Redemptive Love, Vigilante Terror, and Rebellion

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerry Pimblott
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Reconciliation ◽  
Local Branch ◽  
White Resistance ◽  
Local Movement ◽  
Urban Rebellion ◽  
Religiously Based ◽  
Class Youth

Chapter Two chronicles the key battles in Cairo’s Civil Rights Movement with a particular focus on how activists working with the local branch of the NAACP and SNCC mobilized Black congregations behind a powerful local movement aimed at upending the edifice of Jim Crow. By adopting a religious conception of civil rights liberalism rooted in Black Christian discourses of racial reconciliation and nonviolence, local activists were able to recruit intergenerational and cross-class support. However, this religiously based alliance ultimately fractured under the weight of white resistance and the growing disillusionment of Cairo’s Black working-class youth whose frustrations culminated in the urban rebellion of 1967.

Washington Is a Giant Awakened

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Myers Asch ◽  
George Derek Musgrove
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Survival ◽  
White Resistance ◽  
War Effort

As the city boomed during the New Deal and World War II, a new generation of black activists and their allies arose to challenge Jim Crow, find decent housing, and fight for economic survival. They used new forms of protest, including boycotts, union organizing, and sit-ins, and they formed interracial alliances with a growing number of white people, in Washington and around the country, who saw racial inequality in the nation’s capital as a stain on America’s reputation. This experimentation produced mixed results at the time, but the community activism and interracial organizing of the 1930s and 1940s helped lay the foundation for the postwar civil rights movement. Nonetheless, determined white resistance at the local and federal levels largely preserved segregation in the nation’s capital during the war years. In fights against employment discrimination, segregated public spaces, and inadequate housing, racial egalitarians often achieved symbolic or small-scale victories but ultimately failed to defeat Jim Crow. Despite the sweeping rhetoric about freedom, democracy, and the “American Way” that accompanied the U.S. war effort, World War II stalled racial progress in D.C.

scholarly journals The Making of a Movement: An Intergenerational Mobilization Model of the Nonviolent Nashville Civil Rights Movement

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Cornfield ◽  
Jonathan S. Coley ◽  
Larry W. Isaac ◽  
Dennis C. Dickerson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Local Movement ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Movement Mobilization ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Bridge Building ◽  
And Training

The 1960s-era, Nashville nonviolent civil rights movement—with its iconic lunch counter sit-ins—was not only an exemplary local movement that dismantled Jim Crow in downtown public accommodations. It was by design the chief vehicle for the intergenerational mentoring and training of activists that led to a dialogical diffusion of nonviolence praxis throughout the Southern civil rights movement of this period. In this article, we empirically derive from oral-history interviews with activists and archival sources a new “intergenerational model of movement mobilization” and assess its contextual and bridge-leading sustaining factors. After reviewing the literatures on dialogical diffusion and bridge building in social movements, we describe the model and its sustaining conditions—historical, demographic, and spatial conditions—and conclude by presenting a research agenda on the sustainability and generalizability of the Nashville model.

scholarly journals Inclusive American Economic History: Containing Slaves, Freedmen, Jim Crow Laws and the Great Migration

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-78
Author(s):  
Trevon Logan ◽  
Peter Temin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
White Resistance ◽  
White Majority ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Growing Economy ◽  
First Time

This paper records the path by which African Americans were transformed from enslaved persons in the American economy to partial participants in the progress of the economy. The path was not monotonic, and we organize our tale by periods in which inclusiveness rose and fell. The history we recount demonstrates the staying power of the myth of black inferiority held by a changing white majority as the economy expanded dramatically. Slavery was outlawed after the Civil War, and blacks began to participate in American politics en masse for the first time during Reconstruction. This process met with white resistance, and black inclusion in the growing economy fell as the Gilded Age followed and white political will for black political participation faded. The Second World War also was followed by prosperity in which blacks were included more fully into the white economy, but still not completely. The Civil Rights Movement proved no more durable than Reconstruction, and blacks lost ground as the 20th century ended in the growth of a New Gilded Age. Resources that could be used to improve the welfare of whites and blacks continue to be spent on the continued repressions of blacks.

Religion, Race, and Sports

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Scholes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Baseball Player ◽  
Sports History ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
African American Race

Race, religion, and sports may seem like odd bedfellows, but, in fact, all three have been interacting with each other since the emergence of modern sports in the United States over a century ago. It was the sport of boxing that saw a black man become a champion at the height of the Jim Crow era and a baseball player who broke the color barrier two decades before the civil rights movement began. In this chapter, the role that religion has played in these and other instances where race (the African American race in particular) and sports have collided will be examined for its impact on the relationship between race and sports. The association of race, religion, and sports is not accidental. The chapter demonstrates that all three are co-constitutive of and dependent on each other for their meaning at these chosen junctures in American sports history.

Federal Policy and the Racial Integration of Southern Industry, 1961–1980

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Federal Intervention

In the last two decades, one of the central debates of civil rights historiography has concerned the role that the federal government played in securing the gains of the civil rights era. Historians have often been critical of the federal government's inaction, pointing out that it was only pressure from the civil rights movement itself that prompted federal action against Jim Crow. Other scholars have studied the civil rights record of the federal government by analyzing a single issue during several administrations. In this vein, there have been studies of the federal government's involvement in areas as diverse as black voting rights and racial violence against civil rights workers. These studies have both recognized the importance of federal intervention and have also been critical of the federal government's belated and half-hearted endorsement of civil rights.

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.

Monumental Constructions: Statues, Identity, and Gabrielle Roy’s “L’arbre”

2021 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-117
Author(s):  
Holly Collins
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American South ◽  
Live Oak ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Significant Attention

Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans garnered significant attention for his book In the Shadow of Statues (2018), observing that many Confederate monuments were erected to buttress Jim Crow laws and serve as a warning to those who supported the civil rights movement. Likewise, there are a number of monuments in Québec that serve a particular political or religious purpose, seeking to reinforce a pure laine ideology. In this article, I explore the parallels between the literal and figurative construction and deconstruction of monuments that have fortified invented ideas on identity in francophone North America. Further, Gabrielle Roy’s short story “L’arbre,” which describes a “living monument,” tells the story of a racialized past in North America and unveils the falsities that have been preserved through the construction of statues that perpetuate racial myth. “L’arbre” examines the natural, unconstructed monument of the Live Oak: a tree that witnessed and holds the visible scars of the many terrible realities that took place in its shadows. I use Roy’s short story to show how she sought to deconstruct a whitewashed history of the post-Civil War American South and suggest that her broader corpus rejects determinism wholesale.

Trouble in My Way

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-160
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
University President ◽  
State University ◽  
Campus Environment ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Jackson State University ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the strained history of Jackson State University during the aftermath of World War II and leading up to the modern civil rights movement. Located in the heart of Mississippi, Jackson State students carved out space to express their militancy as the war came to a close. However, they quickly felt that space collapse around them as segregationists tightened their grip on the Magnolia State as the burgeoning movement for black liberation challenged the oppressive traditions of the most socially and politically closed state in the country. Administrators such as Jackson State University president Jacob Reddix quickly fell in line with the expectations of his immediate supervisors and squared off against outspoken scholar-activists such as famed poet and novelist Margaret Walker. The standoff resulted in a campus environment fraught with tension yet still producing students and faculty determined to undermine Jim Crow.

Race Women

2019 ◽  
pp. 70-100
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Women ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the fascinating history of Bennett College – one of only two single sex colleges dedicated to educating African American women. Although Bennett would not make that transition until 1926, the institution played a vital role in educating African American women in Greensboro, North Carolina from the betrayal of the Nadir to the promises of a New Negro Era. The latter period witnessed Bennett, under the leadership of David Dallas Jones, mold scores of young girls into politically conscious race women who were encouraged to resist Jim Crow policies and reject the false principals of white supremacy. Their politicization led to a massive boycott of a theatre in downtown Greensboro and helped to set the tone for Greensboro’s evolution into a critical launching point for the modern civil rights movement.

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