Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Lowney
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Black Music ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Jazz History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Through inquiry into influential Marxist, Black Atlantic, and African diasporic studies of jazz literature and jazz history, the introduction explains how Jazz Internationalism is distinguished by its historical scope and attention to multiple genres of jazz literature. This introduction outlines not only a history of Afro-modernist jazz literature that corresponds with the Long Civil Rights Movement, it also underscores the intertextuality of jazz literature as it evolves through several generations of black music and writing. While the primary purpose of Jazz Internationalism is not one of recovering obscure writers or texts, it does make the case for a more expansive understanding of jazz writing for both African American literary history and African diasporic studies more generally.

Legal History and the Problem of the Long Civil Rights Movement

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (04) ◽  
pp. 1081-1107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

This essay offers a critical examination of use of the term “long civil rights movement” as a framework for understanding the legal history of the battle against racial inequality in twentieth-century America. Proponents of the long movement argue that expanding the chronological boundaries of the movement beyond the 1950s and 1960s allows scholars to better capture the diverse social mobilization efforts and ideas that fueled the black freedom struggle. While not questioning the long framework's usefulness for studying the social movement dynamics of racial justice activism, I suggest that the long framework is of more limited value for those who seek to understand the development of civil rights, as a legal claim, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. The tendency of long movement scholars to treat civil rights as a pliable category into which they can put any and all racial justice claims is in tension with historical understandings of the term. Susan Carle's Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880–1915 suggests an alternative approach. Her detailed and nuanced account of a period in American history when racial justice activists understood civil rights as a relatively narrow subset of legal remedies within a much broader struggle for racial equality indicates the need for an alternate history of civil rights—one that places the evolving, contested, and historically particularized concept of civil rights at the center of inquiry. “Civil Rights” is a term that did not evolve out of black culture, but, rather, out of American law. As such, it is a term of limitation. —Alice Walker (1983)

The Dr. and Mrs. Wyatt T. Walker Collection

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Taylor McNeilly
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Local Development ◽  
Black Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Music Audio ◽  
The University ◽  
Tree Image

Wyatt Tee Walker died in January 2018. Deservedly celebratory obituaries in major newspapers noted his heroic efforts as a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, as an aide and confidant to Martin Luther King Jr., as an internationally renowned activist against South African apartheid, and as chair of the Central Harlem Local Development Corporation. Yet they barely scratch the surface of the networks of accompaniment, instruction, apprenticeship, and affiliation that made his life meaningful. Fortunately, there is a full archive of the rich complexity of Walker’s life at the University of Richmond Boatwright Library. It contains a treasure trove of works of visual art, recorded music, audio- and videotaped speeches, books, miscellaneous objects, and the remarkable Music Tree image that Walker created to depict visually the history of Black music. Kalfou solicited a description of that collection from archivist Taylor McNeilly. We publish it in this issue in the hope that the archive will be accessed regularly and fully by the academics, artists, and activists who read this journal, and that they will find in it ways to appreciate the range and scope of Walker’s achievements and to emulate them through immersion in the plural and diverse activities that make the Black Radical Tradition possible.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Brian C. Odom
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

This introductory chapter provides an overall introduction for the volume and its collection of diverse essays intended to promote a deeper, interdisciplinary exploration of the social history of NASA during the age of Apollo, developed around the ideas advocated by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall in her 2005 essay, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” which called upon historians to place civil rights movement histories “in the context of a longer story,” one that would make that history “harder to simplify, appropriate, and contain.” The introduction concludes with a call for further research on the topic.

Not as It Is Written

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
International Exhibition ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Made In

This article discusses an international exhibition that detailed the recent history of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Methodologically, the exhibition paired oral history excerpts with selected historic photographs to evoke a sense of Black life during the twentieth century. Thematically, showcasing the Black experience in Pittsburgh provided a chance to provoke among a wider public more nuanced understandings of the civil rights movement, an era particularly prone to problematic and superficial misreadings, but also to interject an African American perspective into the scholarship on deindustrializing cities, a literature which treats racism mostly in white-centric terms. This essay focuses on the choices made in reconciling these thematic and methodological dimensions when designing this exhibition.

Monumental Constructions: Statues, Identity, and Gabrielle Roy’s “L’arbre”

2021 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-117
Author(s):  
Holly Collins
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American South ◽  
Live Oak ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Significant Attention

Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans garnered significant attention for his book In the Shadow of Statues (2018), observing that many Confederate monuments were erected to buttress Jim Crow laws and serve as a warning to those who supported the civil rights movement. Likewise, there are a number of monuments in Québec that serve a particular political or religious purpose, seeking to reinforce a pure laine ideology. In this article, I explore the parallels between the literal and figurative construction and deconstruction of monuments that have fortified invented ideas on identity in francophone North America. Further, Gabrielle Roy’s short story “L’arbre,” which describes a “living monument,” tells the story of a racialized past in North America and unveils the falsities that have been preserved through the construction of statues that perpetuate racial myth. “L’arbre” examines the natural, unconstructed monument of the Live Oak: a tree that witnessed and holds the visible scars of the many terrible realities that took place in its shadows. I use Roy’s short story to show how she sought to deconstruct a whitewashed history of the post-Civil War American South and suggest that her broader corpus rejects determinism wholesale.

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.

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