Shelter in a Time of Storm

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Student Activism ◽  
The United States ◽  
State University ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Educational Advancement ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
History Of

For generations, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been essential institutions for the African American community. Their nurturing environments not only provided educational advancement but also catalyzed the Black freedom struggle, forever altering the political destiny of the United States. In this book, Jelani M. Favors offers a history of HBCUs from the 1837 founding of Cheyney State University to the present, told through the lens of how they fostered student activism. Favors chronicles the development and significance of HBCUs through stories from institutions such as Cheyney State University, Tougaloo College, Bennett College, Alabama State University, Jackson State University, Southern University, and North Carolina A&T. He demonstrates how HBCUs became a refuge during the oppression of the Jim Crow era and illustrates the central role their campus communities played during the civil rights and Black Power movements. Throughout this definitive history of how HBCUs became a vital seedbed for politicians, community leaders, reformers, and activists, Favors emphasizes what he calls an unwritten "second curriculum" at HBCUs, one that offered students a grounding in idealism, racial consciousness, and cultural nationalism.

Religion, Race, and Sports

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Scholes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Baseball Player ◽  
Sports History ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
African American Race

Race, religion, and sports may seem like odd bedfellows, but, in fact, all three have been interacting with each other since the emergence of modern sports in the United States over a century ago. It was the sport of boxing that saw a black man become a champion at the height of the Jim Crow era and a baseball player who broke the color barrier two decades before the civil rights movement began. In this chapter, the role that religion has played in these and other instances where race (the African American race in particular) and sports have collided will be examined for its impact on the relationship between race and sports. The association of race, religion, and sports is not accidental. The chapter demonstrates that all three are co-constitutive of and dependent on each other for their meaning at these chosen junctures in American sports history.

Trouble in My Way

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-160
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
University President ◽  
State University ◽  
Campus Environment ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Jackson State University ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the strained history of Jackson State University during the aftermath of World War II and leading up to the modern civil rights movement. Located in the heart of Mississippi, Jackson State students carved out space to express their militancy as the war came to a close. However, they quickly felt that space collapse around them as segregationists tightened their grip on the Magnolia State as the burgeoning movement for black liberation challenged the oppressive traditions of the most socially and politically closed state in the country. Administrators such as Jackson State University president Jacob Reddix quickly fell in line with the expectations of his immediate supervisors and squared off against outspoken scholar-activists such as famed poet and novelist Margaret Walker. The standoff resulted in a campus environment fraught with tension yet still producing students and faculty determined to undermine Jim Crow.

Jim Crow Capital

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
National Level ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Post War

Jim Crow Capital tells the story of how black women in Washington, D.C. transformed civil rights politics between 1920 and 1945. Even though no resident of the nation’s capital could cast a ballot, women nonetheless proclaimed their first-class citizenship rights by working to influence congressional legislation, lobby politicians, shape policy, and secure freedom and justice for all African Americans, both in Washington, D.C. and across the country. During the course of their political campaigns, African American women’s relationship to federal and local politics underwent a fundamental transformation. During the 1920s, black women seized on their location in the nation’s capital to intervene in federal matters, thereby working to improve conditions for disenfranchised African Americans who lacked a political voice on a national level. But by the early 1930s, black women turned their attention to focus more fully on local politics in Washington, D.C. by waging campaigns for economic justice, voting rights, and an end to racial segregation and interracial police brutality, making their freedom struggle an example for the nation. Black women in Washington, D.C. crafted a broad vision of citizenship by waging comprehensive and interconnected campaigns for legal equality, economic citizenship, public commemoration, and safety from violence. Women’s political activism in Washington, D.C. influenced the post-war black freedom struggle and still resonates today.

An Earned Insurgency: Quality Education as a Constitutional Right

2009 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 370-381 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Moses
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Quality Education ◽  
Educational Equality ◽  
Justice Department ◽  
History Of ◽  
Constitutional Right ◽  
Lasting Change

In the following pages, Robert Moses tells the history of the early civil rights movement in Mississippi, focusing on the individuals, alliances, and strategies that brought about fundamental change in the United States and ultimately made possible the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Moses describes how the efforts of Justice Department officials working from the "top" of society combined with the day-to-day work of sharecroppers and organizers at the "bottom" to challenge Jim Crow. His story takes us from the front lines of the movement in Mississippi to his contemporary efforts to ensure that all children in this country receive a quality education. While working from the bottom of today's movement for educational equality, he calls on Obama to provide the leadership needed at the top to ensure lasting change. In this"illuminated story" he infuses his narration (in sans serif) with his own reflections and insights about the lessons this story offers.

Representation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry M. Bartels ◽  
Joshua D. Clinton ◽  
John G. Geer
Keyword(s):  
House Of Representatives ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Far Right ◽  
The Past ◽  
Multi Stage ◽  
The Us ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
History Of

We examine the history of political representation in the United States using a multi-stage statistical analysis of the changing relationship between roll call votes in the US House of Representatives and the preferences of citizens (as measured by presidential votes). We show that members of Congress have become considerably more responsive to constituents’ preferences over the past 40 years, reversing a half-century drought in responsiveness stemming from the South’s one-party Jim Crow era. However, the House as a whole has become less representative, veering too far left when Democrats are in the majority and too far right when Republicans are.

Louis Austin and the Carolina Times

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Gershenhorn
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Jim Crow Era

Louis Austin (1898–1971) came of age at the nadir of the Jim Crow era and became a transformative leader of the long black freedom struggle in North Carolina. From 1927 to 1971, he published and edited the Carolina Times, the preeminent black newspaper in the state. He used the power of the press to voice the anger of black Carolinians, and to turn that anger into action in a forty-year crusade for freedom. In this biography, Jerry Gershenhorn chronicles Austin’s career as a journalist and activist, highlighting his work during the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar civil rights movement. Austin helped pioneer radical tactics during the Depression, including antisegregation lawsuits, boycotts of segregated movie theatres and white-owned stores that refused to hire black workers, and African American voting rights campaigns based on political participation in the Democratic Party. In examining Austin’s life, Gershenhorn narrates the story of the long black freedom struggle in North Carolina from a new vantage point, shedding new light on the vitality of black protest and the black press in the twentieth century.

Our Aims Are High and Our Determinations Deep

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-132
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Student Activism ◽  
College President ◽  
Deep South ◽  
State University ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott

This chapter discusses the history of Alabama State University during the crucial period between the New Negro Era and the rise of the modern civil rights movement. It was during this period that Montgomery, Alabama became a launching point for one of the most important protests in American history – the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Yet few understand the crucial role that Alabama State University played in sowing the seeds of that movement by training the leadership that helped to carry it out, and generating a spirit of resistance long before the boycotts took place. It was the members of the Women’s Political Council, a group of educators teaching at ASU, that designed the ideas for a massive boycott, and it was their leadership on campus, alongside the college president Harper Councill Trenholm, that transformed that campus into one of the most militant centers for student activism in the deep south. The campus soon came under the watchful eye of Jim Crow legislatures who controlled the purse strings and held the keys to the institution, but not before the communitas of ASU summoned the vision and the will to carry out their own sit-in protests in downtown Montgomery.

The Lumbee Indians

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malinda Maynor Lowery
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
History Of

Jamestown, the Lost Colony of Roanoke, and Plymouth Rock are central to America's mythic origin stories. Then, we are told, the main characters--the "friendly" Native Americans who met the settlers--disappeared. But the history of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina demands that we tell a different story. As the largest tribe east of the Mississippi and one of the largest in the country, the Lumbees have survived in their original homelands, maintaining a distinct identity as Indians in a biracial South. In this passionately written, sweeping work of history, Malinda Maynor Lowery narrates the Lumbees' extraordinary story as never before. The Lumbees' journey as a people sheds new light on America's defining moments, from the first encounters with Europeans to the present day. How and why did the Lumbees both fight to establish the United States and resist the encroachments of its government? How have they not just survived, but thrived, through Civil War, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and the war on drugs, to ultimately establish their own constitutional government in the twenty-first century? Their fight for full federal acknowledgment continues to this day, while the Lumbee people's struggle for justice and self-determination continues to transform our view of the American experience. Readers of this book will never see Native American history the same way.

“A White-and-Negro Environment Which Is Seldom Spotlighted”

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-118
Author(s):  
Brent M. S. Campney
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
The North ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
White Backlash ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sundown Towns ◽  
The Right

This article investigates white-black race relations in postwar urban Kansas. Focusing on seven small and mid-sized cities, it explores how white Kansans continued to maintain discrimination, segregation, and exclusion in these years, even as they yielded slowly to the demands of civil rights activists and their supporters. Specifically, it examines the means employed by whites to assert their dominance in social interactions; to discriminate in housing, employment, and commerce; and, in some cases, to defend their all-white (or nearly all-white) municipalities, the so-called sundown towns, from any black presence at all. In addition, it briefly discusses the white backlash which followed as whites turned sharply to the right on racial issues, convinced that blacks now enjoyed full equality and no longer required further concessions. In so doing, the article provides insight into the history of the black freedom struggle in a sampling of cities in a midwestern state, supplements the historiography of racism in Kansas, and opens new lines of inquiry into the historiography of the freedom struggle in the North during this period of rapid and profound transformation.

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.

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