scholarly journals Equality before the Law Matters: The Legacy of American Jews and the Founding of the NAACP and the Modern Civil Rights Movement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John P. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Coalition Building ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
The Law

This chapter examines efforts by a small cadre of leading American Jews to bring to light human rights violations toward African Americans at the beginning of the 20th century. More specifically, this effort scrutinizes efforts by Jews who ushered in an era of human rights campaigning based on their moral principles, norms, and cultural practices. These same principles and practices manifested themselves in the co-founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. This profoundly important organization would lead concerted efforts to organize legal protest movements to bring about fairness in housing, employment, and education, regardless of race, color, or creed. This study will answer the following questions: What motivated leading American Jews to help co-found the NAACP and guide it become a leading advocate for African Americans in legal, political, and financial matters? Who were the Jewish leaders who came from various fields, including civil matters, education, law, and business to help create this nascent enterprise? What coalition-building took place between the Jews and African Americans over the last century leading to the birth of the civil rights movement in America in the 1950s and 1960s? What inroads or gains were made from the establishment of the NAACP and its development to bring about civil rights, and equality under the law in housing, education, employment, and banking to the forefront for blacks living in America? Ultimately, this research will underscore ways in which leading Jewish men and women who helped establish the NAACP were successful in integrating this organization with other civic organizations and working black leaders to make it a force in making the NAACP a force in achieving social justice and equality before the law.

Human Rights Activities as a Function of the Prosecutor’s Office

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 88-93
Author(s):  
K.N. Golikov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
The State ◽  
Main Function ◽  
Federal Law ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
The Law

The subject of this article is the problems of the nature, essence and purpose of prosecutorial activity. The purpose of the article is to study and justify the role of the human rights function in prosecutorial activities in the concept of a modern legal state. At the heart of prosecutorial activity is the implementation of the main function of the Prosecutor’s office – its rights and freedoms, their protection. This means that any type (branch) of Prosecutor's supervision is permeated with human rights content in relation to a citizen, society, or the state. This is confirmed by the fact that the Federal law “On the Prosecutor's office of the Russian Federation” establishes an independent type of Prosecutor's supervision-supervision over the observance of human and civil rights and freedoms. It is argued that the legislation enshrines the human rights activities of the Prosecutor's office as its most important function. It is proposed to add this to the Law “On the Prosecutor's office of the Russian Federation”.

An Intimate Yet Anglo-Centric Account of a Renaissance Human Rights Man

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-134
Author(s):  
Dilek Kurban
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Legal Scholar ◽  
Minority Community ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Social

In his well-researched biography, Mike Chinoy chronicles Kevin Boyle's life and career as a scholar, activist and lawyer, bringing to light his under-appreciated role in the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland and the efforts to find a peaceful solution to the conflict, as well as his contributions to human rights movements in the United Kingdom, Europe and the world. Are You With Me? is an important contribution to the literature on the actors who have shaped the norms, institutions and operations of human rights. In its efforts to shed light on one man, the book offers a fresh alternative to state-centric accounts of the origins of human rights. The book offers a portrait of a social movement actor turned legal scholar who used the law to contest the social inequalities against the minority community to which he belonged and to push for a solution to the underlying political conflict, as well as revelations of the complex power dynamics between human rights lawyers and the social movements they represent. In these respects Are You With Me? also provides valuable insights for socio-legal scholars, especially those focusing on legal mobilisation. At the same time the book could have provided a fuller and more complex biographical account had Chinoy been geographically and linguistically comprehensive in selecting his interviewees. The exclusion of Kurdish lawyers and human rights advocates is noticeable, particularly in light of the inclusion of Boyle's local partners in other contexts, such as South Africa.

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.

THE ROLE OF THE JUDICIARY IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL AND LEGAL MECHANISM FOR THE PROTECTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariana Khmyz ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Legal Aspect ◽  
Legal Protection ◽  
The State ◽  
Time Dynamic ◽  
Protection Of Human Rights ◽  
The Law ◽  
Judicial Protection

The article reveals the role of the judiciary in the context of ensuring the protection of human rights and freedoms in terms of practical approach. It was found that ensuring the protection of human rights and freedoms in Ukraine is regulated by the Constitution of Ukraine, the Law of Ukraine «On the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine» and the Law of Ukraine «On Citizens' Appeals». It is established that in Ukraine judicial protection is enshrined in the Constitution of Ukraine, in particular in Article 55, according to which the rights and freedoms of man and citizen in particular are protected by the court. It is proved that the functioning of the constitutional mechanism for the protection of human rights and freedoms can occur only if the state actively participates in ensuring such rights and freedoms. It is determined that an important component of subjective human rights is the right to judicial protection, which should be realized not only in the direct dimension, but also through the activities of state bodies or bodies or organizations authorized by the state. It is established that the concept of «protection» from the standpoint of the legal aspect is interpreted as a legal obligation of the state in the face of bodies, organizations or officials authorized by it, and as the ability of a person to exercise personal subjective right. It was clarified that the concept of «protection of human rights and freedoms» should be interpreted as a set of measures of organizational and legal nature to ensure legal protection or remove obstacles that arise in the context of the exercise of subjective rights and rights to restore such rights, if they were violated with the application of measures on this basis in the form of punishment of the offenders. It is proposed under the mechanism of protection of human and civil rights and freedoms, in particular, to define a holistic, legally enshrined and at the same time dynamic system, which includes subjects, objects, methods and means of protection of human and civil rights and freedoms. to neutralize illegal obstacles, as well as to prevent the emergence of new obstacles. It is proved that the mechanism of protection of human and civil rights and freedoms in particular should consist of institutional and functional systems. It is noted that the prospects for further research in this area are to determine the requirements for the incompatibility of the position of a judge with other activities in a comparative constitutional and legal aspect.

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.

Fury in the “Promised Land”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Popular Narrative ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Willingness To Use

This chapter examines the development of comic rage after the civil rights movement. These works push back against the popular narrative of America’s colorblindness and that the 1980s initiated a period in which racism had ceased to exist. As part of a new artistic wave known as the New Black Aesthetic, these younger writers used their perspectives as the first post-integration generation to chronicle the new challenges facing African Americans. The unprecedented willingness to use humor as a central element in their work created a perfect site for comic rage to flourish and expand. The works that emerge focus on how cultural mulattoes—as many refer to the post-integration generation—attempt to achieve equality in a country attempting to assimilate them and erase the distinctiveness of their cultural traditions and identities.

From Absence to Flight

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrence T. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Black Power Movement

This chapter explores radicalization of comic rage in Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada. Emerging in the middle of the transition from the integrationist period of the civil rights movement to the nationalism of the Black Power movement, both works openly challenge fundamental concepts about race. In addition to targeting fundamental assumptions of Western superiority, these works also question simplistic counter-representations that African Americans present to combat racist stereotypes. Using forms increasingly important in African American literature, like drama and neo-slave narratives, these works enact comic rage as way to depict unique and powerful forms of resistance.

The Department Store Movement in the Postwar Era

2019 ◽  
pp. 116-147
Author(s):  
Traci Parker
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Community Leaders ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Preliminary Testing ◽  
White Community ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
The Relationship

Chapter 4 considers the department store movement and the birth of a modern middle-class consciousness in the 1940s and 1950s. Department stores remained key battlegrounds and took on greater significance as black purchasing power had reached an unprecedented level of $8-9 million by 1947 and the relationship between consumption and citizenship had changed. For the most part, the department store movement remained a fight for jobs in the immediate postwar era, taking on consumer issues as it saw fit. This phase of the movement marked a period of preliminary testing that would eventually lead to militant protests in the 1950s and 1960s. Under the leadership of the National Urban League (NUL) and American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the movement relied on intercultural education and moral exhortations. Emblematic of racial liberalism and the early civil rights movement, the NUL and AFSC believed that if respectable blacks and white community leaders simply asked store officials to hire African Americans in sales and clerical, they would, and after that “their attitude about integrated workplaces and African Americans generally would change,” helping them “topple barriers in other industries and locations.”

Assimilative Tendencies and Curricular Crosscurrents

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Gleason
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
National Organizations ◽  
American Society ◽  
Zoot Suit

Besides its massive impact on the institutional side of Catholic higher education, World War II affected the thinking of Catholic educators. We have already touched upon this dimension in noting how the war and postwar growth required them to expand their horizons and redouble their efforts in research, fundraising, and administration generally. Here we look more closely at how Catholics were affected by the great ideological revival of democracy that accompanied the war. This kind of influence was sometimes explicitly noted by Catholic leaders, as when Archbishop Richard Gushing of Boston called attention to the “neo-democratic mentality of returning servicemen and the university-age generation generally”; others recognized that it created problems since the Catholic church was so widely perceived as incompatible with democracy and “the American way of life.” We shall postpone examination of controversies stemming from this source to the next chapter, turning our attention in this one to the assimilative tendencies reflected in Catholics’ new appreciation for liberal democratic values, and to the major curricular concerns of the era which were also affected by the war. In no area did the democratic revival have a more profound long range effect than in the impetus it lent to the movement for racial equality and civil rights for African Americans. The publication in 1944 of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma marked an epoch in national understanding of what the book’s subtitle called “the Negro problem and modern democracy.” Myrdal himself stressed the importance of the wartime context, which made it impossible to ignore racial discrimination at home while waging war against Nazi racism. At the same time, increasing black militance, the massive migration of African Americans to northern industrial centers, and above all the great Detroit race riot of 1943—reinforced by the anti-Mexican “Zoot Suit” riots in Los Angeles the same summer—suddenly made the improvement of race relations an imperative for American society as a whole. By the end of the war, no fewer than 123 national organizations were working actively to “reduce intergroup tensions,” and the civil rights movement began a steady advance that led directly to the great judicial and political victories it won in the fifties and sixties.

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