Talking Union

Red Strains ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernie Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
World War ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
Protest Songs ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Progressive Party ◽  
American Left

Ernie Lieberman grew up in the midst of the folk revival that took place during the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. This chapter describes how folk music came to be important to the American left, the issues on which they focused (union organizing, racial and gender equality, peace), and Lieberman's own participation in the movement. As a child in the 1930s, he admired Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and sang folk and protest songs at summer camp, Progressive party conventions, and on tours for the Civil Rights Congress. In the 1950s, he performed and recorded albums with the first interracial folk group, and later, as political folk music began to reach a wider audience, became a songwriter.

Power and Protection

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie B. Green
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Working Women ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
World War ◽  
Community Activists ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
Sanitation Workers

Gender bound together labor and civil rights, serving as a key axis in the struggles for racial justice from World War II to the 1968 sanitation workers strike, including the tragic murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Although the conflicts addressed in this essay are crucial to understanding the dramatic events of the later 1960s, they are usually obscured by national civil rights narratives that emphasize desegregation and voting rights, thereby pushing issues reflecting the intersection of labor, racial justice, and gender to the sidelines. This essay highlights conflicts ranging from the denial of World War II defense work, other than menial labor, to African American women to the support movement for the sanitation workers. In placing themselves quite literally on the front lines of that movement, women articulated their own interpretations of the strike’s slogan, “I am a man!” in relation to their own struggles as working women, mothers, and community activists.

Henry A. Wallace, the Liberals, and Soviet-American Relations

1968 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alonzo L. Hamby
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Politics ◽  
World War ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Progressive Party

Several significant works on post-1945 American politics have dealt with the career of Henry A. Wallace. These studies have tended to depict Wallace as a one-dimensional character, either a fuzzy-minded idealist influenced and manipulated by Communists and fellow travelers or a wise and dedicated apostle of peace fighting a losing battle to prevent the Cold War. Both views have in common the assumption that Wallace stood for the same thing in foreign policy from the end of World War II through his Progressive Party campaign for the presidency. It is true that there were important continuities; there were also significant transformations in the content and quality of his thinking.

International Migration and One World

Unwanted ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 98-124
Author(s):  
Maddalena Marinari
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigration Reform ◽  
World War ◽  
Immigration Laws ◽  
Jewish Immigration ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Cold War

Chapter 4 chronicles how Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates appealed to internationalism, humanitarianism, and civil rights rhetoric to fight for refugee legislation first and comprehensive immigration reform later. Unlike World War I, World War II represented an opportunity for reform for many groups who had long fought for less discriminatory immigration laws because of the new geopolitical position of the United States. The Cold War also provided an opening for a broad coalition of ethnic, religious, and civic organizations to come together during the debate over the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. Although the most diverse interethnic alliance fighting for immigration reform to date fell apart over ideological disagreements and under pressure from entrenched restrictionist politicians, the experience of the early 1950s left a mark for the rest of the decade and shaped their approach to immigration reform until the early 1960s.

An Unknown Negro Girl without Title or Prestige, 1940–1946

Pauli Murray ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 94-144
Author(s):  
Troy R. Saxby
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Attorney General ◽  
World War ◽  
Race Riots ◽  
Howard University ◽  
Negro Girl ◽  
And Gender

This chapter explores Pauli Murray’s continuing civil rights activism, emerging feminism, and legal training during World War II. Murray joined the Workers Defense League and campaigned to save sharecropper Odell Waller from execution. The experience partially inspired Murray to become a lawyer. While studying at Howard University, Murray became conscious of sexism, which she labelled “Jane Crow.” Murray’s mental health, sexual identity, and gender identity all continued to trouble her. She initiated restaurant sit-ins to protest segregation in Washington and reported on the 1943 Harlem race riots for a socialist newspaper. Murray also completed a master’s degree at Berkeley before becoming the first African American Deputy Attorney General of California.

4. Modern American women, 1920 to the present

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Ware
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American Woman ◽  
World War ◽  
American Women ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
The Cold War

‘Modern American women, 1920 to the present’ begins with Eleanor Roosevelt, perhaps the twentieth century's most influential and admired American woman. It describes new dilemmas for modern women, who got many of their ideas from the movies, and how gender—as well as class, race, and geography—affected the experience of hard times during the Great Depression. The New Deal's mix of relief programs, stimulus spending, and economic reforms responded to the economic crisis, but it was spending for World War II that solved the problem. The war increased labor opportunities for women. The effects of the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the revival of feminism, and the continuing struggle for equality and diversity are also discussed.

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