Worker-Consumer Alliances and the Modern Black Middle Class, 1951–1970

2019 ◽  
pp. 148-182
Author(s):  
Traci Parker
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Black Worker ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Linked Fate ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Right

The movement in southern cities is the subject of chapter 5. It explores black worker-consumer alliances (built on “linked fate”) in sit-in demonstrations and their utility in helping black southerners claim middle-class citizenship during the civil rights movement. From Washington, D.C., to Charlotte to Nashville, African Americans organized widely publicized sit-ins and picket lines to force the desegregation of public accommodations and democratization of the transitional nature of customer-business interactions. But African Americans had other goals. What began as protests aimed at restructuring the physical space of the public sphere and procuring the right to experience the indulgences of customer service often grew into organized endeavors to dismantle the formidable barriers to black economic emancipation. These endeavors maintained a broad understanding of the black community’s shared interests and involved challenging segregation and discrimination in the marketplace on behalf of black customers and workers.

Mortality, Incarceration, and African American Disenfranchisement in the Contemporary United States

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cottrell ◽  
Michael C. Herron ◽  
Javier M. Rodriguez ◽  
Daniel A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
African American Men ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Right

On account of poor living conditions, African Americans in the United States experience disproportionately high rates of mortality and incarceration compared with Whites. This has profoundly diminished the number of voting-eligible African Americans in the country, costing, as of 2010, approximately 3.9 million African American men and women the right to vote and amounting to a national African American disenfranchisement rate of 13.2%. Although many disenfranchised African Americans have been stripped of voting rights by laws targeting felons and ex-felons, the majority are literally “missing” from their communities due to premature death and incarceration. Leveraging variation in gender ratios across the United States, we show that missing African Americans are concentrated in the country’s Southeast and that African American disenfranchisement rates in some legislative districts lie between 20% and 40%. Despite the many successes of the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights movement, high levels of African American disenfranchisement remain a continuing feature of the American polity.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Maxwell Hayter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Local People ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
The City

The introduction provides an overview of the American civil rights movement in Richmond, Virginia, and describes how slavery and segregation shaped Richmond’s development well into the twentieth century. The Dream Is Lost provides a narrative of Richmond’s contributions to the freedom struggle and the city coming to terms with racial political trends in America after 1965. The book aims to connect three subjects: 1) it demonstrates how middle-class African Americans used politics as a means to empower their communities; 2) the narrative emphasizes how local people helped influence national voting rights policy during the civil rights movement; and, 3) it delineates how race and racism shaped policy and politics in Richmond well into the twentieth century.

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.

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.

scholarly journals Boundary between Religion and Social Conflict —Perspective from the Civil Rights Movement

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 135
Author(s):  
Qiong Li ◽  
Jie Yang
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Social Conflict ◽  
Safety Valve ◽  
Social Stability ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
Religious Factors ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Positive Force

<em>Based on the background of American civil rights movement in which religious factors participated, this study analyzes the function of religious factors in civil rights movement from the perspective of political participation and the principle of separation of politics and religion, in order to consider the research paradigm of the relationship between religion and social conflict. It is believed that religious participation is helpful to exert the positive force of social conflict, the right of religious freedom has, to a certain extent, become the “safety valve” of social stability, and the development of religion is the embodiment of social pluralism and symbiosis.</em>

A Changing Workforce

2020 ◽  
pp. 210-236
Author(s):  
Jennifer A. Delton
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
National Association ◽  
Historically White ◽  
Right To Work ◽  
Workplace Rights ◽  
National Association Of Manufacturers

This chapter examines the overlap between African Americans' demands for jobs and conservatives' push for “right to work” laws. While compulsory union dues were very different from unions' exclusion of blacks, both movements targeted historically white unions and shared a language of workplace “rights.” Conservative “right to work” activists adopted the tactics of the civil rights movement and aligned themselves with blacks against exclusionary unions. Although this strategy failed to attract African Americans, it called attention to unions' historic and ongoing racism in a way that eventually divided the labor–liberal coalition. This dynamic is key to understanding the National Association of Manufacturers' complicated support for civil rights, equal opportunity, and affirmative action.

Fury in the “Promised Land”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Popular Narrative ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Willingness To Use

This chapter examines the development of comic rage after the civil rights movement. These works push back against the popular narrative of America’s colorblindness and that the 1980s initiated a period in which racism had ceased to exist. As part of a new artistic wave known as the New Black Aesthetic, these younger writers used their perspectives as the first post-integration generation to chronicle the new challenges facing African Americans. The unprecedented willingness to use humor as a central element in their work created a perfect site for comic rage to flourish and expand. The works that emerge focus on how cultural mulattoes—as many refer to the post-integration generation—attempt to achieve equality in a country attempting to assimilate them and erase the distinctiveness of their cultural traditions and identities.

From Absence to Flight

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Black Power Movement

This chapter explores radicalization of comic rage in Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada. Emerging in the middle of the transition from the integrationist period of the civil rights movement to the nationalism of the Black Power movement, both works openly challenge fundamental concepts about race. In addition to targeting fundamental assumptions of Western superiority, these works also question simplistic counter-representations that African Americans present to combat racist stereotypes. Using forms increasingly important in African American literature, like drama and neo-slave narratives, these works enact comic rage as way to depict unique and powerful forms of resistance.

The Department Store Movement in the Postwar Era

2019 ◽  
pp. 116-147
Author(s):  
Traci Parker
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Community Leaders ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Preliminary Testing ◽  
White Community ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
The Relationship

Chapter 4 considers the department store movement and the birth of a modern middle-class consciousness in the 1940s and 1950s. Department stores remained key battlegrounds and took on greater significance as black purchasing power had reached an unprecedented level of $8-9 million by 1947 and the relationship between consumption and citizenship had changed. For the most part, the department store movement remained a fight for jobs in the immediate postwar era, taking on consumer issues as it saw fit. This phase of the movement marked a period of preliminary testing that would eventually lead to militant protests in the 1950s and 1960s. Under the leadership of the National Urban League (NUL) and American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the movement relied on intercultural education and moral exhortations. Emblematic of racial liberalism and the early civil rights movement, the NUL and AFSC believed that if respectable blacks and white community leaders simply asked store officials to hire African Americans in sales and clerical, they would, and after that “their attitude about integrated workplaces and African Americans generally would change,” helping them “topple barriers in other industries and locations.”

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