Black Internationalist Feminism

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Higashida
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Women's Movements ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Old Left ◽  
Lorraine Hansberry

This book examines how African American women writers affiliated themselves with the post-World War II Black Communist Left and developed a distinct strand of feminism. This vital yet largely overlooked feminist tradition built upon and critically retheorized the postwar Left's “nationalist internationalism,” which connected the liberation of Blacks in the United States to the liberation of Third World nations and the worldwide proletariat. Exploring a diverse range of plays, novels, essays, poetry, and reportage, the book shows how Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou worked within and against established literary forms to demonstrate that nationalist internationalism was linked to struggles against heterosexism and patriarchy. In examining writing by Black Left women from 1945 to 1995, this book contributes to recent efforts to rehistoricize the Old Left, Civil Rights, Black Power, and second-wave Black women's movements.

Nursing Civil Rights

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charissa J. Threat
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
The United States ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Army Nurse Corps ◽  
Military Nursing

This book investigates the parallel battles against occupational segregation by African American women and white men in the U.S. Army, using the microcosm of military nursing. As the book reveals, both groups viewed their circumstances with the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) as a civil rights matter. Each conducted separate integration campaigns to end the discrimination they suffered. Yet their stories defy the narrative that civil rights struggles inevitably arced toward social justice. The book examines the battles over race and gender discrimination and social justice by linking the civil rights story of the ANC to critical events in the United States between World War II and the Vietnam War. It tells how progressive elements in the integration campaigns did indeed break down barriers in both military and civilian nursing. At the same time, it follows conservative threads to portray how some of the women who succeeded as agents of change became defenders of exclusionary practices when men sought military nursing careers. The ironic result was a struggle that simultaneously confronted and reaffirmed the social hierarchies that nurtured discrimination.

The Contributions of Oscar Halecki to American Historical Scholarship

1976 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-97
Author(s):  
Thaddeus V. Gromada
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
New England ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Oil Refineries ◽  
Middle Atlantic ◽  
Steel Mills ◽  
Social Opportunities ◽  
The One

Most of the one and one-half million Poles who immigrated to the United States before World War II were people of rural, Catholic, Slavic stock in search of greater economic and social opportunities. They settled in urban centers primarily in the middle Atlantic, mid-Western, and New England states where they formed communities (Polonias) around the steel mills, coal and iron mines, slaughter houses and meat packing plants, oil refineries, shoe and textile factories, granaries and milling plants. Their labor was an important element in the industrialization of America. They were among the millions of unknown persons from eastern and southern Europe, as Michael Novak put it, “who have strengthened family and neighborhood life in America, and from 1930's to the present have made possible the longest strides in the nation's history in economic matters and civil rights.” Very few scholars and intellectuals, however, could be found among these Polish immigrants. When Polish scholars, intellectuals, or artists emigrated from partitioned Poland, usually after unsuccessful revolutions, they settled in France or some other European country.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 225-234
Author(s):  
Kurt Edward Kemper
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
College Athletics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Medium Size ◽  
World War ◽  
Multiple Pressures ◽  
Economic Elites

Throughout much of the NCAA’s first half century, the organization maintained an uneasy collection of commercialized schools that pursued highly competitive athletics for publicity and profit; liberal arts colleges that saw college athletics as a component of their educational and leadership missions; and smaller and medium-size state schools that wanted to play athletics for competitive glory but lacked the size, resources, and finances of the big-time powers. Unable to balance those three interests, the NCAA largely ignored the concerns of the latter two while devoting itself to the service of commercialized athletics. This fraught arrangement finally came asunder in the years after World War II when multiple pressures from scandals, racial criticisms, and growing pressure for access to the NCAA Basketball Tournament finally forced concessions. The concessions made in the mid- to late-1950s, however, did not reshape the balance of power in the NCAA, as the organization remained wholly committed to serving the interests of big-time commercialized athletics. In this regard the challenges faced by the NCAA mirrored the larger social and cultural upheaval in the United States following World War II. The civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and opposition to the war in Vietnam all challenged the authority of existing political and economic elites yet did not mark any fundamental shift in power in American life. The question, then, is not really how did the NCAA manage to survive but, rather, how did its critics ever hope to succeed?

Power and Protection

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie B. Green
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Working Women ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
World War ◽  
Community Activists ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
Sanitation Workers

Gender bound together labor and civil rights, serving as a key axis in the struggles for racial justice from World War II to the 1968 sanitation workers strike, including the tragic murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Although the conflicts addressed in this essay are crucial to understanding the dramatic events of the later 1960s, they are usually obscured by national civil rights narratives that emphasize desegregation and voting rights, thereby pushing issues reflecting the intersection of labor, racial justice, and gender to the sidelines. This essay highlights conflicts ranging from the denial of World War II defense work, other than menial labor, to African American women to the support movement for the sanitation workers. In placing themselves quite literally on the front lines of that movement, women articulated their own interpretations of the strike’s slogan, “I am a man!” in relation to their own struggles as working women, mothers, and community activists.

Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Greene
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
White Male ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom

Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are the names that come to mind for most Americans if asked about the civil rights or Black Power movements. Others may point to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, both of whom backed pathbreaking civil rights legislation. However, recent scholarship suggests that neither black male leaders nor white male presidents were always the most important figures in the modern struggle for black freedom. Presidents took their cues not simply from male luminaries in civil rights organizations. Rather, their legislative initiatives were largely in response to grassroots protests in which women, especially black women, were key participants. African American women played major roles in local and national organizing efforts and frequently were the majority in local chapters of groups as dissimilar as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Black Panther Party. Even familiar names like Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King have become little more than sanitized national icons, while their decades-long efforts to secure racial, economic, and gender justice remain relatively unknown. Aside from activists and scholars, even fewer of us know much, if anything, about the female allies of the black freedom struggle, including white southerners as well as other women of color. A closer look at the women who made enormous contributions to both the modern civil rights and Black Power movements sheds new light on these struggles, including the historic national victories we think we fully understand, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In short, examining women’s participation in the “long civil rights movement,” which historians increasingly date to the New Deal and World War II, calls for a redefinition of more conventional notions of leadership, protest, and politics.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charissa J. Threat
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
The United States ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Army Nurse Corps ◽  
Agents Of Change ◽  
Military Nursing ◽  
And Gender

This book examines the battles over race and gender discrimination and social justice by linking the civil rights story of the Army Nurse Corps (ANC) to critical events in the United States between World War II and the Vietnam War. Using the microcosm of military nursing, it considers how agents of change became defenders of exclusionary practices when some of the same women who challenged their exclusion from the military or civilian nursing profession, or those who had gained considerable status within the profession, were unwilling to extend the opportunities to men who sought out military nursing careers. The book also explores the connection between the campaigns to integrate the ANC and the domestic and international anxieties during the Cold War by suggesting that anticommunism both hindered and supported the prospect for gender and race equality within the ANC and, by extension, civilian society.

From Forced Tolerance to Forced Busing: Wartime Intercultural Education and the Rise of Black Educational Activism in Boston

2010 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-327
Author(s):  
Zoë Burkholder
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Factors ◽  
Teacher Resistance ◽  
Racial Tolerance ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Tolerance Education

In this article, Zoë Burkholder explores the historical interplay of the emergence of tolerance education in the United States and the rise of black educational activism in Boston. By uncovering a pointed lack of tolerance education in Boston and a widespread promotion of tolerance education in other cities in the early half of the twentieth century, the author reveals how racial, historical, and political factors complicated tolerance education's local implementation in Boston. Informed by local racialized politics in the 1940s, the predominantly Irish Catholic teaching force in Boston declined to teach lessons on racial tolerance that were popular nationwide during World War II. Burkholder argues that this site of active teacher resistance against tolerance education provided fertile ground for black educational activism in Boston during the civil rights movement. These findings presage the well-documented virulence of white protest to school integration in Boston and complicate our understanding of integration in today's educational context.

African American Women Chemists

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeannette Brown
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
African American Men ◽  
African American Woman ◽  
American Woman ◽  
The United States ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
American Women ◽  
Race And Gender

Dr. Marie Maynard Daly received her PhD in Chemistry from Columbia University in 1947. Although she was hardly the first of her race and gender to engage in the field, she was the first African American woman to receive a PhD in chemistry in the United States. In this book, Jeannette Brown, an African American woman chemist herself, will present a wide-ranging historical introduction to the relatively new presence of African American women in the field of chemistry. It will detail their struggles to obtain an education and their efforts to succeed in a field in which there were few African American men, much less African American women. The book contains sketches of the lives of African America women chemists from the earliest pioneers up until the late 1960's when the Civil Rights Acts were passed and greater career opportunities began to emerge. In each sketch, Brown will explore women's motivation to study the field and detail their often quite significant accomplishments. Chapters focus on chemists in academia, industry, and government, as well as chemical engineers, whose career path is very different from that of the tradition chemist. The book concludes with a chapter on the future of African American women chemists, which will be of interest to all women interested in science.

Post-1965 Changes in Asian America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Hinnershitz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian Immigrants ◽  
World War ◽  
Chinese Exclusion ◽  
The 1960S

After World War II and through the 1960s, Asian Americans began a transformative process, from being the “yellow peril” to becoming the model minority, and Asian Americans in the South experienced, to some degree, the same transformation. The war and its mottos of fighting for freedom and democracy at home and abroad affected the way Americans viewed their own hypocrisy toward minorities in the United States. African Americans were the largest minority group to use the aims of the war to demand attention to their plight with Jim Crow, prompting the growth of a nationwide civil rights movement, but Americans also came to view the century-old forms of legal discrimination against Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in a new light. Not only did Congress repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 (making it legal for some Chinese to naturalize and allowing a small number of Chinese immigrants to enter the United States), but Filipino Americans and Indian Americans received similar treatment during and after World War II. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act (or the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952), although designed to protect American security during the early Cold War by prohibiting and deporting subversive aliens, also made it possible for Asian immigrants of all ethnicities to become American citizens (while the number of Asians admitted to the United States did not drastically increase). Americans also viewed the ability of Japanese Americans to overcome the massive civil rights violations of wartime imprisonment and achieve economic and educational success as a model for all minorities to follow. Asian Americans came through the fires of World War II and proved that they were loyal Americans and deserving of equal treatment and respect, and while more subtle and sometimes not so subtle forms of racism and discrimination ...

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