The Freedom Labor Union

2018 ◽  
pp. 191-204
Author(s):  
Michael Sistrom
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
Displaced Workers ◽  
Local Application ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Communal Housing

The Mississippi Freedom Labor Union (MFLU) and related efforts were part of the larger evolution of black activism and of the maturing and varied philosophy of Black Power in the mid- and later 1960s. The MFLU and its offshoots embodied this mutation; first, in strategy, from a focus on demonstrations to capture the attention of a national white audience to awakening and organizing the poor black community in the South; and second, a shift in goals from requesting civil rights from the country's lawmakers to demanding a share of political and economic power. After a series of plantation strikes in the summer of 1965, MFLU members and other black Mississippians tried to gain a voice in the local application of War on Poverty programs and to establish Freedom City as communal housing for displaced workers.

HEALTH CARE, CIVIL RIGHTS AND THE BLACK COMMUNITY

1983 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Woodrow Jones ◽  
Mitchell F. Rice
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Community

Salvaging Marginalized Men: How the Department of Defense Waged the War on Poverty

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 373-400
Author(s):  
JOHN WORSENCROFT
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Department Of Defense ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Social Welfare Policy ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Military Installations ◽  
Male Breadwinner ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Military

AbstractArchitects of social welfare policy in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations viewed the military as a site for strengthening the male breadwinner as the head of the “traditional family.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Robert McNamara—men not often mentioned in the same conversations—both spoke of “salvaging” young men through military service. The Department of Defense created Project Transition, a vocational jobs-training program for GIs getting ready to leave the military, and Project 100,000, which lowered draft requirements in order to put men who were previously unqualified into the military. The Department of Defense also made significant moves to end housing discrimination in communities surrounding military installations. Policymakers were convinced that any extension of social welfare demanded reciprocal responsibility from its male citizens. During the longest peacetime draft in American history, policymakers viewed programs to expand civil rights and social welfare as also expanding the umbrella of the obligations of citizenship.

The Pauper

2019 ◽  
pp. 99-138
Author(s):  
Sylvie Laurent
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Peace Movement ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Welfare Rights ◽  
New Class ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Poor People's Campaign

This chapter questions the implications of King’s new class-based coalition. It casts the Poor People’s Campaign as a crucial hinge in creating a possible link between the civil rights movement, the labor movement, black nationalists who endorsed Marxism, the Chicano movements, the Welfare Rights movements (in which women played a critical role), poor whites organizations and the peace movement.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Sylvie Laurent
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
Democratic Socialism ◽  
The Poor

This introduction offers a wide overview of the campaign, resituating it in the context of the post 1965 civil rights struggle but also in regards to King’s thinking on economic inequality. It presents the “insurrection of the Poor” as the offspring of an embattled King who embraced democratic socialism in conjonction to nonviolence.

Bringing the Moon to Mankind

2019 ◽  
pp. 44-58
Author(s):  
David Miguel Molina ◽  
P. J. Blount
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Space Exploration ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Space Program ◽  
The Moon ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

In chapter 3, Molina and Blount offer a contextualization of NASA’s interlocutory role throughout the long civil rights movement by mobilizing these three themes to analyze a series of archival and cultural artifacts. The authors first analyze the rhetoric deployed by the Poor People Campaign’s various mobilizations to show that the American space program was viewed with deep skepticism by the African American community and particularly within the context of ongoing struggles for black freedom. Second, they discuss the “distance” between the tropes of spatial disenfranchisement represented in the civil rights movement and the Moon missions to show how space exploration was portrayed as an acceleration of the marginalization of black spaces.

No Peace until the Suffrage Question Is Settled

2018 ◽  
pp. 22-37
Author(s):  
Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Community ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Black Legislators

This chapter focuses on the post-civil war election of Massachusetts’ first black legislators and the debates over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. It argues that in these early debates issues of black suffrage were central to visions of citizenship and that conflicts over the breadth of the amendments planted the seeds for future skepticism of the Republican Party. Following the passage of the amendments, portions of Boston’s black community remained unsure of Republicans’ commitment to civil rights protections.

The Techniques of Disavowal

2021 ◽  
pp. 159-191
Author(s):  
Erin R. Pineda
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
The South ◽  
Black Activism ◽  
The Public ◽  
The One

This chapter considers the limitations of civil rights disobedience in transforming white citizens. Building on the work of James Baldwin, Charles Mills, and Elizabeth Spelman and chronicling a “failed” protest at the 1964 World’s Fair, this chapter attends to the discursive techniques of disavowal that white citizens and state officials used to dismiss black activism as inappropriate, irresponsible, gratuitous, and violent—thereby avoiding the claims such protest made upon them, while preserving their own innocence and moral standing. In stepping outside the South and the familiar set of events that make up the public memory of the “short” civil rights movement, this chapter also suggests that some aspects of campaigns like the one in Birmingham were enabled—and publicly legitimated—by the very techniques of disavowal that limited the movement’s radical potentialities.

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