Documenting SNCC and the Rural South

2018 ◽  
pp. 156-193
Author(s):  
Scott L. Matthews
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
New Left ◽  
The Political ◽  
Rural South ◽  
James Agee ◽  
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ◽  
Walker Evans

This chapter examines the cultural politics of civil rights movement photography by analysing the work of Danny Lyon who worked as a photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee between 1962 and 1964. It explores how documentarians such as Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and James Agee inspired Lyon’s documentary work and how the political culture of the New Left influenced his work’s reception. The chapter first focuses on Lyon’s photographs of black SNCC activists in the South, particularly Robert Moses. Lyon’s photographs of Moses helped spread a romantic mythology around Moses and SNCC that was useful in recruiting white liberal support up North. Lyon also photographed the rural South’s landscapes and people extensively. Many in the New Left romanticized rural black southerners as true outsiders, the authentic opposites of their industrialized and commercialized societies back home. Consequently, Lyon’s photographs had the capacity to aestheticize the same conditions that SNCC recognized as the source of black subjugation. The chapter also highlights how these images and themes appeared and circulated in a civil rights movement photography book, The Movement, which Lyon contributed to and helped produce.

The Political Culture of Emancipation: Morality, Politics, and the State in Garrisonian Abolitionism, 1854–1863

1995 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-184
Author(s):  
Mark Voss-Hubbard
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
National Government ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Purpose ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
Federal Authority ◽  
Emancipation Proclamation

Historians have long recognized the unprecedented expansion of federal power during the Civil War. Moreover most scholars agree that the expansion of federal power manifested itself most immediately and profoundly in the abolition of slavery. In a sense, through the Emancipation Proclamation, the Republican administration injected the national government into the domain of civil rights, and by doing so imbued federal power with a distinct moral purpose. The passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments codified this expression of federal authority, rejecting the bedrock tenet in American republican thought that centralized power constituted the primary threat to individual liberty.

Anarchism, Violence and Civil Disorder

Worldview ◽  
1968 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 6-12
Author(s):  
Paul W. Blackstock
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Order ◽  
New Left ◽  
Western World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Moral Indignation ◽  
The World ◽  
Civil Disorder ◽  
Sensitive Individual

The Liberal's Dilemma and the Anarchism of Youth. The sensitive individual in the Western world has nearly always been impelled to protest the injustices of. the political and social order in which he finds himself. For example, very early in life Stephen Spender observed that "to be born is to be a Robinson Crusoe, cast up by elemental powers upon an island," that "all men are not free to share what nature offers here … are not permitted to explore the world into which they are born." Throughout their lives they are "sealed into leaden slums as into living tombs." To this general awareness of the plight of the poor, the New Left in this country has added a sense of burning moral indignation that the colored minority has also been sealed into ghettos and deprived of civil rights and human dignity.

„I Have a Dream“

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Werner
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Political System ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
The Political ◽  
Church Staff ◽  
Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King and East Germany are connected both directly and indirectly. The Communist Party had the power to make public decisions on agenda-setting topics related to Martin Luther King. The Christian Bloc Party mostly represented the state and published books by Martin Luther King, which churches and the civil rights movement liked to use. Moreover, pacifists and civil rights activists used these books to undermine the political system in East Germany. Church institutions reported by far the most on Martin Luther King. This empirical study, which can also act as a basis for further research on Martin Luther King and East Germany, will appeal to both church staff and admirers of Martin Luther King.

scholarly journals The Divided Mind of James Baldwin

1979 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. W. E. Bigsby
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
The Political ◽  
Lionel Trilling ◽  
New Novel ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Critical Interest

Lionel Trilling once observed that there are certain individuals who contain the “ yes ” and “ no ” of their culture, whose personal ambivalences become paradigmatic. This would seem to be an apt description of a man whose first novel was published twenty-five years ago, a man whose career has described a neat and telling parabola and whose contradictions go to the heart of an issue which dominated the political and cultural life of mid-century America: James Baldwin. And it is perhaps not inappropriate to seize the occasion of this anniversary and of the publication of his new novel, Just Above My Head, to attempt a summation of a writer, once an articulate spokesman for black revolt, now living an expatriate existence in southern France.To date, Baldwin has written six novels: Go Tell it on the Mountain (1954), Giovanni's Room (1956), Another Country (1962), Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), Just Above My Head (1979); four books of essays: The Fire Next Time (1963), Nobody Knows My Name (1964), Notes of a Native Son (1964), No Name in the Street (1972); two plays: Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964), Amen Corner (1968); and one book of short stories: Going to Meet the Man (1965). Born in Harlem in 1924, he left in 1948 for France, driven out by despair of the racial situation. He returned in 1957 and in the heady days of the Civil Rights movement found himself a principal spokesman — his polemical essay, The Fire Next Time, appearing at a crucial moment in black/white relations. Outflanked by the events of the late sixties, he retreated again to Europe. His more recent novels have failed to spark the popular or critical interest of his earlier work.

Open Suburbs vs. Open Space

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lily Geismer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Affordable Housing ◽  
Open Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
Route 128 ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Political Battle

This chapter concentrates on a series of conflicts over affordable housing that took shape during the late 1960s and early 1970s that pitted traditionally liberal causes like civil rights and environmentalism against each other. At the outset of the 1970s, several observers identified “opening up the suburbs” as “the major domestic social and political battle of the decade ahead.” However, the Route 128 suburbs had stood on the front lines of what experts had deemed “The Battle over the Suburbs.” These controversies and their outcome ultimately show that liberalism did not stop at the proverbial driveway of local residents, and instead expose the continuities in and adaptations of the political culture of the Route 128 suburbs and liberalism more broadly in the 1970s.

Participatory Documentary

2018 ◽  
pp. 99-119
Author(s):  
Grace Elizabeth Hale
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
New Left ◽  
The World

In “Participatory Documentary: Recording the Sound of Equality in the Southern Civil Rights Movement,” Grace Hale examines the work of noted New Left documentary makers Guy and Candie Carawan, who recorded documentary albums of mass meetings and protest actions during the southern civil rights movement. The production of these albums, Hale argues, which render the voices of African Americans denied official political representation in a segregated society, enacted a mode of participatory documentary, prefiguring the world to which its participants aspired.

Scenes of Argument

PMLA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (5) ◽  
pp. 995-1001
Author(s):  
Nijah Cunningham
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Short Story ◽  
The Political ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Political Message

In a crucial moment from Henry Dumas's short story “strike and fade” (C. 1965-68), an unnamed narrator observes what is left of a city in the immediate aftermath of an urban uprising: “The word is out. Cool it. We on the street, see. Me and Big Skin. We watch the cops. They watch us. People comin and goin. That fire truck still wrecked up side the buildin. Papers say we riot, but we didn't riot. We like the VC, the Viet Cong. We strike and fade” (111). The staccato established by the short phrasings, fragments, and use of the vernacular evokes a sense of anxiety, contributing to what Carter Mathes aptly describes as Dumas's “aural portrait of black urban space under siege” (91). Dumas's careful attunement to the rhythmic feelings, or grooves, of the everyday adds texture to that opening pronouncement, “The word is out,” which, in this instance, registers a temperate disposition simultaneously alert and giving off the impression that one is maintaining the order of things. Everything will have changed by the time the phrase returns in the short story's penultimate paragraph, when the narrator and Big Skin are no longer eyeing the police but are instead woven into the collective action of an indeterminate “we.” Dumas writes, “The word is out. Burn, baby, burn. We on the scene. The brothers. Together. Cops and people goin and comin. Some people got good loot, some just hoofin it. A police cordon comin. We shadows on the wall. Light comin towards us. We fade” (115). The political message seems obvious. It's the post-Watts 1960s and disenchantment with the civil rights movement is setting in. For an emerging generation of radical black artists and activists, the time has come for people to . . . confer on the possibility of Blackness and the inevitability of Revolution. (Giovanni)

Community-Based, Civic Unionism during the Height of the Civil Rights Era

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
The Political ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Cheap Labor ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
District 65

This concluding chapter examines the changed role labor unions, especially those on the left end of the political spectrum, took during the civil rights era—having gone from leading the fight for racial equality to immersing the contest for better jobs into the larger civil rights movement that was underway. The NAACP, the CIO, the NNLC, and District 65/DPO may have agreed on the basic fundamentals of racial equality but they certainly did not agree on how to achieve it. Local 65's version of community-based, civic unionism, one that was designed to confront the discriminatory manifestations of the capitalist, “for-profit” system, was subsumed into the larger civil rights-era struggles. The overt capitalist critique all but vanished, and for low-wage workers, that critique was what rendered their existence as part of the never ending supply of cheap labor visible.

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