Search Results

This chapter focuses on how LeRoy Collins worked with a committee of legal experts to undermine Brown in Florida. Specifically, it discusses his use of state troopers and state agencies to monitor both white extremists and black activists. It also describes Collins's attempts to reconfigure segregation in racially neutral ways, including his attempts to shift attention away from black bids for desegregation and toward the need to improve black “standards.” Hoping to augment such rhetoric, Collins engaged in a variety of measures designed to place more scrutiny and pressure on the black poor. Though his commitment to segregation seemed ambivalent, a close review of Collins's private letters suggests that he maintained a firm commitment to segregation from the start but did not advertise it, in the hopes that federal courts would be more prone to approving Florida's pupil placement program.

Chapter Five examines the closing stages of the Cairo Black Power struggle, situating state repression of activist church agencies and the revival of conservative political agendas within white congregations as fundamental but overlooked causes of the movement’s demise. In contrast to many other grassroots Black Power organizations, the United Front had survived the narrowing structure of political opportunities as well as the initial wave of state repression that characterized the late 1960s. As this chapter will show, United Front leaders – like other Black Power activists across the country – were subject to a systematic campaign of repression at the hands of federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

This book takes up one crucial aspect of the “woman question” debate: the extent to which African American women would exercise autonomy and authority within their community's public culture. Black activist thought on the question changed over the course of the century. In some cases convergences fostered the enhancement of women's public standing; at other times disagreements thwarted women's claims and threatened the well-being of the institutions of which they were a part. Always, the woman question generated challenges over power. The parameters of the debate cut across institutional boundaries. Biblical precepts were employed to support the seating of women in political conventions, and political theory was used to argue against the elevation of women to the ministry. Finally, the debate emerged across a broad geographic terrain.

Kimberly Gant’s essay “Ruptures and Disruptures: The Photographic landscape of Ingrid Pollard and Zarina Bhjimji as Revisionist History of Great Britain,” underscores the importance of the emergence of two photographers whose work reflects the racially charged climate of the United Kingdom in the 1980s. By focusing on the work of Pollard’s Pastoral Interludes and Bhimji’s series Cleaning the Garden, Gant explores how their depictions of the iconic English garden, a symbol of “white Englishness” and the “purity of heritage,” challenge the concept of English and British cultural identity. Both artists appropriate the idyllic country garden as the backdrop to the invisibility of Black people who made these very gardens possible as a result of the “enterprise of Empire.” Black English activists and artists drew inspiration from the African American Black Arts and Power Movements to formulate and cultivate what would become Britain’s Black Arts Movement. Through their appropriation of the traditional English garden, the artists make the seemingly invisible visible.