(s):  
Rick Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
California State University ◽  
The State ◽  
State University ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Disaster Capitalism

As today’s catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic exacerbates ongoing crises, including systemic racism, rising ethno-nationalism, and fossil-fuelled climate change, the neoliberal world that we inhabit is becoming increasingly hostile, particularly for the most vulnerable. Even in the United States, as armed white-supremacist, pro-Trump forces face off against protesters seeking justice for African Americans, the hostility is increasingly palpable, and often frightening. Yet as millions of Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrated after the brutal police killing of George Floyd, the current, intersecting crises – worsened by Trump’s criminalization of anti-racism protesters and his dismissal of science – demand a serious, engaged, response from activists as well as artists. The title of this article is meant to evoke not only the state of the unusually cruel moment through which we are living, but also the very different approaches to performance of both Brecht and Artaud, whose ideas, along with those of others – including Benjamin, Butler, Latour, Mbembe, and Césaire – inform the radical, open-ended, post-pandemic theatre practice proposed in this essay. A critically acclaimed dramatist as well as Professor of English and Playwriting at California State University, Northridge, Mitchell’s published volumes of plays include Disaster Capitalism; or Money Can’t Buy You Love: Three Plays; Brecht in L.A.; and Ventriloquist: Two Plays and Ventriloquial Miscellany. He is the editor of Experimental O’Neill, and is currently at work on a series of post-pandemic plays.

West of Jim Crow

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn M. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
White Schools ◽  
Black Bodies

This book follows California’s history of segregation from statehood to the beginning of the long civil rights movement, arguing that the state innovated methods to control and contain African Americans and other people of color. While celebrated in popular discourse for its forward-thinking culture, politics, and science, California also pioneered new ways to keep citizenship white. Schools, streetcars, restaurants, theaters, parks, beaches, and pools were places of contestation where the presence of black bodies elicited forceful responses from segregationists. Black Californians employed innovative measures to dismantle segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they borrowed some tactics from race rebels in the South, others they improvised. West of Jim Crow uses California to highlight the significance of African American resistance to racial restrictions in places often deemed marginal to mainstream civil rights histories. Examining segregation in the state sheds light on the primacy of gender and sexuality in the minds of segregationists and the significance of black women, black bodies, and racial science, in the years preceding the modern civil rights struggle. California has much to teach us about the lives of African Americans who crossed the color line and the variety of tactics and strategies employed by freedom fighters across the United States.

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.

scholarly journals The Entanglements of Cultural Victimization and Cultural Healing within the Dominant White Apparatus: Tayo in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony and Bigger in Richard Wright’s Native Son

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Sameer M. Al-Shraah
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Native Son ◽  
Cultural Healing ◽  
Mainstream Culture

The dominant white culture in the United States of America has always assumed the role of supremacy that victimizes other ethnicities and minorities and looked upon them as inferiors and unworthy of the privileges white people enjoy. Although the maltreatment of the Other-the non-white- differs from one ethnicity or minority to the other, it has always had sheer negative impacts on individuals as well as communities. This paper aims to show the victimization of African Americans as a community in America represented by the atrocity of Bigger and the victimization of Native Americans represented by trauma of Tayo. This paper will tackle the issue of victimization of the two communities-African American and native American-in general through the tough life journeys of the two protagonists of Richard Wright’s Native Son and Leslie Silko’s Ceremony and will try to show two different faces of maltreatment by the mainstream culture, but eventually same negative effects on both communities, African Americans and Native Americans. Thus, many Native Americans are subject to the mainstream culture instrumental policies that convince underprivileged ethnicities that they are integral part of the texture of the American society in time of national need. The irony is that such attitude is only meant to recruit non-whites to fight for the interest of the white supremacist apparatus. Silko eloquently displays patriotism and loyalty as the citizen who is eager and willing to fight and die for his people and country, and in that sense many Native Americans enlisted in the military so as to assert their masculinity. This, in fact, shows the negative effects of the pressure of white supremacist ideologies practiced against non-whites that they choose to act against their desires and choices in the hope that they will be accepted within the American social fabric. Finally, this paper explores some of the solutions available for the victimization and the atrocities of ethnic Americans, such as the communal support and the reconnection to one’s heritage and cultural roots to heal the damaged self-image and psyches of ethnic Americans.

Children Are Hiding in Plain Sight in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Rouleau
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Young People ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Age Of Majority

All kinds of peoples, previously marginalized in favor of the actions and thoughts of elite policy makers, now fill foreign relations histories. African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, women, workers, and many others have been shown to be indispensable—if informal—diplomatic assets. And yet, diverse as this cast of characters has become, notice one thing they share in common: their adulthood. It is as if human experience with foreign affairs only begins with the age of majority. What might be gained once we appreciate the influence of young people, as both audience and agent, in the long history of America's entanglement with the wider world?

Native Americans in the Pennsylvania School Curriculum

2009 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Minderhout ◽  
Andrea Frantz
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
School Curriculum ◽  
The State ◽  
State Agency ◽  
Red Power ◽  
American Society ◽  
Native American Group ◽  
The 1960S

In the 2000 U. S. Census, 18,348 people in Pennsylvania indicated that they were Native Americans, an increase of nearly 50% since 1990; another 34,302 identified themselves as "part-Indian." These numbers likely reflect a trend towards a greater acceptance of Native American status in the United States generally and in Pennsylvania in particular. This trend has been going on since the 1960s with the rise of the Red Power movement, and a changing American society that increasingly saw Native Americans as environmentally friendly and historically wronged. Today, in Pennsylvania, hardly a weekend goes by without a powwow or a tribal gathering somewhere in the state. In our on-going research with Pennsylvania's Native Americans since 2004, we have found them to be both proud of their identity and heritage and increasingly frustrated with the lack of recognition they receive from the state and the larger, non-Indian population. Pennsylvania is one of very few states that neither contains a reservation nor officially recognizes any Native American group. No university-level Native American cultural center or studies program exists within the state, and no state agency is dedicated to the issues and concerns of Native Americans. This is ironic because the first two hundred years of European history in Pennsylvania is one of extensive interaction, cooperation and eventually conflict with Native Americans. But, as will be seen in this paper, Native Americans have largely disappeared from the state history books.

Unification and Its Discontents

2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
Brian Kovalesky
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School District ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
The State ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
City Schools

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the height of protests and actions by civil rights activists around de facto school segregation in the Los Angeles area, the residents of a group of small cities just southeast of the City of Los Angeles fought to break away from the Los Angeles City Schools and create a new, independent school district—one that would help preserve racially segregated schools in the area. The “Four Cities” coalition was comprised of residents of the majority white, working-class cities of Vernon, Maywood, Huntington Park, and Bell—all of which had joined the Los Angeles City Schools in the 1920s and 1930s rather than continue to operate local districts. The coalition later expanded to include residents of the cities of South Gate, Cudahy, and some unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, although Vernon was eventually excluded. The Four Cities coalition petitioned for the new district in response to a planned merger of the Los Angeles City Schools—until this time comprised of separate elementary and high school districts—into the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The coalition's strategy was to utilize a provision of the district unification process that allowed citizens to petition for reconfiguration or redrawing of boundaries. Unification was encouraged by the California State Board of Education and legislature in order to combine the administrative functions of separate primary and secondary school districts—the dominant model up to this time—to better serve the state's rapidly growing population of children and their educational needs, and was being deliberated in communities across the state and throughout Los Angeles County. The debates at the time over school district unification in the Greater Los Angeles area, like the one over the Four Cities proposal, were inextricably tied to larger issues, such as taxation, control of community institutions, the size and role of state and county government, and racial segregation. At the same time that civil rights activists in the area and the state government alike were articulating a vision of public schools that was more inclusive and demanded larger-scale, consolidated administration, the unification process reveals an often-overlooked grassroots activism among residents of the majority white, working-class cities surrounding Los Angeles that put forward a vision of exclusionary, smaller-scale school districts based on notions of local control and what they termed “community identity.”

Transformations: The New Deal through the 1950s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Federal Court ◽  
Labor Standards ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter traces the changes in federal and state protective policies from the New Deal through the 1950s. In contrast to the setbacks of the 1920s, the New Deal revived the prospects of protective laws and of their proponents. The victory of the minimum wage for women workers in federal court in 1937 and the passage in 1938 of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which extended labor standards to men, represented a peak of protectionist achievement. This achievement rested firmly on the precedent of single-sex labor laws for which social feminists—led by the NCL—had long campaigned. However, “equal rights” gained momentum in the postwar years, 1945–60. By the start of the 1960s, single-sex protective laws had resumed their role as a focus of contention in the women's movement.

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