Championships and Civil Rights

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-146
Author(s):  
Derrick E. White
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Black College ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Predominately White Institutions ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Predominately White ◽  
Racial Change ◽  
White Institutions

This chapter explores how Black college football and FAMU reckoned with the civil rights movement. Gaither preferred interracial cooperation rather than direct action as a means for racial change. The civil rights movement, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education, and including the bus boycotts of the mid-1950s and the sit-ins of the early 1960s, undermined Gaither’s reputation with activists. Gaither’s opposition to immediate desegregation not only was an attempt to hold on to his powerful football program but also showed an understanding of how integration would perpetuate athletic dominance by predominately white institutions. Gaither’s experiences with structural racism in building Bragg Stadium provided an alternative perspective to the civil rights movement.

Blood, Sweat, and Tears

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derrick E. White
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
College Football ◽  
Black College ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Predominately White Institutions ◽  
Predominately White ◽  
Football Programs

Black college football began during the nadir of African American life after the Civil War. The first game occurred in 1892, a little less than four years before the Supreme Court ruled segregation legal in Plessy v. Ferguson. In spite of Jim Crow segregation, Black colleges produced some of the best football programs in the country. They mentored young men who became teachers, preachers, lawyers, and doctors--not to mention many other professions--and transformed Black communities. But when higher education was integrated, the programs faced existential challenges as predominately white institutions steadily set about recruiting their student athletes and hiring their coaches. Blood, Sweat, and Tears explores the legacy of Black college football, with Florida A&M’s Jake Gaither as its central character, one of the most successful coaches in its history. A paradoxical figure, Gaither led one of the most respected Black college football programs, yet many questioned his loyalties during the height of the civil rights movement. Among the first broad-based histories of Black college athletics, Derrick E. White’s sweeping story complicates the heroic narrative of integration and grapples with the complexities and contradictions of one of the most important sources of Black pride in the twentieth century.

The Color Line of Scrimmage and Sporting Congregations

2019 ◽  
pp. 16-39
Author(s):  
Derrick E. White
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
College Football ◽  
Black College ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Predominately White Institutions ◽  
Predominately White ◽  
White Institutions ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter examines the beginnings of college football at HBCUs from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s. Black college football started as a separate institution distinct, yet similar, to the game played at predominately white institutions. This chapter uses Gaither’s early biography to examine how the pieces of the sporting congregation came together to support Black college football.

Divided by Law: The Sit-ins and the Role of the Courts in the Civil Rights Movement

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Court Ruling ◽  
Supreme Court Ruling ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations ◽  
Student Control

A central goal of the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960, the protests that launched the direct-action phase of the Civil Rights Movement, was to give new meaning to the very idea of “civil rights.” To the students who took part in the protests, civil rights work entailed litigation and lobbying. It required relying on the older generation of civil rights activists and working through established civil rights organizations. It meant surrendering student control over the demonstrations. And, as the great unrealized promise of the then 6-year-old Supreme Court ruling inBrown v. Board of Educationmade painfully clear, it meant patience. For the thousands of students who joined the sit-in movement, reliance on their elders, litigation, and patience—the stuff of civil rights, traditionally understood—was precisely what they wanted to avoid.

Women’s Activism in the Modern Movement for Black Liberation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aisha A. Upton ◽  
Joyce M. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Modern Movement

This chapter examines women’s activism in the modern movement for Black liberation. It examines women’s roles across three phases of mobilization. Starting with an exploration of women’s participation in the direct action phase of the U.S. civil rights movement (1954–1966), the chapter discusses the key roles that women played in the fight for legal equality for African Americans. Next it examines women’s central role in the Black Power movement of 1966–1974. The authors argue that Black women found new roles in new struggles during this period. The chapter ends with a look at the rise of radical Black feminism between 1974 and 1980, examining the codification of intersectional politics and discussing the continuation of issues of race, privilege, and diversity in contemporary feminism.

Civil Rights and the Private School Movement in Mississippi, 1964–1971

2002 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Fuquay
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Private School ◽  
Black Children ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Housing Discrimination ◽  
Civil Rights Act

The signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was heralded as a tremendous victory for the civil rights movement, the fulfillment of a decade-long struggle to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Along with measures against job and housing discrimination, the Civil Rights Act included provisions specifically designed to overcome the white South's massive resistance campaign and enforce school desegregation. Despite the continued intransigence of segregationists, these measures proved successful and white public schools across the South opened their doors to black children. With segregationists in retreat and the Voting Rights Act on the horizon, this was a time of celebration for civil rights activists. But this was not the end of the story.

Introduction

Troublemakers ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Kathryn Schumaker
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Chicano Movement ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The introductionexplains how and why student protest became common in the United States in the late 1960s and places these protests in the context of shifts in the history of education and in broader social movements, including the civil rights movement, the Chicano Movement, and black power activism. The introduction also situates students’ rights within the context of children’s rights more broadly, explaining the legal principles that justified age discrimination and excluded children and students from the basic protections of American constitutional law. The introduction identifies the two decades between the 1960s and 1980s as a constitutional moment that revolutionized the relationship of students to the state. It also connects students’ rights litigation to the issue of school desegregation and the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education.

Paul Beatty, the Rhetoric of War, and the Selling Out of Civil Rights

2021 ◽  
pp. 255-277
Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Anker
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The Self ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Constitutional Politics ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Good Citizenship ◽  
Paul Beatty ◽  
Drugs And Crime

Elizabeth Anker situates Paul Beatty’s The Sellout in a literary tradition that enlists satire as an instrument of critique. Anker demonstrates that Beatty violates race-related taboos in order to confront readers with the avoidances that those taboos impose. Beatty’s biting humor, with its slippage between metaphor and reality, serves to disrupt the self-satisfaction and complacency that mark conventional narratives about the legacy of the Civil War and the civil rights movement in American constitutional politics. The Sellout shows us, in Anker’s view, that the tradition of written constitutionalism and its celebratory symbolism of “quill and ink” has often served instead to enable and legitimize the criminalization and disenfranchisement of African Americans. Moreover, courts have assimilated a racialized language of urban combat—including the so-called wars on poverty, drugs, and crime—that has perpetuated structural racism, reinforcing standards of decorum and good citizenship that have operated as barriers to inclusion in the liberal democratic public sphere.

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