Race, Memory, and Military Men’s Sexuality

Author(s):  
Rebecca Forgash

This chapter analyzes Okinawan discourses on race and military men's sexuality, with a focus on how Japanese and American racial discourses have shaped local understandings of difference. It discusses how the imperial rhetoric positioned Okinawans and other Asians alongside the Japanese in unified opposition to Europeans and Americans. During the postwar occupation, the U.S. military and its personnel were introduced into the Okinawa discourses on U.S. imperialism in Asia, Jim Crow segregation, and the 1960s civil rights and black power movements. The chapter also features the personal narratives of individuals who self-consciously viewed their relationships as transgressing established racial boundaries. It narrates stories that illustrate the struggle of military international couples in order to understand and rework racial ideologies and expectations in Okinawa's postwar society.

Author(s):  
Edward G. Goetz

This chapter describes the tension between integration and community development from the 1940s through the end of the 1960s. It describes the conflict within the African-American community between efforts to achieve integration on the one hand and building power and capacity within the community on the other. It describes the emergence and evolution of the fair housing movement in the U.S. Finally, the ways in which this conflict played out during the civil rights and Black Power eras is highlighted.


2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Davis Graham

Unlike the breakthrough civil rights legislation of 1964–65, which dismantled the South's Jim Crow system and led to rapid advances in job access and educational opportunity for minorities throughout the nation, the federal fair housing legislation of the 1960s produced little substantive change. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 quickly became case studies in the dominant tradition of presidential leadership in legislative reform, joining such modern classics as Social Security and the Marshall Plan. The Open Housing Act of 1968, however, belongs to a different era of national policy development.


2020 ◽  
pp. 137-158
Author(s):  
Joe William Trotter

By the mid-1960s, the political and social terrain on which the Urban League worked had changed dramatically. The Pittsburgh-born children of southern black migrants had come of age and pushed hard against the color line in the city's economy, politics, and institutions. National headquarters and local branches across the country worried about the increasing black nationalist turn in African American politics. But the ULP had helped to establish the postwar groundwork and even models for the fluorescence and even militance of Pittsburgh's Civil Rights and Black Power struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s.


Author(s):  
Kerry Pimblott

Chapter Four tracks Black Power activists’ mobilization of these new discourses to secure important organizational resources and coalitional support from local, state, and national Black church organizations. Between 1969 and 1974, the United Front secured more than half a million dollars in grants from church-based organizations as well as extensive lobbying, consultancy, and staff support for their political programming. As financial support for traditional civil rights organizations waned during the 1960s and local civic elites obstructed governmental funds, these new organizational resources proved invaluable and ensured that churches would become a significant, albeit overlooked, source of coalitional support for the Black Power Movement in Cairo and beyond.


2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 945-967 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Narayan

The history of the US Black Power movement and its constituent groups such as the Black Panther Party has recently gone through a process of historical reappraisal, which challenges the characterization of Black Power as the violent, misogynist and negative counterpart to the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, scholars have furthered interest in the global aspects of the movement, highlighting how Black Power was adopted in contexts as diverse as India, Israel and Polynesia. This article highlights that Britain also possessed its own distinctive form of Black Power movement, which whilst inspired and informed by its US counterpart, was also rooted in anti-colonial politics, New Commonwealth immigration and the onset of decolonization. Existing sociological narratives usually locate the prominence and visibility of British Black Power and its activism, which lasted through the 1960s to the early 1970s, within the broad history of UK race relations and the movement from anti-racism to multiculturalism. However, this characterization neglects how such Black activism conjoined explanations of domestic racism with issues of imperialism and global inequality. Through recovering this history, the article seeks to bring to the fore a forgotten part of British history and also examines how the history of British Black Power offers valuable lessons about how the politics of anti-racism and anti-imperialism should be united in the 21st century.


Author(s):  
Julian Lim

This chapter examines the hardening of the border during the 1920s and 1930s, and the more expansive racially restrictive immigration regimes that developed from both sides of the border. As the United States shifted its focus from excluding Chinese immigrants to targeting Mexicans, Mexico enacted its own set of immigration policies to marginalize and bar Chinese and African-American movement to Mexico. Using NAACP papers, government correspondence, and immigration records from both U.S. and Mexican archives, this chapter provides a fresh perspective on the experiences of African Americans in Texas who felt the double blow of exclusion at the U.S.-Mexico border: the exclusions of Jim Crow and Mexico’s indigenismo. Providing a more integrated understanding of Chinese, black, and Mexican experiences at the border, the chapter ultimately emphasizes the shared venture between the Mexican and U.S. nation-states in controlling race, immigration, and the nation during the first half of the twentieth century. As racial ideologies and immigration policies migrated across national boundaries, it became more difficult for racialized bodies to do the same. And not only was their multiracial presence physically marginalized within the landscape of the borderlands, they were removed altogether from the nation’s identity and history.


Author(s):  
Stephanie Hinnershitz

After World War II and through the 1960s, Asian Americans began a transformative process, from being the “yellow peril” to becoming the model minority, and Asian Americans in the South experienced, to some degree, the same transformation. The war and its mottos of fighting for freedom and democracy at home and abroad affected the way Americans viewed their own hypocrisy toward minorities in the United States. African Americans were the largest minority group to use the aims of the war to demand attention to their plight with Jim Crow, prompting the growth of a nationwide civil rights movement, but Americans also came to view the century-old forms of legal discrimination against Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in a new light. Not only did Congress repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 (making it legal for some Chinese to naturalize and allowing a small number of Chinese immigrants to enter the United States), but Filipino Americans and Indian Americans received similar treatment during and after World War II. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act (or the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952), although designed to protect American security during the early Cold War by prohibiting and deporting subversive aliens, also made it possible for Asian immigrants of all ethnicities to become American citizens (while the number of Asians admitted to the United States did not drastically increase). Americans also viewed the ability of Japanese Americans to overcome the massive civil rights violations of wartime imprisonment and achieve economic and educational success as a model for all minorities to follow. Asian Americans came through the fires of World War II and proved that they were loyal Americans and deserving of equal treatment and respect, and while more subtle and sometimes not so subtle forms of racism and discrimination ...


Author(s):  
Scott Barretta

Conventional narratives about blues revival activity in the U.S. in the 1960s treat it as a northern phenomenon. This chapter addresses lesser known efforts in the Deep South to enhance the cultural status of the blues, and how they were hampered by Jim Crow segregation. It also compares revival scenes in New Orleans, Memphis and Houston, focusing on the distinctive institutional arrangements of bohemia in each city.


Author(s):  
David Lucander

This chapter describes a series of sit-ins during 1944. Led by largely forgotten African American women, this interracial direct-action campaign sought to challenge the color line at department-store lunch counters. Integrating, or at least improving, access to food service at major downtown retailers was an important step in the process of breaking down elements of Jim Crow segregation in St. Louis. That same year, the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) shifted its attention toward obtaining and retaining jobs for black workers in publicly funded workplaces. Gaining access to jobs operating switchboards and in the local administration of Southwestern Bell Telephone offices was presented as a stride toward securing sustainable employment for a largely female contingent of working-class African Americans who wanted long-term white- and pink-collar employment. This sort of local women's activism, juxtaposed against national men's leadership, is consistent with a gendered pattern of activism in civil rights campaigns that persisted through the 1960s.


2020 ◽  
pp. 95-112
Author(s):  
Harris Beider ◽  
Kusminder Chahal

This chapter examines the possibilities of building cross-racial coalitions between the white working class and communities of color as the United States transitions from majority white to a minority white country. Fifty years after the campaign for civil rights and the passage of landmark legislation during the 1960s, there is little evidence of formal and sustainable cross-racial coalition building at the grassroots or grasstops level between the white working class and communities of color. White working-class communities wanted to engage with communities of color but did not have the means of engaging across racial boundaries beyond a superficial everyday level. Discussions between different communities were “soft-wired” and based on fleeting exchanges in informal spaces rather than becoming “hard-wired” in a strategic plan that can create a framework for coalition building. Stakeholders were largely ambivalent and occasionally hostile toward engaging with white working-class communities to build effective cross-racial alliances. Similar to white working-class communities in relation to communities of color, stakeholders found it challenging to engage with these groups.


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