The Antielitist Elite

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifton Hood
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Class Groups ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Cultural Transformations ◽  
Corporate Elites ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Yorkers

The cultural transformations of the 1960s and 1970s created problems and opportunities for elites. In these decades the upper- and middle classes went from being seen as the wellspring of social virtue in Victorian culture to being perceived as repressed, stuffy, and out of touch; after all, they were the prime beneficiaries of a status quo that was now found wanting. From lording it over commoners in the eighteenth century, to loathing the dangerous classes in the nineteenth century, many elite New Yorkers came around to romanticizing African-Americans and other lower-class groups as exemplars of human spirit and social justice. These actions were in many cases genuine, yet in espousing civil rights causes and tackling discrimination and poverty, in exposing the falseness and superficiality of genteel society, upper-class New Yorkers also established their own heightened sensitivity as anti-elitists and their own legitimacy. Corporate elites thus championed achievement and diversity as the foundation of a more democratic, anti-elitist elite.

Margaret A. Simons, Rebel at Heart

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-335
Author(s):  
Margaret A. Simons ◽  
Erika Ruonakoski
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Simone De Beauvoir ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Liberation Movements ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Radical Ideas

Abstract In this interview, Margaret A. Simons describes her path to philosophy and existentialism, her struggles in the male-dominated field in the 1960s and 1970s, and her political activism in the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. She also discusses her encounters with Simone de Beauvoir and Beauvoir’s refusal to own her philosophical originality, suggesting that Beauvoir may have adopted a more conventional narrative of a female intellectual to circumvent the public’s resistance to her radical ideas in the 1950s.

Prison autobiographical narratives: Making sense of personal and social (racial) transformation

2019 ◽  
pp. 174165901988011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Lynn
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Racial Solidarity ◽  
Autobiographical Accounts ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
The 1960S

This article investigates autobiographical public narratives of people who are, and were, incarcerated during different regimes of injustices in the United States—from the civil rights era to the current era of mass incarceration. People make sense of their experiences with race and racism through time, from a present standpoint of incarceration or freedom, in retrospect via proximate and distant memories of injustices, and toward a vision of the future. I juxtapose mainstream autobiographies from Malcolm X to Shaka Senghor with public blog posts from individuals incarcerated who provide autobiographical accounts to the world. I find that generations of incarcerated people who came of age during the height of the War on Drugs of the 1980s and 1990s project a narrative of a neoliberal subject who has a more individualistic and de-racialized idea of transforming their moral self and community. This contradicts with the way they portray prison as being a conduit for creating communities of racial solidarity and racial consciousness. Highly influenced and inspired by other narratives of radical prisoners of conscience of the 1960s and 1970s who were prone to view their liberation, and of the Black community, through vanquishing White supremacy, the new generation speaks to the color-blind narratives that pervade mainstream society and possible in narrative interventions correctional program.

5. Absurdism, protest, and commitment

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Gay Rights ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Many Sources ◽  
The Cold War

The decades 1960–80 witnessed a seismic shift in modern drama. The rage that came to define, and fuel, much of the drama in the 1960s and 1970s is directed at the audience. ‘Absurdism, protest, and commitment’ shows it is a post-war rage stemming from many sources: the Vietnam War, the Cold War, a feeling of betrayal by government and politicians, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, gay rights, feminism, the growing gap between rich and poor, and ethnic oppression. It is all about denying the audience what it expects of a play, provoking it out of real or perceived complacency, startling, and offending it. The plays of Pinter, Shepard, Beckett, Stoppard, Friel, and Fugard are discussed.

“Alone in a Sea of Rib-Tips”: Alvenia Fulton, Natural Health, and the Politics of Soul Food1

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 292-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Travis A Weisse
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Natural Food ◽  
Health Food ◽  
Star Power ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Food Movement

Abstract While the intersection between alternative medicine and the natural food movement in radical white communities of the 1960s and 1970s is well known, the connection between these traditions and the simultaneous revolution in the black foodscape has not received adequate attention. This paper addresses this gap by exploring how an alternative healer and minister from the rural South, Alvenia Fulton, rose to prominence in Chicago during the 1960s and 1970s as one of the major figures in the transformation of the black diet by harnessing the star power of her celebrity clients. Fulton hybridized her apprenticeship in slave herbalism with concepts from white Protestant health food lectures into a corrective nutrition program to bring health and renewal to black communities that were struggling under the burden of structural and medical racism. When, in the 1960s, coronary heart disease peaked for black Americans, soul food became the iconic diet of the civil rights movement. To help her community while respecting their culture, Fulton struck a careful bargain to encourage more black Americans to eat raw, natural, vegetarian food by subtly reimagining the historical contents of the slave diet.

Education in the Eighties

1980 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Keppel
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
State Government ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Federal Programs ◽  
State And Local ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Right

In the 1980s individual states will probably continue to have the major responsibility for education in this country. While the federal government may increase the percentage it contributes to the total costs of education, it will continue to be the junior partner in the enterprise, though one with increasing influence. This junior partner today places more demands on state government than its financial contribution seems to warrant. Conventional wisdom acquired in the 1960s and 1970s suggests that the federal government has set the right agenda on such issues as civil rights, poverty, and policies for minority groups and the handicapped—issues which state governments have generally neglected. But, under the Constitution, the federal government has not had the power to carry out its wishes for education without state and local cooperation. In fact, we often forget that a state's willingness to administer programs effectively is the key to the success of federal programs.

Strategic Sisterhood

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Tuuri
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Council ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Feminist Movements ◽  
Radical Activism ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

When women were denied a major speaking role at the 1963 March on Washington, Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), organized her own women's conference for the very next day. Defying the march's male organizers, Height helped harness the womanpower waiting in the wings. Height’s careful tactics and quiet determination come to the fore in this first history of the NCNW, the largest black women's organization in the United States at the height of the civil rights, Black Power, and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Offering a sweeping view of the NCNW's behind-the-scenes efforts to fight racism, poverty, and sexism in the late twentieth century, Rebecca Tuuri examines how the group teamed with U.S. presidents, foundations, and grassroots activists alike to implement a number of important domestic development and international aid projects. Drawing on original interviews, extensive organizational records, and other rich sources, Tuuri’s work narrates the achievements of a set of seemingly moderate, elite activists who were able to use their personal, financial, and social connections to push for change as they facilitated grassroots, cooperative, and radical activism.

Cold War Progressives

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Castledine
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

In recognizing the relation between gender, race, and class oppression, American women of the postwar Progressive Party made the claim that peace required not merely the absence of violence, but also the presence of social and political equality. For progressive women, peace was the essential thread that connected the various aspects of their activist agendas. This study maps the routes taken by postwar popular-front women activists into peace and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The book tells the story of their decades-long effort to keep their intertwined social and political causes from unraveling and to maintain the connections among peace, feminism, and racial equality. It explains how the master narrative of U.S. history too often reduces the scope of leftist women's Cold War-era activism by containing it within women's, workers', or civil rights movements.

Julius Chambers

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Rosen ◽  
Joseph Mosnier
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
High Water ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Firm ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Legal Defense

Born in the hamlet of Mount Gilead, North Carolina, Julius Chambers (1936–2013) escaped the fetters of the Jim Crow South to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s as the nation’s leading African American civil rights attorney. After blazing a unique path through the world of higher education, including becoming the first black student ever to be editor-in-chief of the law review at a historically white southern law school, Chambers was selected as the initial intern for NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund’s civil rights internship program. Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chambers worked closely with LDF in forwarding the strategic litigation campaign for civil rights, with Chambers arguing and ultimately winning landmark school and employment desegregation cases at the U.S. Supreme Court. Aided by a small group of white and black attorneys and support staff which he gathered together in a truly integrated law firm, and undaunted by the dynamiting of his home and the arson that destroyed the offices of his law practice, Chambers pushed federal civil rights law to its high-water mark. This book connects the details of Chambers’s life to the wider struggle to secure racial equality through the development of modern civil rights law. Tracing his path from a dilapidated black elementary school to counsel’s lectern at the Supreme Court and beyond, the authors reveal Chambers’s singular influence on the evolution of federal civil rights law after 1964.

Ideas, Institutions, and Political Order: Explaining Political Change

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 697-712 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert C. Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Exogenous Factors ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
View Change

Institutional approaches to explaining political phenomena suffer from three common limitations: reductionism, reliance on exogenous factors, and excessive emphasis on order and structure. Ideational approaches to political explanation, while often more sensitive to change and agency, largely exhibit the same shortcomings. In particular, both perspectives share an emphasis on discerning and explaining patterns of ordered regularity in politics, making it hard to explain important episodes of political change. Relaxing this emphasis on order and viewing politics as situated in multiple and not necessarily equilibrated order suggests a way of synthesizing institutional and ideational approaches and developing more convincing accounts of political change. In this view, change arises out of “friction” among mismatched institutional and ideational patterns. An account of American civil rights policy in the 1960s and 1970s, which is not amenable to either straightforward institutional or ideational explanation, demonstrates the advantages of the approach.

scholarly journals Opening a Discourse on Race Relations in New Zealand: The Fern and the Tiki Revisited

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry A. Kersey
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Intellectual Legacy ◽  
New Zealanders

This article discusses the intellectual legacy of David P. Ausubel in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Some forty years after the American academic's provocative work The Fern and the Tiki first appeared in print it still evokes strong and mixed reactions from Pakeha and Maori alike. It certainly had a searing impact among a generation of New Zealanders who were in universities during the tumultuous civil rights dominated era of the 1960s and 1970s. Even those who have never read the book recognize the title, can name its author, and generally accord it some deference as a seminal work that should be read or reread.

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