Race Over Party

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
The Face

In late nineteenth-century Boston, battles over black party loyalty were fights over the place of African Americans in the post–Civil War nation. In his fresh in-depth study of black partisanship and politics, Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood demonstrates that party politics became the terrain upon which black Bostonians tested the promise of equality in America’s democracy. Most African Americans remained loyal Republicans, but Race Over Party highlights the actions and aspirations of a cadre of those who argued that the GOP took black votes for granted and offered little meaningful reward for black support. These activists branded themselves “independents,” forging new alliances and advocating support of whichever candidate would support black freedom regardless of party. By the end of the century, however, it became clear that partisan politics offered little hope for the protection of black rights and lives in the face of white supremacy and racial violence. Even so, Bergeson-Lockwood shows how black Bostonians’ faith in self-reliance, political autonomy, and dedicated organizing inspired future generations of activists who would carry these legacies into the foundation of the twentieth-century civil rights movement.

Forced Confessions

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-78
Author(s):  
Silvan Niedermeier
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
High Profile ◽  
White Allies ◽  
Criminal Suspects ◽  
Bureaucratic State ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

This chapter studies two high-profile cases in which police officers used torture to extract confessions from black criminal suspects. In these cases, African Americans, aided by prominent white allies and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), appealed to the courts to protest acts of torture, contest forced confessions, and challenge legal discrimination. The chapter places these protests within the context of the “long Civil Rights movement” to illuminate the tensions between the demands of white supremacy and the demands of a “color-blind” law characteristic of the modern bureaucratic state.

Voices of Civil Rights Lawyers

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Deep South ◽  
The North ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Face ◽  
Big Events

Twenty-six contributors tell their stories about being civil rights lawyers in the Deep South. A thematic structure is employed to reflect these stories. Ten of the stories describe how children of the South and children of the North chose to become civil rights lawyers. The context of civil rights lawyering is explored from big events such as the 1965 Selma march to the everyday experiences of mass meetings and the recurring racism of Neshoba County. The misadventures of civil rights lawyers are described from arrests, to beatings, to a black lawyer being called by a racial epithet in court by a judge. The development of civil rights lawyer groups—the Legal Defense Fund, the LCDC (Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee), and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law—were crucial to the success of the civil rights movement. Voting rights dramatically spurred by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were crucial to the newly emerging status of blacks. The public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 broke barriers in hotels and eating places. School desegregation litigation changed the face of public schools forever. Employment discrimination litigation dramatically changed the workplace. The success of civil rights litigation led to using the federal courts to reform prisons and facilities for the mentally ill. Two authors discuss the contemporary language of race and the status of white supremacy.

scholarly journals Much Bigger Than a Hamburger: Disrupting Problematic Picturebook Depictions of the Civil Rights Movement

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noreen Naseem Rodriguez ◽  
Amanda Vickery
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Youth Activism ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Critical Content ◽  
The Face

While more diverse children's literature about youth activism is available than ever before, popular picturebooks often perpetuate problematic tropes about the Civil Rights Movement. In this article, we conduct a critical content analysis of the award-winning picturebook The Youngest Marcher and contrast the book's content to a critical race counterstory of the Movement focused on the collective struggle for justice in the face of racial violence. We argue for the need to engage students in civic media literacy through a critical race lens and offer ways to nuance the limited narratives often found in children's literature.

Epilogue

2014 ◽  
pp. 115-118
Author(s):  
Heather Andrea Williams
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
First Century ◽  
The North ◽  
The Right

Despite the abolition of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, notions of black inferiority and white supremacy still persisted in both the North and the South. The ‘Epilogue’ outlines the profound struggles by African Americans to make their freedom meaningful. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to African Americans and promised equal protection under the law and, in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment gave black men the right to vote. The modern civil rights movement of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s began to impact on the discriminatory Jim Crow laws and practices, but for many African Americans, struggles for equality, justice, and fairness continue into the twenty-first century.

The Civil Rights Movement in the Urban South

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudrena N. Harold
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Federal Spending ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
Urban South ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Economic Boycotts

The civil rights movement in the urban South transformed the political, economic, and cultural landscape of post–World War II America. Between 1955 and 1968, African Americans and their white allies relied on nonviolent direct action, political lobbying, litigation, and economic boycotts to dismantle the Jim Crow system. Not all but many of the movement’s most decisive political battles occurred in the cities of Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama; Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee; Greensboro and Durham, North Carolina; and Atlanta, Georgia. In these and other urban centers, civil rights activists launched full-throttled campaigns against white supremacy, economic exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence against African Americans. Their fight for racial justice coincided with monumental changes in the urban South as the upsurge in federal spending in the region created unprecedented levels of economic prosperity in the newly forged “Sunbelt.” A dynamic and multifaceted movement that encompassed a wide range of political organizations and perspectives, the black freedom struggle proved successful in dismantling legal segregation. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 expanded black southerners’ economic, political, and educational opportunities. And yet, many African Americans continued to struggle as they confronted not just the long-term effects of racial discrimination and exclusion but also the new challenges engendered by deindustrialization and urban renewal as well as entrenched patterns of racial segregation in the public-school system.

This Is Not Dixie

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brent M. S. Campney
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Property Damage ◽  
Race Riots ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Definition Of

Often defined as a mostly southern phenomenon, racist violence existed everywhere. This book explodes the notion of the Midwest as a so-called land of freedom with an in-depth study of assaults both active and threatened faced by African Americans in post-Civil War Kansas. The book's definition of white-on-black violence encompasses not only sensational demonstrations of white power like lynchings and race riots, but acts of threatened violence and the varied forms of pervasive routine violence—property damage, rape, forcible ejection from towns—used to intimidate African Americans. As the book shows, such methods were a cornerstone of efforts to impose and maintain white supremacy. Yet the book's broad consideration of racist violence also lends new insights into the ways people resisted threats. African Americans spontaneously hid fugitives and defused lynch mobs while also using newspapers and civil rights groups to lay the groundwork for forms of institutionalized opposition that could fight racist violence through the courts and via public opinion. Ambitious and provocative, this book rewrites fundamental narratives on mob action, race relations, African American resistance, and racism's grim past in the heartland.

Federal Policy and the Racial Integration of Southern Industry, 1961–1980

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Federal Intervention

In the last two decades, one of the central debates of civil rights historiography has concerned the role that the federal government played in securing the gains of the civil rights era. Historians have often been critical of the federal government's inaction, pointing out that it was only pressure from the civil rights movement itself that prompted federal action against Jim Crow. Other scholars have studied the civil rights record of the federal government by analyzing a single issue during several administrations. In this vein, there have been studies of the federal government's involvement in areas as diverse as black voting rights and racial violence against civil rights workers. These studies have both recognized the importance of federal intervention and have also been critical of the federal government's belated and half-hearted endorsement of civil rights.

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.

Racial Realities

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Natsu Taylor Saito
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Structural Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Empowerment ◽  
American Indian Movement ◽  
The 1960S

In the 1960s, global decolonization and the civil rights movement inspired hope for structural change in the United States, but more than fifty years later, racial disparities in income and wealth, education, employment, health, housing, and incarceration remain entrenched. In addition, we have seen a resurgence of overt White supremacy following the election of President Trump. This chapter considers the potential of movements like Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock water protectors in light of the experiences of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and other efforts at community empowerment in the “long sixties.”

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