We Have, Happily, Gone beyond the Chitchat over Tea Cups Stage

2018 ◽  
pp. 80-102
Author(s):  
Rebecca Tuuri
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
National Council ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The North ◽  
Catholic Women ◽  
Poverty Program ◽  
Bridge Building

This chapter examines the second and third years of Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS), an interracial, interfaith civil rights organization sponsored by the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). In the summer of 1965, around fifty black and white, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic women returned to Mississippi to help with Head Start, the newly formed War on Poverty program. Despite increased activist calls for more participation and leadership from the grassroots and poor, WIMS continued to promote its elite pedigree by highlighting its members' expertise in teaching, social work, librarianship, and child development. In 1966, WIMS began to shift its focus to bridge building in the North, promoting the liberal strategy of interracial and interfaith conversations as a method to create personal change and combat racial discrimination. However, by 1966, WIMS leaders began to realize the limitations of such a strategy when they were rebuffed in both Mississippi and Boston.

High Heels on the Ground

2018 ◽  
pp. 56-79
Author(s):  
Rebecca Tuuri
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
National Council ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Freedom Summer ◽  
Catholic Women ◽  
High Heels ◽  
Wednesdays In Mississippi

This chapter examines the first summer of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW)-sponsored civil rights organization Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS). WIMS brought down forty-eight black and white, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic women from northern and Midwestern cities to personally witness and provide support for the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, sponsored by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). WIMS relied on a behind-the-scenes approach that did not publicly challenge segregation, but sought to quietly reason with local women to support civil rights activists fighting for voting rights and desegregation of schools, businesses, and other facilities. Although the strategy of personal witness proved limited, WIMS helped connect NCNW to local black activists in Mississippi who advocated for more direct action protests and planted the seeds for a later change of NCNW's direction.

But If You Have a Pig in Your Backyard … Nobody Can Push You Around

2018 ◽  
pp. 128-148
Author(s):  
Rebecca Tuuri
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Home Ownership ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Voluntary Organizations ◽  
National Council ◽  
Childcare Centers ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Sunflower County

Following its local workshops in the late 1960s, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) began to create self-help community programs. This chapter focuses on NCNW's programs in Mississippi--a pig bank for Fannie Lou Hamer's Sunflower County Freedom Farm; low-income home ownership (also known as Turnkey III); and childcare centers in Okolona, Ruleville, and Jackson. To fund these programs, the NCNW utilized financial support from public sources--such as the federal government--and private sources--such as foundations, businesses, and voluntary organizations. Drawing upon its new concept of grassroots expertise as well as the War on Poverty concept of "maximum feasible participation" of the poor, the NCNW recruited local civil rights women such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Unita Blackwell to lead these programs that provided black communities with much-needed food, housing, and childcare. The NCNW's efforts boosted Mississippi women's interest in the larger national organization.

From Civil Rights to Economic Empowerment

2020 ◽  
pp. 26-49
Author(s):  
Emma J. Folwell
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Economic Empowerment ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Poverty Program ◽  
Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission ◽  
Development Group

Chapter one traces the development of President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty. It explores how the nation’s first anti-poverty program—the Child Development Group of Mississippi—formed a central part in the fight for African Americans’ economic empowerment, building on the state’s long tradition of community organizing. White Mississippi launched a renewed massive resistance campaign against the Group, led by Senator John Stennis and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. While the campaign was only partially successful, it was hugely significant in shaping the state’s war on poverty. White segregationists drew on a color-blind language that Senator Stennis had been using to oppose civil rights advances for years, calling for “local responsible people” to take control of the war on poverty. Their calls were little more than a thinly veiled request for whites to enact a “defensive localism” that enabled whites to re-establish their control over African American advancement.

Creating a Ministry of Presence

2018 ◽  
pp. 37-55
Author(s):  
Rebecca Tuuri
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Women ◽  
Team Member ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
National Council ◽  
The South ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Freedom Summer ◽  
Ministry Of Presence

In the fall of 1963, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) took steps to become more directly involved in the civil rights movement when Dorothy Height travelled with a small interracial team of elite clubwomen to investigate the abuse of activist children imprisoned in Selma. The team moved behind the scenes and tried to establish ties with local black and white women to better support the movement. After the Selma trip, white team member Polly Cowan developed plans to bring additional teams of interracial middle and upper class women down to the South. At a March 1964 Atlanta meeting of black and white southern clubwomen, Clarie Collins Harvey, a black businesswoman and clubwoman from Jackson, Mississippi, invited Cowan and the NCNW to provide support to civil rights efforts in Jackson. Her invitation led Cowan and Height to develop plans for Wednesdays in Mississippi to help with Freedom Summer.

The Black Freedom Struggle in the Urban North

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Sugrue
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
The North ◽  
Black Freedom

Racism in the United States has long been a national problem, not a regional phenomenon. The long and well-documented history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and racial violence in the South overshadows the persistent reality of racial discrimination, systemic segregation, and entrenched inequality north of the Mason-Dixon line. From the mid-19th century forward, African Americans and their allies mounted a series of challenges to racially separate schools, segregated public accommodations, racially divided workplaces, endemic housing segregation, and discriminatory policing. The northern civil rights movement expanded dramatically in the aftermath of the Great Migration of blacks northward and the intensification of segregation in northern hotels, restaurants, and theaters, workplaces, housing markets, and schools in the early 20th century. During the Great Depression and World War II, emboldened civil rights organizations engaged in protest, litigation, and lobbying efforts to undermine persistent racial discrimination and segregation. Their efforts resulted in legal and legislative victories against racially separate and unequal institutions, particularly workplaces and stores. But segregated housing and schools remained more impervious to change. By the 1960s, many black activists in the North grew frustrated with the pace of change, even as they succeeded in increasing black representation in elected office, in higher education, and in certain sectors of the economy. In the late 20th century, civil rights activists launched efforts to fight the ongoing problem of police brutality and the rise of the prison-industrial complex. And they pushed, mostly through the courts, for the protection of the fragile gains of the civil rights era. The black freedom struggle in the North remained incomplete in the face of ongoing segregation, persistent racism, and ongoing racial inequality in employment, education, income, and wealth.

Book Reviewing and Civil Rights: The Effect of Regional Opinion

1964 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-394
Author(s):  
Charles E. Higbie
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Random Sample ◽  
The South ◽  
The North

Differing practices in reviewing books by region are revealed in a content analysis of a U.S. 90-newspaper random sample. Books on racial discrimination fared less well in the South than in the North.

Too Close for Comfort: Canada, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and the North American Colo(u)r Line

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Asa McKercher
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
North American ◽  
The North ◽  
The U.S

Too Close for Comfort: Canada, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and the North American Colo(u)r Line

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