How the Civil Rights Movement and Litigation Advanced Other Movements for Social Justice

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Residential Treatment ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Lgbt Rights ◽  
Public Facilities

Part 4 describes how many of us who cut our teeth on race-based litigation subsequently used the same tools to reform prisons, mental health hospitals, and other public facilities. Part 4 includes chapter 12, “Constitutional Race-Based Litigation and the Friendly Judicial Climate Lead to Other Areas of Constitutional Litigation”; chapter 13, “How the Civil Rights Movement and Litigation Informed Other Movements for Social Justice”; and chapter 14, “Framing the Contemporary Dialogue of Race.” The courts of the time did not shrink from establishing minimal constitutional standards for prisons and hospitals. Wyatt v. Stickney established the national precedent for residential treatment of mental health. The Prison Project brought constitutional standards to Parchman Prison. Race-based litigation also informed later social movements, such as the women’s movement and the movement for LGBT rights. The anthology concludes with two authors’ assessments of where we are now in framing the discussion of race and white supremacy. Barbara Phillips explores the challenges of what we call “diversity.” Larry Menefee explores Jacquelyn Hall Dowd’s thesis concerning the restricted view of the civil rights movement.

Achieving the Black Social Gospel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Dorrien
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Abolitionist Movement ◽  
The 19Th Century

The black social gospel advocated protest activism within religious communities to resist America’s system of racial caste. Dorrien’s previous book, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel, described the 19th century founding of this tradition as a successor to the abolitionist movement. The New Abolition ended just as King’s models of social justice ministry entered the story. Breaking White Supremacy describes the black social gospel luminaries who influenced King and the figures of King’s generation who led the civil rights movement.

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.”

Medium

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-36
Author(s):  
Ray Brescia
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Mass Movement ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Communications Technology ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Abolitionist Movement

This chapter discusses the medium—the mode of communication a group uses to communicate and organize. It reviews the advent of the printing press, the post office, the telegraph, the transcontinental railroad, the telephone, the radio, and the television, revealing that with the emergence of each of these innovations, a mass movement or movements rose up in their wake. Communications technology, in the form of the steam printing press, combined with the reach of the postal system, helped spur abolitionist efforts. Indeed, just as the abolitionist movement was gaining strength, this new technology helped fuel the advocacy of the movement and strengthen its power and reach. The chapter explores this connection between communications technology and social movements in U.S. history, from the events leading up to the American Revolution through the successes of the civil rights movement.

Selling White Supremacy in the United States

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Grant
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Party ◽  
Black Protest ◽  
Sustained Effort ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter traces South African foreign policy responses to the civil rights movement in the United States. It explores how the National Party engaged with the racial politics of the Cold War in an attempt legitimize apartheid to an increasingly sceptical global audience. The National Party did not shy away from challenging negative portrayals of apartheid. In the United States, South African diplomatic officials mounted a systematic propaganda campaign to correct “misconceptions” and present the apartheid system in a positive light. Equating black protest with communist subversion, South African diplomats engaged in a deliberate and sustained effort to defend apartheid in the United States.

Desegregation of City Parks and the Civil Rights Movement: The Case of Oak Park in Montgomery, Alabama

2019 ◽  
pp. 009614421987763
Author(s):  
Rebecca Retzlaff
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
City Parks ◽  
Segregated Schools ◽  
Public Facilities ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Battle

This article analyzes the history of desegregation of city parks in Montgomery, Alabama. The article chronicles the sixteen-year legal battle to desegregate parks in Montgomery and the efforts of city officials to keep parks segregated, including closing all of the parks for seven years, contracting with the Montgomery YMCA to operate segregated private recreation facilities, and allowing only segregated schools to use the parks. The article explores the connection between park segregation and the Montgomery Bus Boycott and school segregation, and questions why public officials fought to keep parks segregated after other public facilities began court-ordered desegregation, and why the story of park desegregation in Montgomery is largely unknown. The article concludes with a call to confront the history of park segregation in Montgomery.

Foundational Invocations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angélica Maria Bernal
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Tea Party ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Normative Authority ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
Constitutional Thought

This chapter examines appeals to the authority of original founding events, founding ideals, and Founding Fathers in contemporary constitutional democracies. It argues that these “foundational invocations” reveal a window into the unique, albeit underexamined function that foundings play: as a vehicle of persuasion and legitimation. It organizes this examination around two of the most influential visions of founding in the US tradition: the originalist, situated in the discourses of conservative social movements such as the Tea Party and in conservative constitutional thought; and the promissory, situated in the discourses of social movements such as the civil rights movement. Though they might appear radically dissimilar, this chapter illustrates how these two influential conceptualizations of founding together reveal a shared political foundationalism that conflates the normative authority of a regime for its de facto one, thus circumscribing radical change by obscuring the past and placing founding invocations and their actors beyond question.

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.

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