Pittsburgh and the Urban League Movement

Author(s):  
Joe William Trotter ◽  
Dick Gilbreath

During the Great Migration, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became a mecca for African Americans seeking better job opportunities, wages, and living conditions. The city's thriving economy and vibrant social and cultural scenes inspired dreams of prosperity and a new start, but this urban haven was not free of discrimination and despair. In the face of injustice, activists formed the Urban League of Pittsburgh (ULP) in 1918 to combat prejudice and support the city's growing African American population. In this broad-ranging history, Joe William Trotter Jr. uses this noteworthy branch of the National Urban League to provide new insights into an organization that has often faced criticism for its social programs' deep class and gender limitations. Surveying issues including housing, healthcare, and occupational mobility, Trotter underscores how the ULP -- often in concert with the Urban League's national headquarters -- bridged social divisions to improve the lives of black citizens of every class. He also sheds new light on the branch's nonviolent direct-action campaigns and places these powerful grassroots operations within the context of the modern Black Freedom Movement. The impact of the National Urban League is a hotly debated topic in African American social and political history. Trotter's study provides valuable new insights that demonstrate how the organization has relieved massive suffering and racial inequality in US cities for more than a century.

Author(s):  
Husain Lateef ◽  
Heather Smyth ◽  
Maya Williams ◽  
Adrian Gale ◽  
Ed-Dee Williams ◽  
...  

Racism and its ramifications are salient societal-level factors that detrimentally affect African American youth and families. Few studies have investigated how African American youth experience discrimination within families and society and colorism’s impact on racial identity, despite extensive racial discrimination research. We assessed whether the perceptions of African American youth of their skin tone affected their racial identity, familial functioning, and everyday discrimination, using the National Survey of American Life–Adolescent Supplement data. We found no significant relationships among skin tone perception, racial identity, familial functioning, or everyday experiences of discrimination. Conversely, age and gender differences were significant predictors of racial identity, family functioning, and discrimination reports. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings for social work practice.


2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Cerezo ◽  
Mariah Cummings ◽  
Meredith Holmes ◽  
Chelsey Williams

Although the concept of intersectionality has gained widespread attention in psychological research, there remains a significant gap related to the impact of intersectionality on identity formation for persons negotiating multiple minority statuses. This gap is especially pronounced among sexual and gender expansive women of Latinx and African American descent—two groups that face disparate personal and public health risks but are largely ignored in the research literature. In response to this gap, we carried out a qualitative study using constructivist grounded theory with 20 Latinx and African American sexual minority, gender expansive women to understand participants’ experiences of forming an intersectional social identity. Following an exploration of identity formation related to the specific domains of race, gender identity, and sexual orientation, we prompted participants to consider how each of the specified identity domains impacted the formation and experience of an overall intersectional identity (e.g., how racial position impacted gender identity and/or sexual identity formation). Findings revealed four major themes that were critical in identity formation: (a) family and cultural expectations, (b) freedom to explore identity, (c) the constant negotiation of insider/outsider status, and (d) identity integration as an act of resistance. Implications for future research and psychological services are discussed.


2021 ◽  
pp. 53-90
Author(s):  
Erin R. Pineda

This chapter develops an alternative framework for understanding the civil disobedience of civil rights activists: as a decolonizing praxis that linked their dissent to that of anticolonial activists and tied the context of Jim Crow to global white supremacy. If the constitutional, democratic state formed the normative horizon for liberal understandings of civil disobedience, activists’ horizon was defined by processes of imaginative transit—the process of thinking and traveling across boundaries and disparate contexts, through which activists in motion constructed civil disobedience as a means of transforming worldwide structures of racist imperialism, colonial rule, apartheid, and Jim Crow. Between 1920 and 1960, African American, Indian, South African, and Ghanaian activists proposed, debated, and wielded nonviolent direct action as a means of self-liberation from white supremacy’s structures of fear and violence, and way of disrupting and transforming the practices that held those structures in place.


Author(s):  
Sarah Azaransky

Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, and Pauli Murray developed a black Christian pacifism inspired by Gandhian nonviolence. Their activist projects in the 1940s, including sit-ins, freedom rides, and multicity marches, became mainstays of the later civil rights movement. While working with majority-white organizations like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and interracial organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality, Murray, Rustin, and Farmer nevertheless developed what Farmer called “the race logic of pacifism,” the idea that black Americans had a particular aptitude for nonviolent direct action because of their experiences of white racism. In the midst of a majority-white Christian peace movement, these three black activists devised a religious pacifism that was also distinctly black. Their early activism illuminates, furthermore, questions about the role of gender and sexuality in the black freedom movement.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 2097-2108
Author(s):  
Robyn L. Croft ◽  
Courtney T. Byrd

Purpose The purpose of this study was to identify levels of self-compassion in adults who do and do not stutter and to determine whether self-compassion predicts the impact of stuttering on quality of life in adults who stutter. Method Participants included 140 adults who do and do not stutter matched for age and gender. All participants completed the Self-Compassion Scale. Adults who stutter also completed the Overall Assessment of the Speaker's Experience of Stuttering. Data were analyzed for self-compassion differences between and within adults who do and do not stutter and to predict self-compassion on quality of life in adults who stutter. Results Adults who do and do not stutter exhibited no significant differences in total self-compassion, regardless of participant gender. A simple linear regression of the total self-compassion score and total Overall Assessment of the Speaker's Experience of Stuttering score showed a significant, negative linear relationship of self-compassion predicting the impact of stuttering on quality of life. Conclusions Data suggest that higher levels of self-kindness, mindfulness, and social connectedness (i.e., self-compassion) are related to reduced negative reactions to stuttering, an increased participation in daily communication situations, and an improved overall quality of life. Future research should replicate current findings and identify moderators of the self-compassion–quality of life relationship.


2007 ◽  
Vol 177 (4S) ◽  
pp. 95-95
Author(s):  
Atreya Dash ◽  
Peng Lee ◽  
Qin Zhou ◽  
Aaron D. Berger ◽  
Jerome Jean-Gilles ◽  
...  

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