scholarly journals The Impact of the 1970s on Black Identity Development: An Analysis of Psychosocial and Black Existential Perspectives

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jackie Sewell
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Identity Development ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Black Consciousness ◽  
Existential Approach ◽  
The Impact

With the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the subsequent focus on black existence, itis perhaps timely to revisit a previous historical period – the 1970s which saw theemergence of the civil rights movement and the transformation of black consciousness and identity.Both psychosocial and existential theories highlight the relationship between context and the development of identity. Drawing on the work of Erikson, Cross describes stages of identity development from negro to black which he originally related to the historical context of the black consciousness period of the 1970s but later, developed into a tool to measure black identity. This model depicts identity as developing in fixed stages with objective and measurable characteristics. The black existential approach focuses on the construction of identity within a context shaped by an individual’s experiences. Black existential philosophy aims to explore how different black experiences shape different manifestations of black identity construction. This articlereviews these two perspectives. I conclude that the black existential perspective produces richer knowledge about the existence of black people. Using the example ofhow second generation British born black Jamaicans constructed their identity during the 1970s, it is possible to see how this construction was shaped by their lived experiences in Britain at this time.

scholarly journals Kneading, Needing, and Eating Black Bodies

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 217-240
Author(s):  
Fabienne Snowden ◽  
Willie Tolliver ◽  
Amanda McPherson
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Workers ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black People ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
History Of

Social workers have been on the frontlines alongside marginalized communities since the profession’s emergence. This stance continues with supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement and centering the structural inequities that the COVID-19 pandemic highlights. A narrative that centers the history of social work’s concern for Black citizenship in the profession’s formation is neglected in the literature. This historical review traces the genesis of the profession’s work to expand access to the entitlements of citizenship among Black communities. Thematic analysis of secondary sources is used to investigate the formation of the profession and its work to ensure access to resources among Blacks communities. Study findings identify that the profession emerged from the bonds between the Abolitionist Movement and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, then moved away from working with Black people during the Settlement Movement and did not return to addressing the needs of these communities until the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement. Black social workers answered the call to support Black and non-Black communities in the absence of the profession’s national organization’s presence. Social work needs, kneads, and eats Black bodies by being in complicity with systems of oppression. The history of social work and its concern and lack of concern for Black citizenship is a pedagogical innovation that addresses the historical amnesia that White domination fosters. The findings of this analysis call social workers to task to disrupt White dominant epistemologies of ignorance by incorporating this historical context into their social work pedagogy.

The Congressional Black Caucus and the Closure of NASA’s Satellite Tracking Station at Hartebeesthoek, South Africa

2019 ◽  
pp. 167-180
Author(s):  
Keith Snedegar
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Satellite Tracking ◽  
Global Issues ◽  
Tracking Station ◽  
Minority Regime ◽  
The Impact

Keith Snedegar explores the impact of the civil rights movement on decisions related to NASA facilities outside the United States. Snedegar maintains that when Charles C. Diggs Jr., one of the founders of the Black Congressional Caucus, visited the NASA satellite tracking station at Hartesbeesthoek, South Africa, in 1971, he discovered a racially segregated facility where technical jobs were reserved for white employees and black Africans essentially performed menial labor. Upon his return to the United States, the Detroit congressman embarked on a two-year struggle, first to improve workplace equity at the tracking station, and later, for the closure of the facility. NASA administration under James Fletcher was largely indifferent to demands for change at the station. It was only after Representative Charles Rangel proposed a reduction in NASA appropriations did the agency announce plans to end its working relationship with the white minority regime of South Africa. NASA’s public statements suggested that a scientific rationale lay behind the station’s eventual closure in 1975, but this episode clearly indicates that NASA was acting only under political pressure, and its management remained largely insensitive to global issues of racial equality.

The Newest South

2019 ◽  
pp. 61-108
Author(s):  
Brenda Plummer
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
New South ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S

Brenda Plummer examines the effect of the U.S. space program on race relations in key areas of the South, and the impact of that connection on popular culture. She also explores the intersection of the struggle for racial equality and aerospace exploration, as both constituted potent narratives of freedom in the American imaginary. Plummer disputes the assumption that NASA as an instrument of modernization and partner in the creation of the New South was implicitly allied with the civil rights movement. While the transformation of parts of the Deep South undeniably broke up earlier political, economic, and cultural patterns, aerospace research and development helped inaugurate a successor regime that neither challenged the structural foundations of racial inequality nor guarded against the production of new disparities.

The Turning Point

2019 ◽  
pp. 301-352
Author(s):  
Steven K. Green
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Public Support ◽  
The Public ◽  
Education Legislation ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact

This chapter examines the various events that undermined the public support for church–state separation in the 1960s. It considers the impact of Vatican II, of ecumenism, of the civil rights movement, and of federal social welfare and education legislation on Protestant attitudes. All of these events encouraged Protestants and Catholics to find common ground in working for the greater societal good. These events also suggested a model of church-state cooperation rather than one of separation. The chapter then segues to consider the various church–state cases before the Supreme Court between 1968 and 1975 in which the justices began to step back from applying a strict separationist approach to church–state controversies.

Margaret Walker

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Byerman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black People ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Northwestern University

Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on July 7, 1915. Her father, Sigismund, was a Methodist minister born in Jamaica and educated at Northwestern University; her mother, Marion Dozier, a music teacher. Both later taught at New Orleans University. In 1925, they moved to New Orleans and lived with Walker’s maternal grandmother, Elvira “Vyry” Dozier, who provided many of the stories used in her only novel, Jubilee (1966). After two years at New Orleans University (now Dillard University) Walker received her bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1935. She then worked in Chicago for the Federal Writers’ Project and became part of what came to be known as the black Chicago renaissance, often associated with the novelist Richard Wright. Her friendship with him ended acrimoniously after he moved to New York. She continued to help him with the research for his celebrated novel Native Son (1940) after he left Chicago. She earned her master’s degree at the University of Iowa, with the poetry collection that was published as For My People, which won the Yale Younger Poets Award (1942). She married Firnist James Alexander in 1943, and they had four children. She taught at Livingstone College and West Virginia State College before moving to a permanent position at Jackson State University, where she taught from 1949 to 1979. In 1962, she took leave from her teaching position to work on a doctorate at Iowa. Her dissertation was based on the stories told by her grandmother and on the research she had conducted in the South for thirty years. She earned her degree in 1965 and the novel was published a year later as Jubilee. During this time, she continued writing poetry, including Ballad of the Free (1966)—a chapbook—and Prophets for a New Day (1970), both of which concern the civil rights movement, and October Journey (1973), primarily a collection of celebrations of black historical and literary figures, including a long memorial to her father. At Jackson State in 1968, she established the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People. In 1973, she organized the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival through the Institute; it brought together twenty African American women poets of different generations. For Folkways Records in 1975, she recorded three albums of poetry by African American artists, including her own version of “Yalluh Hammuh,” which she had collected as part of the Federal Writers Project. In 1989, she published This is My Century: New and Collected Poems. Her most controversial work is Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1987), which many reviewers have seen as an attack on her former friend, even though she adds significant detail to his early career in Chicago. She died of cancer on November 30, 1998.

Latino/a and African American Relations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian D. Behnken
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black And White

African Americans and Latino/as have had a long history of social interactions that have been strongly affected by the broader sense of race in the United States. Race in the United States has typically been constructed as a binary of black and white. Latino/as do not fit neatly into this binary. Some Latino/as have argued for a white racial identity, which has at times frustrated their relationships with black people. For African Americans and Latino/as, segregation often presented barriers to good working relationships. The two groups were often segregated from each other, making them mutually invisible. This invisibility did not make for good relations. Latino/as and blacks found new avenues for improving their relationships during the civil rights era, from the 1940s to the 1970s. A number of civil rights protests generated coalitions that brought the two communities together in concerted campaigns. This was especially the case for militant groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Mexican American Brown Berets, and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, as well as in the Poor People’s Campaign. Interactions among African Americans and Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban/Cuban American illustrate the deep and often convoluted sense of race consciousness in American history, especially during the time of the civil rights movement.

The Chicano Movement: Mexican American History and the Struggle for Equality

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Carlos Muñoz
Keyword(s):  
High School Students ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
School Students ◽  
Mexican American History ◽  
Mass Protest ◽  
The 1960S

Abstract The Chicano/Chicana movement was a product of the global eruption that took place in 1968. A critical understanding of this movement requires that it be put into a historical context and theoretical framework of an indigenous people who were internally colonized by the expanding us Empire after the end of the us-Mexico War of 1846-48. Violent and nonviolent struggles took place prior to the 1960s over the issues of land, social justice, and civil rights. The first nonviolent and largest Mexican American mass protest in us history occurred in the Spring of 1968 in East Los Angeles, California, where over ten thousand Chicano high school students walked out of their inferior and racist barrio high schools. The student walkouts ignited the emergence of the Chicano civil rights movement. The movement’s positive contributions and failures will be discussed. Discussion will conclude with a critical analysis of Mexican American struggles in the present age of “Trumpism”.

Bangla Rock: exploring the counterculture and dissidence in post-colonial Bengali popular music

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Kamalini Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Vernacular Literature ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Cultural Foundations ◽  
Vernacular Music ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
The Impact

This paper is an attempt to explore the politics and the poetics of vernacular music in modern Bengal. Drawn from extensive and in-depth research into the current “scene” (as popularly referred to in the musician and music lover circles), this paper delves into the living histories of musical and linguistic revolutions in a part of India where the vernacular literature has been historically rich, and vastly influenced by the post-colonial heritage. The popular music that grew from these political and cultural foundations reflected its own pathos, and consecutively inspired its own form of oral tradition. The linguistic and musical inspirations for Bangla Rock and the eventual establishment of this genre in a rigidly curated culture is not only a remarkable anthropological case study, but also crucial in creating discourse on the impact of this music in the creation of oral histories. This paper will discuss both the musical and the lyrical journey of Bengali counterculture in music, thus in turn exploring the scope of Bangla – as in the colloquial for Bengali, and Rock – the Western musical expression which began during the 50’s and the 60’s (also populist and political in its roots). The inception of this particular political populist narrative driven through songs and music, is rooted in the Civil Rights movement, and comparisons can be drawn in the ‘soul’ of the movements, though removed both geographically and by time. Thus this paper engages with the poetics of Bangla Rock, to understand the marginal political voices surfacing through alternative means of expression.

Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Black Art ◽  
And Gender

Through its analysis of film, drama, fiction, visual culture, poetry, and other cultural -artifacts, Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights offers a fresh examination of how the historical paradox by which unprecedented civil rights gains coexist with novel impediments to collectivist black liberation projects. At the beginning of the 1970s, the ethos animating the juridical achievements of the civil rights movement began to wane, and the rise of neoliberalism, a powerful conservative backlash, the co-optation of “race-blind” rhetoric, and the pathologization and criminalization of poverty helped to retrench black inequality in the post-civil rights era. This book uncovers the intricate ways that black cultural production kept imagining how black people could achieve their dreams for freedom, despite abject social and political conditions. While black writers, artists, historians, and critics have taken renewed interest in the historical roots of black un-freedom, Black Cultural Production insists that the 1970s anchors the philosophical, aesthetic, and political debates that animate contemporary debates in African American studies. Black cultural production and producers help us think about how black people might achieve freedom by centralizing the roles black art and artists have had in expanding notions of freedom, democracy, equity, and gender equality. Black cultural production continues to engage in social critique and transformation and remains an important site for the (re)making of black politics.

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