Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Garrett Felber
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Carceral State ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Struggle ◽  
Freedom Movement

Describes how Those Who Know Don’t Say uses the NOI as a vehicle to explore forgotten sites and forms of Black struggle that confronted the carceral state during the mid-twentieth century. Reconsidering the place and scope of the NOI within the history of the Black Freedom Struggle in this way expands the boundaries of Black liberation struggles by revealing a more dynamic freedom movement in which objectives and strategies were always contested and debated within communities themselves, changing who we see as political theorists and agents of change, and expanding our spatial lens to include prison yards and courtrooms as sites of activism.

scholarly journals Media, Criminal Injustice, and the Black Freedom Struggle

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-102
Author(s):  
Erin G. Turner
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Legal Action ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
International Attention

Since the mid-20th century, media outlets have driven publicity for newsworthy events and shaped content for their receptive audiences. Commonly, massive movements seek publicity to attract attention and participation for protests, demonstrations, slogans, and unfortunate events. For instance, the black freedom struggle of the 1950s through the 1970s took advantage of their traumatic narratives of oppression to attract national and international attention. Many African Americans who experienced dastardly components of a racist criminal justice system were, in turn, earning respect and power from their freedom-seeking counterparts by commodifying the emotion that fueled black liberation efforts.[i] Media, therefore, became a tool for exposing the nation to racist law enforcement and legal action. Ultimately, black freedom struggle activists deployed media depictions of their policing, arrest, and imprisonment to be used as movement publicity, earning increased participation and advancing movement motives through this subsequent growing interest. [i] Colley, Zoe A. Ain't Scared of Your Jail: Arrest, Imprisonment, and the Civil Rights Movement. University Press of Florida, 2012. 4.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Catherine O. Jacquet
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Gender Oppression ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Freedom Movement ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter introduces the frameworks and visions of the two major social movements that took up antirape organizing in the mid-to-late twentieth century United States – the black freedom movement and the women’s liberation movement. The dominant discourses on rape emanating from these movements privileged either narrowly defined racial or gender oppression. Many activists challenged these frameworks and pushed for an intersectional approach to the larger antirape agenda. The chapter gives a brief history of antirape activism in the decades prior to situate the work of mid-twentieth-century activists into a larger historical context. A brief chapter outline for the book is also included.

Nonviolence, Black Power, and the Surveillance State in Memphis’s War on Poverty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony C. Siracusa
Keyword(s):  
Black Power ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom Movement ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Antipoverty Programs ◽  
Freedom Movement

This essay examines the intertwined histories of federal antipoverty programs and the Black Power movement in Memphis, framed through the unlikely alliance of the Reverend James Lawson and members of the Black Organizing Project. Employing primary sources from antipoverty organizations in Memphis and newly surfaced FBI documents, it argues that the explosive events of late March and early April 1968 cannot be explained only by differences among black activists. The fracture within Memphis’s black freedom movement—a rupture that nearly thirty years of scholarship has attributed chiefly to deepening fissures between advocates of Black Power and advocates of nonviolence in the Memphis sanitation strike of 1968—is better explained by two factors: political resistance at both the local and national levels to black-led antipoverty efforts, and a robust and likely illegal effort by the FBI to infiltrate and undermine both the Black Power and nonviolent wings of the black freedom movement. The political efforts to halt the antipoverty movement and the black freedom struggle in Memphis were bound inextricably together.

“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.

“A Relatively New Discovery in the Modern West”: #BlackLivesMatter and the Evolution of Black Humanism

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Floyd-Thomas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Origin And Evolution ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
History Of

Prompted by the current debate and cognitive dissonance surrounding the #BlackLivesMatter protest campaign’s desired goals of securing freedom, justice, equality, and human dignity for people of African descent in the United States, this article addresses this social movement as an extension of Black humanism. This claim is a direct result of the #BlackLivesMatter movement’s sui generis origin and evolution beyond any identifiable Black religious institution. Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us that “insisting that we are human and productive members of [American] society has been a first principle of Black abolitionist politics since at least the eighteenth century.” Thus it is important to recognize the contemporary significance of #BlackLivesMatter by placing it within a broader historical context that resonates with many tenets of the traditional Black freedom struggle yet also charts future directions, including nontheistic thought and praxis such as atheism, agnosticism, humanism, and other expressions of unbelief as part of the broader African American experience. In 2009, Pew Research Center data on religious pluralism in the United States revealed that more than 12 percent of African Americans nationwide readily self-identified as being unaffiliated with any particular religion. This group of Black nonbelievers constitutes the third largest cohort within African American religious life—a major development in the history of African American faith and culture that ought to be more fully explored and explained. Scholars have discussed the origins and varied nature of Black humanism at considerable length; this article builds upon that existing research by examining the origins and nature of Black humanism within the history of the Black freedom struggle.

Let Us Make Men

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
D'Weston Haywood
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Gender Ideology ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Manhood ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Newspapers ◽  
Black Freedom

This book conducts a close, gendered reading of the modern black press to reinterpret it as a crucial tool of black men’s leadership, public voice, public image, gender and identity formation, and a space for the construction of ideas of proper masculinity that shaped the long twentieth-century black freedom struggle to promote a fight for racial justice and black manhood. Moving from the turn of the twentieth century to the rise of black radicalism, the book argues that black people’s ideas, rhetoric, and strategies for protest and racial advancement grew out of a quest for manhood led by black newspapers. Drawing on discourse theory and studies of public spheres to examine the Chicago Defender, Crisis, Negro World, Crusader, and Muhammad Speaks and their publishers during the Great Migration, New Negro era, Great Depression, civil rights movement, and urban renewal, this study engages the black press at the complex intersections of gender, ideology, race, class, identity, urbanization, the public sphere, and black institutional life. Departing from typical histories of black newspapers and black protest that examine the long roots of black political organizing, this book makes a crucial intervention by advancing how black people’s conceptions of rights and justice, and their activism in the name of both, were deeply rooted in ideas of redeeming Black men, prioritizing their plight on the agenda for racial advancement. Yet, the black press produced a highly influential discourse on black manhood that was both empowering and problematic for the long black freedom struggle.

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