The Great Divide

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-93
Author(s):  
Ray Brescia
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Communications Technology ◽  
Colored People ◽  
Grassroots Groups ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
National Organizations ◽  
Do So

This chapter recounts the radical change in communications technology that helped launch many organizations that abandoned the translocal organizing structure because the most modern means of communication available to them—the computerized mailing list—made it easy for them to do so. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement—which was built on networks of cells of grassroots groups spread out through the country and coordinated, loosely, by national organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—the new movements, for the most part, utilized the ability to engage in mass mailing to create national organizations divorced from grassroots networks. Mass mailing would then shape social movements for two generations and the next forty years. This forty-year period also saw two different phenomenon unfold: one socioeconomic and one social. There was both a dramatic increase in economic inequality as well as a decrease in generalized trust.

Medium

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-36
Author(s):  
Ray Brescia
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Mass Movement ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Communications Technology ◽  
Post Office ◽  
Abolitionist Movement

This chapter discusses the medium—the mode of communication a group uses to communicate and organize. It reviews the advent of the printing press, the post office, the telegraph, the transcontinental railroad, the telephone, the radio, and the television, revealing that with the emergence of each of these innovations, a mass movement or movements rose up in their wake. Communications technology, in the form of the steam printing press, combined with the reach of the postal system, helped spur abolitionist efforts. Indeed, just as the abolitionist movement was gaining strength, this new technology helped fuel the advocacy of the movement and strengthen its power and reach. The chapter explores this connection between communications technology and social movements in U.S. history, from the events leading up to the American Revolution through the successes of the civil rights movement.

Foundational Invocations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angélica Maria Bernal
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Tea Party ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Normative Authority ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
Constitutional Thought

This chapter examines appeals to the authority of original founding events, founding ideals, and Founding Fathers in contemporary constitutional democracies. It argues that these “foundational invocations” reveal a window into the unique, albeit underexamined function that foundings play: as a vehicle of persuasion and legitimation. It organizes this examination around two of the most influential visions of founding in the US tradition: the originalist, situated in the discourses of conservative social movements such as the Tea Party and in conservative constitutional thought; and the promissory, situated in the discourses of social movements such as the civil rights movement. Though they might appear radically dissimilar, this chapter illustrates how these two influential conceptualizations of founding together reveal a shared political foundationalism that conflates the normative authority of a regime for its de facto one, thus circumscribing radical change by obscuring the past and placing founding invocations and their actors beyond question.

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.

Recasting the Movement and Reframing the Law in Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (01) ◽  
pp. 243-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
National Association ◽  
Department Of Justice ◽  
Colored People ◽  
The North ◽  
Civil Rights Division ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007) advances the historiographical idea that a long civil rights movement, beginning well before the mid‐1950s, had a robust and innovative legal dimension. Her study of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) itself, demonstrates that lawyers in those organizations took guidance from many working‐class clients to successfully deploy a conception of civil rights rooted on the farm and in the factory to challenge the economic and social edifice of Jim Crow, in the North as well as the South.

“We Will Never Go Back to the Old Way Again”: Germany in the African-American Debate on Civil Rights

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 605-637 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Höhn
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Special Edition ◽  
Urban League ◽  
Black Soldiers ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
Central European ◽  
Colored People ◽  
Point Of Reference

This special edition of Central European History is concerned with how America viewed Germany, and my contribution focuses on how, beginning with Hitler's rise to power, Germany became a point of reference for the emerging American civil-rights movement. By looking at Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Opportunity, published by the National Urban League, as well as African-American newspapers, such as the Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, Amsterdam News, Afro-American, Negro Digest, Ebony, and Jet, I will show how the black community discussed developments in Germany, America's struggle against Nazi racism, and the black soldiers' experience in postwar Germany.

Social movements as schooling for careers: career consequences of the Nashville civil rights movement

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Jonathan S. Coley ◽  
Daniel B. Cornfield ◽  
Larry W. Isaac ◽  
Dennis C. Dickerson
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement

The Past & Future of American Civil Rights

Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas S. Massey
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Formation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
American Society

Although American society will not become race-blind anytime soon, the meaning of race is changing, and processes of racial formation now are quite different than those prevailing just two generations ago. Massey puts the present moment in historical perspective by reviewing progress toward racial equality through successive historical epochs, from the colonial era to the age of Obama. He ends by exploring the contours of racial formation in the United States today, outlining a program for a new civil rights movement in the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals The Persistent Effect of U.S. Civil Rights Protests on Political Attitudes

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soumyajit Mazumder
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Attitudinal Change ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Party Vote Shares

Protests can engender significant institutional change. Can protests also continue to shape a nation’s contemporary politics outside of more formalized channels? I argue that social movements can not only beget institutional change, but also long-run, attitudinal change. Using the case of the U.S. civil rights movement, I develop a theory in which protests can shift attitudes and these attitudes can persist. Data from over 150,000 survey respondents provide evidence consistent with the theory. Whites from counties that experienced historical civil rights protests are more likely to identify as Democrats and support affirmative action, and less likely to harbor racial resentment against blacks. These individual-level results are politically meaningful—counties that experienced civil rights protests are associated with greater Democratic Party vote shares even today. This study highlights how social movements can have persistent impacts on a nation’s politics.

Kangaroo Court: The Black Power Movement and the Courtroom as a Space of Resistance

2022 ◽  
pp. 000276422110660
Author(s):  
Joyce M. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Black Power Movement ◽  
Contested Space ◽  
The Law ◽  
A Site ◽  
Law And Social Movements

Scholars in many disciplines have examined how social movements use the law to create social change. While the study of the law and social movements has largely relied on studies of the US civil rights movement to develop theoretical tools for understanding how movements target the state to create legal changes, none of these studies have examined the legal strategy of the Black Power movement. This article draws on data from a larger project on Black Power law and the National Conference of Black Lawyers to develop the idea of the courtroom as contested space and construct a concept of courtroom resistance. I argue that the courtroom, operating as hegemonic white space, was viewed as a site of contestation by Black Power activists who found creative ways to challenge the legal, ideological, and physical “space” of the courtroom. These conceptual tools open an important avenue for researchers interested in examining the relationship between social movements and the law and how race operates in the courts.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document