The White Man’s Tax Dollar

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camille Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Private School ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
State Action ◽  
White Backlash ◽  
Legal Identity ◽  
Tax Exempt ◽  
To Come ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

Chapter Five examines how the responses to Brown in defense of segregation were consistently framed in terms of "taxpayer" citizenship and the rights of whites to unequal and better funded schooling. In addition, this chapter identifies the tax-centric debate in Virginia in the era of massive resistance, and the private school/state action questions raised in the wake of Brown v. Board, including its impact on tax exempt institutions like Girard College in Philadelphia. This chapter builds on and combines the recently expanded historiography of the white backlash to the "long civil rights movement" by tracing the continuous assertion by segregationists of a legal identity as "taxpaying citizens." This rights claim drew deeply on the debate over whether taxation and education should facilitate equity or facilitate privilege and the use of the claim to "taxpayer" identity by segregationists anticipated the justification for racially unequal schools in decades to come.

Civil Rights and the Private School Movement in Mississippi, 1964–1971

2002 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Fuquay
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Private School ◽  
Black Children ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Housing Discrimination ◽  
Civil Rights Act

The signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was heralded as a tremendous victory for the civil rights movement, the fulfillment of a decade-long struggle to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Along with measures against job and housing discrimination, the Civil Rights Act included provisions specifically designed to overcome the white South's massive resistance campaign and enforce school desegregation. Despite the continued intransigence of segregationists, these measures proved successful and white public schools across the South opened their doors to black children. With segregationists in retreat and the Voting Rights Act on the horizon, this was a time of celebration for civil rights activists. But this was not the end of the story.

The Private School Pivot: The Shrouded Persistence of Massive Resistance in the Black Belt and Beyond

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-486
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Edmonds
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
School Choice ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Private School ◽  
Educational Equality ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Greene County

In 1969, four years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, African Americans in Greene County, Alabama, reclaimed control of local government, becoming the first community in the South to do so since Reconstruction. A half century later, however, Greene County remains an impoverished and largely segregated area with poor educational outcomes, especially for Black children. This essay explores the history of Greene County from 1954 to the recent past, with a particular focus on Warrior Academy, a segregated private school (“segregation academy”) founded by Whites in 1965. As a case study of “school choice” in the context of the “long civil rights movement,” it complicates scholarly definitions of “massive resistance.” Furthermore, it demonstrates the ways in which an emerging “color-blind” conservatism premised on White concerns about “educational quality” thwarted Black efforts to achieve educational equality, even in places where African Americans achieved significant political victories.

The Civil Rights Movement and American Law, 1950–1969

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-198
Author(s):  
Donald G. Nieman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
White Backlash ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
American Law ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter shows that Brown v. Board of Education raised hope for fundamental change but produced few results. Massive resistance blocked school integration, and only the emergence of black-led organizations and massive grass-roots protests forced Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to support civil rights legislation and Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act. The federal bureaucracy and courts aggressively enforced these laws to topple Jim Crow, bring African Americans into the political process, and open economic opportunities. Although change was dramatic, it bypassed many poor blacks, including those living in northern cities. As the 1960s ended, their anger sparked urban uprisings that shattered the illusion of progress and generated a white backlash.

Contending with Change and Challenges

2018 ◽  
pp. 56-81
Author(s):  
Michelle A. Purdy
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Private School ◽  
School Leaders ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Local Schools ◽  
Tax Exempt ◽  
The Face

This chapter captures the development of Westminster in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By the late 1950s, Westminster’s student body had quadrupled, and the school was housed on the current West Paces Ferry Road campus. School leaders prepared for the possible closing of Atlanta Public Schools as black Atlantans called for desegregation in the face of oppositional state policies. As the civil rights movement increased in momentum, Westminster and other local schools, including Lovett and Trinity, received inquiries into their admissions policies from interracial organizations such as the Greater Atlanta Council on Human Relations and leading civil rights activists including the Kings, Abernathys, and Youngs, and black families such as the Rosses. Private school leaders worked to find a balance among multiple contexts and influences, including the enlarged federal presence in education and increased questions about federal tax-exempt status for private schools. Concurrently, a school culture at Westminster developed in ways that continued to reflect the “Old South” and included racist traditions while some white students earnestly debated and discussed the issues of the day.

The Lost Promise of the Long Civil Rights Movement

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Alternative Definition ◽  
To Come ◽  
Legal Strategies ◽  
Alternative Set ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

This chapter examines Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights, which incorporates the perspective of labor and social historians who have posited the importance and power of a working-class-oriented civil rights movement in the 1940s. She finds that an alternative set of legal strategies and organizing initiatives was available to civil rights litigators, indeed that these more economically radical strategies were successfully deployed, and, that if they had been consistently pursued would have given this plebian civil rights orientation an embedded character in law and social policy during the decades to come. In effect, Goluboff posits in the most precise fashion an alternative definition to the meaning of what we have come to think of as civil rights law and litigation and then asks why this more proletarian version was marginalized in the years after 1950.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Lowney
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Black Music ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Jazz History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Through inquiry into influential Marxist, Black Atlantic, and African diasporic studies of jazz literature and jazz history, the introduction explains how Jazz Internationalism is distinguished by its historical scope and attention to multiple genres of jazz literature. This introduction outlines not only a history of Afro-modernist jazz literature that corresponds with the Long Civil Rights Movement, it also underscores the intertextuality of jazz literature as it evolves through several generations of black music and writing. While the primary purpose of Jazz Internationalism is not one of recovering obscure writers or texts, it does make the case for a more expansive understanding of jazz writing for both African American literary history and African diasporic studies more generally.

Bringing the Moon to Mankind

2019 ◽  
pp. 44-58
Author(s):  
David Miguel Molina ◽  
P. J. Blount
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Space Exploration ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Space Program ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

In chapter 3, Molina and Blount offer a contextualization of NASA’s interlocutory role throughout the long civil rights movement by mobilizing these three themes to analyze a series of archival and cultural artifacts. The authors first analyze the rhetoric deployed by the Poor People Campaign’s various mobilizations to show that the American space program was viewed with deep skepticism by the African American community and particularly within the context of ongoing struggles for black freedom. Second, they discuss the “distance” between the tropes of spatial disenfranchisement represented in the civil rights movement and the Moon missions to show how space exploration was portrayed as an acceleration of the marginalization of black spaces.

A Chink in the Armor: The Black-Led Struggle for School Desegregation in Arlington, Virginia, and the End of Massive Resistance

2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McGrath Morris
Keyword(s):  
Public School ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Student ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
School Integration ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
White School

As it had for countless other children in Arlington, Virginia, the idyll days of summer had come to end for eleven-year-old Edward Leslie Hamm Jr. on the morning of 5 September 1957. After donning a pair of clean khaki pants and a freshly pressed, short-sleeved white shirt, Hamm was heading back to the classroom along with twenty-one thousand other students in this Northern Virginia community. That alone was enough to put a pit in any child's stomach. But for Hamm the day possessed an added dimension. Instead of riding a bus for forty-five minutes to the Negro school six miles across the county, his parents were dispatching him, along with two other black pupils, to challenge the continued exclusion of blacks from the all-white school, one mile from their isolated exclusively black neighborhood. A full three years after Brown v. Board of Education, not a single black student had yet attended a white public school in Virginia, seen by many observers as the frontline state of resistance to school integration. The three children were nervous and took no comfort in thinking of themselves among a vanguard of the civil rights movement. “I wasn't into an integration thing,” recalled George Tyrone Nelson, who was fourteen at the time and among the trio challenging the segregated schools that day.

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