Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Traci Parker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Department Store ◽  
White Collar ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Freedom Movement

In this book, Traci Parker examines the movement to racially integrate white-collar work and consumption in American department stores, and broadens our understanding of historical transformations in African American class and labor formation. Built on the goals, organization, and momentum of earlier struggles for justice, the department store movement channeled the power of store workers and consumers to promote black freedom in the mid-twentieth century. Sponsoring lunch counter sit-ins and protests in the 1950s and 1960s, and challenging discrimination in the courts in the 1970s, this movement ended in the early 1980s with the conclusion of the Sears, Roebuck, and Co. affirmative action cases and the transformation and consolidation of American department stores. In documenting the experiences of African American workers and consumers during this era, Parker highlights the department store as a key site for the inception of a modern black middle class, and demonstrates the ways that both work and consumption were battlegrounds for civil rights.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Traci Parker
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
Black Labor ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Class Status ◽  
Freedom Movement

The five-decade department store movement was contemporaneous with both the black labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Therefore, it provides a privileged perspective on these two movements and their interrelationships. The department store movement helped dismantle racialized patterns of labor and consumption and, in the process, facilitated the emergence of a modern black middle class. This new black middle class and those aspiring to ideal middle-class status would profoundly shape the course of the civil rights movement. The department store movement reveals aspects of the black middle class that might enhance our understanding of the politics of the black freedom movement in the twentieth century, not least of which is why its targets were so often sites of consumption.

“I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”: Nina Simone and the Redefining of the Freedom Song of the 1960s

2008 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-317 ◽  
Author(s):  
TAMMY L. KERNODLE
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
New Type ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Freedom Movement ◽  
Nina Simone ◽  
Important Shift

AbstractThis article explores the work of pianist/vocalist Nina Simone as the catalyst for a new type of freedom song in the black freedom movement during the 1960s. It examines the lyrical content and structure of Simone's music, which reflects the rhetorical and geographical shift of the transition from King's nonviolent, southern-based civil rights movement of the late 1950s to the mid-1960s to the militant black power nationalist movement of the late 1960s. Curtis Mayfield's Chicago soul style is also referenced as marking an important shift in mid-1960s R&B, which had largely avoided overt political statements.

Black Theologies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerry Pimblott
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Churches ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Womanist Theology ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
The Poor ◽  
African American Clergy ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Freedom Movement ◽  
American Clergy

Black theology burst onto the scene in the late 1960s as a new cohort of progressive African American clergy and seminarians responded to the imperative of a burgeoning black freedom movement and global anticolonial struggles. Taken collectively, their work championed a distinctive black theological tradition, birthed in the context of enslavement and transmitted through independent black churches, which placed primacy on God’s preferential and emancipatory activity on behalf of the poor and oppressed. This chapter traces the origins, development, and legacy of black theology over three consecutive generations, identifying important debates related to the discipline’s defining motifs, methods, and approaches as well as the emergence of alternative paradigms, including womanist theology and African American humanism.

Teaching Freedom Song as Antiracist Praxis

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-465
Author(s):  
Stephen Stacks
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Music Curriculum ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Integral Component ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Freedom Movement

In the teaching of history, oversimplification is, perhaps, unavoidable. In certain cases, however, that oversimplification can be deadly. There are some lessons that are too complex, some stories that are too nuanced, to be reduced in such a way. By their contours and particularities, they resist easy digestion. In the spirit of this particularity, my contribution to the colloquy is specific, but hopefully applicable to contexts beyond its specificity: I argue that the US Black Freedom Movement (or civil rights movement) and its music is a story that must be taught in all its complexity, for oversimplifying it does concrete harm to the ongoing struggle against white supremacy in the present. Teaching the US Black Freedom Movement and its music is also vital if we hope to enable our students to be forces of understanding, healing, and justice in the world, and should be an integral component of any undergraduate music curriculum that hopes to be antiracist.

Poll Power

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Faulkenbury
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Local Power ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Grassroots Organizing ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Freedom Movement

The civil rights movement required money. In the early 1960s, after years of grassroots organizing, civil rights activists convinced non-profit foundations to donate in support of voter education and registration efforts. One result was the Voter Education Project (VEP), which, starting in 1962, showed far-reaching results almost immediately and organized the groundwork that eventually led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In African American communities across the South, the VEP catalyzed existing campaigns; it paid for fuel, booked rallies, bought food for volunteers, and paid people to canvass neighborhoods. Despite this progress, powerful conservatives in Congress weaponized the federal tax code to undercut the important work of the VEP. Though local power had long existed in the hundreds of southern towns and cities that saw organized civil rights action, the VEP was vital to converting that power into political motion. Evan Faulkenbury offers a much-needed explanation of how philanthropic foundations, outside funding, and tax policy shaped the southern black freedom movement.

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