Voices of Civil Rights Lawyers

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Deep South ◽  
The North ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Face ◽  
Big Events

Twenty-six contributors tell their stories about being civil rights lawyers in the Deep South. A thematic structure is employed to reflect these stories. Ten of the stories describe how children of the South and children of the North chose to become civil rights lawyers. The context of civil rights lawyering is explored from big events such as the 1965 Selma march to the everyday experiences of mass meetings and the recurring racism of Neshoba County. The misadventures of civil rights lawyers are described from arrests, to beatings, to a black lawyer being called by a racial epithet in court by a judge. The development of civil rights lawyer groups—the Legal Defense Fund, the LCDC (Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee), and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law—were crucial to the success of the civil rights movement. Voting rights dramatically spurred by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were crucial to the newly emerging status of blacks. The public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 broke barriers in hotels and eating places. School desegregation litigation changed the face of public schools forever. Employment discrimination litigation dramatically changed the workplace. The success of civil rights litigation led to using the federal courts to reform prisons and facilities for the mentally ill. Two authors discuss the contemporary language of race and the status of white supremacy.

How Civil Rights Lawyers Emerged

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Moral Outrage ◽  
Deep South ◽  
The South ◽  
Large Measure ◽  
The North ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Status

Part 1 tells ten stories of young people who chose to be civil rights lawyers. Part 1 includes chapters 1, “Children of the South,” and chapter 2, “Children of the North.” Some of the lawyers were children of the South. All had grown up in a completely segregated society. For blacks, the opportunity to challenge the status quo they had always known contained a large measure of personal and cultural gratification and moral outrage. For whites, the evolution was one of a growing conviction of the immorality of the system that had nurtured them. Some of the lawyers were children of the North. Through a variety of experiences, they caught the fever of the civil rights movement in the Deep South and came south to help make changes. Some were Jews whose feelings were informed by the Holocaust. Some were blacks who had had a big enough taste of racism in the North to be lured into the rapidly changing South. For young lawyers from both the North and the South, their experience was materially impacted by their race

Teaching Brown: Reflections on Pedagogical Challenges and Opportunities: Introduction

2004 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Dougherty
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
List Type ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
The North ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities

These first-person reflective essays were written from our perspectives as educators who find it immensely rewarding, yet incredibly challenging, to teach about Brown vs Board of Education. Rarely do we address an issue in our classroom that is wrapped up in so many layers of racial meaning, people's lived experiences, ongoing policy debates, and historical mythology. Teaching Brown forces many of us to confront a number of dilemmas that have no easy answers: •How do we “keep the struggle alive” in our students' hearts and minds while simultaneously teaching them to think like historians, who do not uncritically accept simplistic or celebratory accounts of the civil rights movement?•How do we bridge the gap between two diverging bodies of historical scholarship: one that praises desegregation activists who courageously challenged White supremacy and another that celebrates the good qualities of Black segregated schools?•How can we help our students see connections between historical struggles and contemporary debates over race, education, and power without slipping into presentism, the unfortunate tendency to perceive the past solely through present-day lenses?•Or how do we connect any of this academic literature to everyday people's lived experiences in the communities around us, whether we teach in the South, the North, or the West?

A Powerful Weapon

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-128
Author(s):  
Zoë Burkholder
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
School Integration ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Black Schools ◽  
The North ◽  
Brown Decision

Chapter 3 highlights a resurgence of northern Black support for school integration alongside the expanding civil rights movement. The outbreak of World War II created economic opportunities that drew Black migrants North in a second wave and sparked more militant civil rights activism. NAACP leaders persuaded northern Black communities to reject school segregation. By citing anti-discrimination legislation and organizing petitions and boycotts, these activists won the formal desegregation of public schools in the North between 1940 and 1954. A potent combination of civil rights activism, the decline of scientific racism, and the emergence of the Cold War pushed school integration to the forefront of national politics. Following the Brown decision, northern Blacks demanded school integration. The process was contentious, especially when districts closed Black schools and fired Black teachers. By 1965, many Black northerners expressed frustration with school integration and what they viewed as its failure to improve the quality of education for Black youth.

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.

Lillian Smith

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Brantley
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Rural Setting ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The North ◽  
Lillian Smith ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Liberal Vision

Lillian Smith (b. 1897–d. 1966) was born in Jasper, Florida, and grew up in a large and well-to-do southern family. In 1915, in the wake of the First World War, her father, Calvin Warren Smith, lost his financial standing and relocated his family to their summer home in North Georgia where he opened first a hotel and then a summer camp for girls, which Smith would later own and direct. It is somewhat surprising that no one has yet made a feature film based on Smith’s life. She is the Floridian teenager who found herself transplanted to a scenic but rural environment in the north Georgia mountains; the young woman who superintended elementary schools in this rural setting; the undergraduate student at both the local Piedmont College (1915–1916) and the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore (1917–1918, 1919–1922); the music teacher at a missionary school in Huzhow, China, an experience that solidified her social consciousness (1922–1925); the progressive director of Laurel Falls Camp for girls, many of whom came from the state’s wealthiest families (1925–1948); the publisher of South Today, a quarterly magazine and forum for liberal thought that she coedited for ten years with her life partner Paula Snelling (1936–1944); the controversial author of Strange Fruit, one of the best-selling novels of 1944; the self-analyst who published Killers of the Dream, a groundbreaking work of autobiography and cultural criticism that appeared first in 1949 and then again in an expanded edition in 1962; the friend and advisor to influential players on the national scene, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr.; and the combative social activist who withstood threats as she promoted her liberal vision through fiction, letters, essays, speeches, and pamphlets—including Now Is the Time (1954), her ardent defense of school desegregation—and creative works of self-writing and nonfiction prose, including The Journey (1954) and her final book, Our Faces, Our Words (1964). Smith was diagnosed with cancer in 1953, the disease that took her life in 1966 at the height of the civil rights movement that she, through her writings and activism, had helped to bring about and which she saw as evidence that human beings can in fact evolve. Smith turned a searchlight on the workings of white supremacy and blasted conservative ideologies of both race and gender. She has, since her death, emerged slowly but steadily as a pivotal figure in attempts to redraw the boundaries of the literary and cultural renaissance in the mid-20th century South.

Contending with Change and Challenges

2018 ◽  
pp. 56-81
Author(s):  
Michelle A. Purdy
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Private School ◽  
School Leaders ◽  
Black Families ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Local Schools ◽  
Tax Exempt ◽  
The Face

This chapter captures the development of Westminster in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By the late 1950s, Westminster’s student body had quadrupled, and the school was housed on the current West Paces Ferry Road campus. School leaders prepared for the possible closing of Atlanta Public Schools as black Atlantans called for desegregation in the face of oppositional state policies. As the civil rights movement increased in momentum, Westminster and other local schools, including Lovett and Trinity, received inquiries into their admissions policies from interracial organizations such as the Greater Atlanta Council on Human Relations and leading civil rights activists including the Kings, Abernathys, and Youngs, and black families such as the Rosses. Private school leaders worked to find a balance among multiple contexts and influences, including the enlarged federal presence in education and increased questions about federal tax-exempt status for private schools. Concurrently, a school culture at Westminster developed in ways that continued to reflect the “Old South” and included racist traditions while some white students earnestly debated and discussed the issues of the day.

Crispus Attucks and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1950s–1970s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Writers ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
The Status ◽  
School Curricula

As the integrationist civil rights movement took shape, Attucks became one of the most prominent black figures to enter elementary and secondary school curricula and textbooks. In most mainstream texts he became merely a token black presence, yet some white commentators took issue with even this superficial elevation to the status of Revolutionary patriot, reviving the contention that Attucks was no more than a rabble-rousing ruffian. Meanwhile, black writers characterized him as everything from a peaceful integrationist to an Afrocentric rebel to a sellout Uncle Tom. Attucks was now more present than ever in the nation’s public schools and popular culture, but widespread disagreement remained regarding his status as a national hero to be honored by all, an embodiment of race pride, a symbol of violence and disorder, or an irrelevant nobody who should be forgotten.

REGULATING NORTHERN IRELAND: THE SPECIAL POWERS ACTS, 1922–1972

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 1089-1120 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA K. DONOHUE
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Minority Community ◽  
The Public ◽  
The North ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Government ◽  
Civil Order

Although the 1922–43 Special Powers Acts (SPAs) played a central role in prompting the Northern Irish civil rights movement in the late 1960s, virtually no secondary literature exists on the operation of the statutes. This article examines the manner in which the unionist government employed the acts during the tenure of the northern parliament. It suggests that the 1922–43 SPAs became a central grievance of the minority community because of the manner in which regulations introduced under their auspices were exercised: the ministry of home affairs initially used the emergency statutes to return civil order to the province; however, as violence declined the government began to utilize regulations to prevent the expression of republican ideals. Any attempt to garner support for a united Ireland was perceived as an attack on the Northern Irish constitution. Concurrent with this shift was a change in justification for the 1922–43 SPAs: from being required in order to establish law and order in the face of rising violence, they were soon heralded by unionists as necessary to maintain the constitutional structure of the North. In preventing the public exposition of republicanism, expressions of nationalism were likewise limited. This impacted upon a large portion of the minority community, giving rise to claims that the statutes were being unfairly applied.

Too Close for Comfort: Canada, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and the North American Colo(u)r Line

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Asa McKercher
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
North American ◽  
The North ◽  
The U.S

Too Close for Comfort: Canada, the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and the North American Colo(u)r Line

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