The Colored School

Gone Home ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 103-130
Author(s):  
Karida L. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Social World ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Racial Ideologies ◽  
Harlan County ◽  
Coded Messages

Within the confines of their segregated social world, black children became aware of the color line at a very young age through racially coded messages, but also through taken-for-granted practices and institutions. This chapter traces the transformation in the black community along the grain of the civil rights movement through a close reading of the rise and fall of one of the institutions most beloved by the black community in Harlan County, Kentucky—the colored school. Brown shows how the black segregated school institutionalized and reproduced racial ideologies within the community. At the same time, she demonstrates how the colored school was a proud site of black cultural expression.

Black Workers Matter

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Honey
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Working People ◽  
Difficult Terrain

What happened to Martin Luther King’s dream of economic equality in Memphis? For most of the city’s history, 80 percent or more of the black community has consisted of black workers. Slavery set the terms of cheap labor as the measure of profitability in Memphis, and white economic elites have pursued that measure of profitability ever since, but not without resistance from black working people. Drawing on the last thirty years of research on Memphis labor and race relations, this essay surveys the struggles of black workers and the black community as a whole for economic advancement. After documenting decisive, powerful advances for African Americans in Memphis during the “long civil rights movement” from 1934 to 1968, the essay surveys the fate of the black working class and poses questions about the legacy of the freedom struggle in the fifty years since 1968, during which time more educated and politically involved people have advanced, while the fate of undereducated, underpaid, or unemployed working people has worsened. The legacy of the black freedom struggle in Memphis continues in the increasingly difficult terrain of America’s racial capitalism in the twenty-first-century global economy.

Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago

1988 ◽  
Vol 93 (3) ◽  
pp. 797
Author(s):  
Arnold R. Hirsch ◽  
Alan B. Anderson ◽  
George W. Pickering
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Color Line

The Limits of Liberal Internationalism

2019 ◽  
pp. 222-240
Author(s):  
Hannah Higgin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Exchange Programs ◽  
Liberal Internationalism ◽  
The Us ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
At Home ◽  
Western Ideals

This chapter addresses how Fulbright’s views on race complicated American exchange programs with African nations in the 1960s. At the height of the civil rights movement, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson sought to improve relations with newly decolonized African nations, and Fulbright’s influence over exchange programs complicated that pursuit. Though Fulbright believed that boosting mutual understanding through exchange was the world’s best hope for creating and maintaining peace, he did not believe that all people—not least Africans—would be able to grasp the liberal, Western ideals he wished to spread. Though he was known as a racial moderate, his outlook on policy was hemmed in by the color line at home and abroad, a fact that constrained the US government’s African exchange programming. He preferred that the focus of exchange programs remain on Europe.

scholarly journals What Did Chartism Petition For? Mass Petitions in the British Movement for Democracy

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 531-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Chase
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Third ◽  
The People ◽  
Women And Children

Chartism was in effect Britain’s civil rights movement and petitioning was at its heart: it defined who the Chartists were as well as the “other” against which they were implacably opposed. Its history has been effectively narrated around its three national petitions (1839, 1842, and 1848), and its decline almost habitually and directly linked to circumstances surrounding the last of these. More than 3.3 million people signed the 1842 National Petition. Chartism’s history after 1842 is partly one of how the State learned to manage the movement in general and petitioning in particular. The question posed by the title is deliberately ambiguous: What did the Chartists petition for and, equally, why did they bother? The first issue will be answered by a close reading of the three texts (surprisingly not undertaken by previous historians of the movement). The second will answered through an analysis of the wider uses of petitioning. The third issue addressed by this article is how petitioning constructed Chartism. In every contributing locality, canvassing was a major intervention in political life. The subscriptional community created by its petitions were “the people,” a term that clearly included not only men but also women and children. This was a different and wider meaning of the term “the people” from that used by Chartism’s opponents and it was a profound departure. Petitioning shaped, articulated, and mobilized the politics of a nascent working class, “banded together in one solemn and holy league” but excluded from economic and political power.

Deuteronomy in African American Christianity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Breck Reid
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Hebrew Text ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
Martin Luther King

Africans in America have been interpreting Deuteronomy since kidnapped Africans first reached Jamestown in 1619. This chapter recovers precritical or pastoral interpretations of Deuteronomy by people from Africa and the African diaspora. This interpretation of their freedom narratives explores the language of Deuteronomy. Already in the 1990s, black theology understood the importance of these once-named “slave narratives” and precritical biblical interpretation and theology, but now even mainstream biblical criticism recognizes their importance. The use of Deuteronomy in the Harlem Renaissance by Zora Neale Hurston and in the civil rights movement by Martin Luther King Jr. picks up more on its narrative plot rather than its poetics. Recent readings by Harold V. Bennett and my own work focus on the historical and close reading of the Hebrew text.

The Problem of the Twenty-first Century Is the Problem of the Color Line as It Intersects the Nativity Line

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Prewitt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Center Of Gravity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Color Line ◽  
The Right ◽  
Line P

This chapter argues that the center of gravity is shifting because of an intricate interplay between America's color line and its nativity line. It uses the color line concept to ask whether America has the right policy tools to fully erase the line that separated whites and racial minorities throughout America's history. If they merge—if immigrants are racialized—the future sadly repeats America's past. If, instead, America's population becomes so diverse and multiracial that the color line disappears, an altogether different future is in store, perhaps the promised postracial society. However, it is not certain whether this social process will strengthen or weaken a color line inherited from the eighteenth century, strengthened across the next century and a half, and then challenged but not fully erased by the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century.

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