Forced Confessions

2019 ◽  
pp. 58-78
Author(s):  
Silvan Niedermeier
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
High Profile ◽  
White Allies ◽  
Criminal Suspects ◽  
Bureaucratic State ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

This chapter studies two high-profile cases in which police officers used torture to extract confessions from black criminal suspects. In these cases, African Americans, aided by prominent white allies and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), appealed to the courts to protest acts of torture, contest forced confessions, and challenge legal discrimination. The chapter places these protests within the context of the “long Civil Rights movement” to illuminate the tensions between the demands of white supremacy and the demands of a “color-blind” law characteristic of the modern bureaucratic state.

scholarly journals “Hell Is Popping Here in South Carolina”: Orangeburg County Black Teachers and Their Community in the Immediate Post-Brown Era

2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-62
Author(s):  
Candace Cunningham
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Teachers ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Training School ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Equal Education ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

When the South Carolina legislature created the anti-NAACP oath in 1956, teachers across the state lost their positions. But it was the dismissal of twenty-one teachers at the Elloree Training School that captured the attention of the NAACP and Black media outlets. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, South Carolina's Black and White communities went head-to-head in the battle over White supremacy versus expanded civil rights. The desegregation movement in 1955 and 1956 placed Black teachers’ activism in the spotlight—activism that mirrored what was happening in their community. This largely unknown episode of civil rights activism demonstrates that Black teachers were willing to serve not only as behind-the-scenes supporters in the equal education struggle but as frontline activists. Furthermore, it shows that South Carolina was an integral site of the long civil rights movement.

“Don’t Crash the Gate but Stand on Your Own Feet!”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reginald K. Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Higher Learning ◽  
Black College ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Learning ◽  
Black Institutions ◽  
Professional Class ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

Scholars often consider the Brown decision of 1954 as the chief legal victory for African Americans in the twentieth century. Although the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s legal team achieved their goal of gaining access to public education for black citizens, historians studying this movement generally praise the outcome of Brown while not focusing on the unintended consequences of that victory. Such circumstances as the ultimate demise of many southern-based black institutions in the name of integration. Researchers have often labelled the leaders of such institutions as obstructionist, gradualists, accommodationist or even worse, “Uncle Toms.” Much of this criticism came from individuals who did not carry the burden of leading either a southern-based institution or community during the early 1900s. Despite these negative labels, black college administrators such as Shepard were responsible for creating a southern black professional class, and future Civil Rights leaders through their institutions of higher learning. Consequently, this essay will explore how Shepard navigated the currents of southern white supremacy, and northern black radicalism while creating an institutional legacy that remains today despite his “gradualist” approach during the long Civil Rights Movement.

Epilogue

2014 ◽  
pp. 115-118
Author(s):  
Heather Andrea Williams
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
First Century ◽  
The North ◽  
The Right

Despite the abolition of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, notions of black inferiority and white supremacy still persisted in both the North and the South. The ‘Epilogue’ outlines the profound struggles by African Americans to make their freedom meaningful. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to African Americans and promised equal protection under the law and, in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment gave black men the right to vote. The modern civil rights movement of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s began to impact on the discriminatory Jim Crow laws and practices, but for many African Americans, struggles for equality, justice, and fairness continue into the twenty-first century.

Race Over Party

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
The Face

In late nineteenth-century Boston, battles over black party loyalty were fights over the place of African Americans in the post–Civil War nation. In his fresh in-depth study of black partisanship and politics, Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood demonstrates that party politics became the terrain upon which black Bostonians tested the promise of equality in America’s democracy. Most African Americans remained loyal Republicans, but Race Over Party highlights the actions and aspirations of a cadre of those who argued that the GOP took black votes for granted and offered little meaningful reward for black support. These activists branded themselves “independents,” forging new alliances and advocating support of whichever candidate would support black freedom regardless of party. By the end of the century, however, it became clear that partisan politics offered little hope for the protection of black rights and lives in the face of white supremacy and racial violence. Even so, Bergeson-Lockwood shows how black Bostonians’ faith in self-reliance, political autonomy, and dedicated organizing inspired future generations of activists who would carry these legacies into the foundation of the twentieth-century civil rights movement.

The Civil Rights Movement in the Urban South

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudrena N. Harold
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Federal Spending ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
Urban South ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Economic Boycotts

The civil rights movement in the urban South transformed the political, economic, and cultural landscape of post–World War II America. Between 1955 and 1968, African Americans and their white allies relied on nonviolent direct action, political lobbying, litigation, and economic boycotts to dismantle the Jim Crow system. Not all but many of the movement’s most decisive political battles occurred in the cities of Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama; Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee; Greensboro and Durham, North Carolina; and Atlanta, Georgia. In these and other urban centers, civil rights activists launched full-throttled campaigns against white supremacy, economic exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence against African Americans. Their fight for racial justice coincided with monumental changes in the urban South as the upsurge in federal spending in the region created unprecedented levels of economic prosperity in the newly forged “Sunbelt.” A dynamic and multifaceted movement that encompassed a wide range of political organizations and perspectives, the black freedom struggle proved successful in dismantling legal segregation. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 expanded black southerners’ economic, political, and educational opportunities. And yet, many African Americans continued to struggle as they confronted not just the long-term effects of racial discrimination and exclusion but also the new challenges engendered by deindustrialization and urban renewal as well as entrenched patterns of racial segregation in the public-school system.

West of Jim Crow

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn M. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
White Schools ◽  
Black Bodies

This book follows California’s history of segregation from statehood to the beginning of the long civil rights movement, arguing that the state innovated methods to control and contain African Americans and other people of color. While celebrated in popular discourse for its forward-thinking culture, politics, and science, California also pioneered new ways to keep citizenship white. Schools, streetcars, restaurants, theaters, parks, beaches, and pools were places of contestation where the presence of black bodies elicited forceful responses from segregationists. Black Californians employed innovative measures to dismantle segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they borrowed some tactics from race rebels in the South, others they improvised. West of Jim Crow uses California to highlight the significance of African American resistance to racial restrictions in places often deemed marginal to mainstream civil rights histories. Examining segregation in the state sheds light on the primacy of gender and sexuality in the minds of segregationists and the significance of black women, black bodies, and racial science, in the years preceding the modern civil rights struggle. California has much to teach us about the lives of African Americans who crossed the color line and the variety of tactics and strategies employed by freedom fighters across the United States.

Racial Realities

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Natsu Taylor Saito
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Structural Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Empowerment ◽  
American Indian Movement ◽  
The 1960S

In the 1960s, global decolonization and the civil rights movement inspired hope for structural change in the United States, but more than fifty years later, racial disparities in income and wealth, education, employment, health, housing, and incarceration remain entrenched. In addition, we have seen a resurgence of overt White supremacy following the election of President Trump. This chapter considers the potential of movements like Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock water protectors in light of the experiences of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and other efforts at community empowerment in the “long sixties.”

A Changing Workforce

2020 ◽  
pp. 210-236
Author(s):  
Jennifer A. Delton
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Affirmative Action ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
National Association ◽  
Historically White ◽  
Right To Work ◽  
Workplace Rights ◽  
National Association Of Manufacturers

This chapter examines the overlap between African Americans' demands for jobs and conservatives' push for “right to work” laws. While compulsory union dues were very different from unions' exclusion of blacks, both movements targeted historically white unions and shared a language of workplace “rights.” Conservative “right to work” activists adopted the tactics of the civil rights movement and aligned themselves with blacks against exclusionary unions. Although this strategy failed to attract African Americans, it called attention to unions' historic and ongoing racism in a way that eventually divided the labor–liberal coalition. This dynamic is key to understanding the National Association of Manufacturers' complicated support for civil rights, equal opportunity, and affirmative action.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document