Youth and Women Lead

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-34
Author(s):  
Wesley C. Hogan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Typical Mode

Diane Nash, Bob Moses, and The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) routed an oppressive system that had existed for nearly a century. In just five years, between 1960 and 1965, young activists—most Black, some not—dismantled large parts of legalized segregation, a system widely known as Jim Crow. They set up voting rights, community organizing, and nonviolent direct action in the very places in which segregation was most deeply rooted—Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. Ella Baker, possibly the greatest champion of American democratic politics that no one outside of certain circles has ever heard about—was a lodestar for SNCC’s group-centered leadership. Baker resisted the typical mode of individual heroics. Her legacy not only pervades the story of SNCC but also becomes visible in many of the movements that followed the civil rights/Black Power era.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Freedom Struggle of the 1960s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles M. Payne
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Social Change Organizations

The only youth-led national civil rights organization in the 1960s in the United States, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), grew out of sit-ins, with the base of its early membership coming from Black colleges. It became one of the most militant civil rights groups, pushing older organizations to become more aggressive. Under the tutelage of the experienced activist Ella Baker, it emphasized developing leadership in “ordinary” people. Its early years were dominated by direct action campaigns against White supremacy in the urban and Upper South, while internally, SNCC strove to actualize the Beloved Community. Later it specialized in grassroots community organizing and voter registration in dangerous areas of the Deep South. Its Freedom Summer campaign played a significant role in radicalizing young activists. SNCC, in general, acted as a training ground and model for other forms of youth activism. Notwithstanding its own issues with chauvinism, SNCC was open to leadership from women in a way that few social change organizations of the time were.

An Entire World in Motion

2021 ◽  
pp. 53-90
Author(s):  
Erin R. Pineda
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Entire World

This chapter develops an alternative framework for understanding the civil disobedience of civil rights activists: as a decolonizing praxis that linked their dissent to that of anticolonial activists and tied the context of Jim Crow to global white supremacy. If the constitutional, democratic state formed the normative horizon for liberal understandings of civil disobedience, activists’ horizon was defined by processes of imaginative transit—the process of thinking and traveling across boundaries and disparate contexts, through which activists in motion constructed civil disobedience as a means of transforming worldwide structures of racist imperialism, colonial rule, apartheid, and Jim Crow. Between 1920 and 1960, African American, Indian, South African, and Ghanaian activists proposed, debated, and wielded nonviolent direct action as a means of self-liberation from white supremacy’s structures of fear and violence, and way of disrupting and transforming the practices that held those structures in place.

Federal Policy and the Racial Integration of Southern Industry, 1961–1980

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Federal Intervention

In the last two decades, one of the central debates of civil rights historiography has concerned the role that the federal government played in securing the gains of the civil rights era. Historians have often been critical of the federal government's inaction, pointing out that it was only pressure from the civil rights movement itself that prompted federal action against Jim Crow. Other scholars have studied the civil rights record of the federal government by analyzing a single issue during several administrations. In this vein, there have been studies of the federal government's involvement in areas as diverse as black voting rights and racial violence against civil rights workers. These studies have both recognized the importance of federal intervention and have also been critical of the federal government's belated and half-hearted endorsement of civil rights.

The Gospel of the Sit-In

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Gershenhorn
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

During the 1960s, Austin lent his talents and his newspaper in support of the direct action movement in Durham and throughout the state. Unlike many other black leaders in the city, he immediately and enthusiastically embraced an early sit-in in Durham that began in 1957, three years before the more celebrated Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins. He also aided a boycott of white retail businesses that refused to hire black workers by publishing the names of those businesses in the Carolina Times. This strategy was quite effective in forcing white businesses to hire African Americans. Austin’s efforts and those of countless civil rights activists led to major freedom struggle successes with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Social and Economic Factors and Negro Voter Registration in the South

1963 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald R. Matthews ◽  
James W. Prothro
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Attorney General ◽  
Voter Registration ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
The South ◽  
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ◽  
Congress Of Racial Equality ◽  
The Right

The vote is widely considered the southern Negro's most important weapon in his struggle for full citizenship and social and economic equality. It is argued that “political rights pave the way to all others.” Once Negroes in the South vote in substantial numbers, white politicians will prove responsive to the desires of the Negro community. Also, federal action on voting will be met with less resistance from the white South—and southerners in Congress—than action involving schools, jobs, or housing.Such, at least, seems to have been the reasoning behind the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, both of which deal primarily with the right to vote. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and his predecessor, Herbert Brownell, are both reported to believe that the vote provides the southern Negro with his most effective means of advancing toward equality, and recent actions of the Justice Department seem to reflect this view. Many Negro leaders share this belief in the over-riding importance of the vote. Hundreds of Negro registration drives have been held in southern cities and counties since 1957. Martin Luther King, usually considered an advocate of non-violent direct action, recently remarked that the most significant step Negroes can take is in the “direction of the voting booths.” The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, historically identified with courtroom attacks on segregation, is now enthusiastically committed to a “battle of the ballots.” In March, 1962, the Southern Regional Council announced receipt of foundation grants of $325,000 to initiate a major program to increase Negro voter registration in the South. The Congress of Racial Equality, the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee are among the organizations now participating in the actual registration drives.

“These Women Really Did the Work”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lucander
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Food Service ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Color Line ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Access To Food

This chapter describes a series of sit-ins during 1944. Led by largely forgotten African American women, this interracial direct-action campaign sought to challenge the color line at department-store lunch counters. Integrating, or at least improving, access to food service at major downtown retailers was an important step in the process of breaking down elements of Jim Crow segregation in St. Louis. That same year, the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) shifted its attention toward obtaining and retaining jobs for black workers in publicly funded workplaces. Gaining access to jobs operating switchboards and in the local administration of Southwestern Bell Telephone offices was presented as a stride toward securing sustainable employment for a largely female contingent of working-class African Americans who wanted long-term white- and pink-collar employment. This sort of local women's activism, juxtaposed against national men's leadership, is consistent with a gendered pattern of activism in civil rights campaigns that persisted through the 1960s.

Working together to survive and thrive: The struggle for Black lives past and present

Leadership ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 174271502097620
Author(s):  
Herbert G Ruffin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Digital Technology ◽  
Black People ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Black Leadership ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Revolutionary Period

This article examines Black leadership through the generations as a multifaceted struggle for Black lives led by ordinary Black people working together to end anti-Black violence and systemic racism for the affirmation of their humanity. At the center of this examination is the latest phase in a long struggle for Black lives, which has been branded as a Black Lives Matter movement. This new movement for social justice developed from past struggles and during the aftermath of the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin, 2014 Ferguson uprising, and 2020 George Floyd uprising. For the author, this new struggle is Black Americans most recent “walk of life” that stretches back to the movements for self-determination, anti-enslavement, and civil rights during the American Revolutionary period (1764–1789). Central to this new struggle is the blending of nonviolent direct action tactics with the use of digital technology and the inclusion of people who previously functioned on the margins of the civil rights agenda. This struggle is addressed, first through an exploration of where Black-led community organizations have been since Trayvon’s death, and second, by examining what is currently being done during the aftermath of the death of Breonna Taylor up to mid-September 2020.

Pathways to Modes of Movement Participation: Micromobilization in the Nashville Civil Rights Movement

Social Forces ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 255-280
Author(s):  
Larry W Isaac ◽  
Jonathan S Coley ◽  
Daniel B Cornfield ◽  
Dennis C Dickerson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Prior Experience ◽  
A Priori ◽  
The Core ◽  
Workshop Training ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Movement Participation

Abstract We employ a unique sample of participants in the early 1960s Nashville civil rights movement to examine within-movement micromobilization processes. Rather than assuming movement micromobilization and participation is internally homogeneous, we extend the literature by identifying distinct types of pathways (entry and preparation) and distinct types (or modes) of movement participation. Pathways into the Nashville movement are largely structured a priori by race, by several distinct points of entry (politically pulled, directly recruited, or professionally pushed), and by prior experience or training in nonviolent direct action. Participation falls into a distinct division of movement labor characterized by several major modes of participation—core cadre, soldiers, and supporters. We demonstrate that pathways and modes of participation are systematically linked and that qualitatively distinct pathways contribute to understanding qualitative modes of movement participation. Specifically, all core cadre members were pulled into activism, soldiers were either pulled or recruited, and supporters were pulled, recruited, or pushed. Highly organized, disciplined, and intense workshop training proved to be integral in becoming a member of the core cadre but not for soldier or supporter roles. We conclude that social movement studies would do well to pay more attention to variability in structured pathways to, preparation for, and qualitative dimensions of movement participation. These dimensions are critical to further understanding the way movements and their participants move and add insights regarding an important chapter in the southern civil rights movement. The implications of our findings extend to modes of movement activism more generally.

High Heels on the Ground

2018 ◽  
pp. 56-79
Author(s):  
Rebecca Tuuri
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
National Council ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Freedom Summer ◽  
Catholic Women ◽  
High Heels ◽  
Wednesdays In Mississippi

This chapter examines the first summer of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW)-sponsored civil rights organization Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS). WIMS brought down forty-eight black and white, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic women from northern and Midwestern cities to personally witness and provide support for the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, sponsored by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). WIMS relied on a behind-the-scenes approach that did not publicly challenge segregation, but sought to quietly reason with local women to support civil rights activists fighting for voting rights and desegregation of schools, businesses, and other facilities. Although the strategy of personal witness proved limited, WIMS helped connect NCNW to local black activists in Mississippi who advocated for more direct action protests and planted the seeds for a later change of NCNW's direction.

scholarly journals Narratives of Urban Resistance: The Community Land Trust

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Udi Engelsman,
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Community Organizing ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Land Trust ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Community Land Trust ◽  
Urban Rural ◽  
Ownership Of Land ◽  
Us Cities

A small part of the self-help housing campaign has been the slow emergence of the Community Land Trust (CLT) movement. CLTs are heterogeneous in terms of their scale and urban/rural contrast and because the motivations behind their inception appear to be so different. We outline the contradiction between housing as the process of activism and housing as a commodity. This is important because we see in the former means by which community organizing can be explained, but show the former to be understood in terms of class analysis. We then consider activism through the four phases of direct action suggested by Ward and go on to look specifically at two CLTs, both in major US cities. These two cases, one in New York and one in Boston, offer an insight into why a particular type of community organizing took place. We see a stand against gentrification in the heart of Manhattan, radical action to secure the ownership of land and to prevent displacement in a Lower East Side neighbourhood. In contrast, the second case shows a stand against the violence exerted in the degeneration of a South Boston neighbourhood. Here we see a community conversant with civil rights struggles able to secure the compliance of the local state through their direct action. Narratives of resistance, we suggest, rely on activists and professionals who both share similar aims and develop a symbiotic relationship in resisting the hegemony of private capital and the state.

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