Stephen M. Ward
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780807835203
- eISBN:
- 9781469617718
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9780807835203.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter describes Correspondence’s reaction to three major events in 1956 and 1957: the Hungarian Revolution, the independence of Ghana, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. C.L.R. James pushed the ...
More
This chapter describes Correspondence’s reaction to three major events in 1956 and 1957: the Hungarian Revolution, the independence of Ghana, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. C.L.R. James pushed the writers at Correspondence to focus on the Hungarian revolution above all else, while James and Grace Lee Boggs sought to emphasize colonial revolts.Less
This chapter describes Correspondence’s reaction to three major events in 1956 and 1957: the Hungarian Revolution, the independence of Ghana, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. C.L.R. James pushed the writers at Correspondence to focus on the Hungarian revolution above all else, while James and Grace Lee Boggs sought to emphasize colonial revolts.
Zoe A. Colley
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780813042411
- eISBN:
- 9780813043050
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813042411.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
Chapter 1 focuses on the efforts of the black community in Montgomery, Alabama, to desegregate the city's buses between 1955 and 1956. It explores the way in which city authorities attempted to ...
More
Chapter 1 focuses on the efforts of the black community in Montgomery, Alabama, to desegregate the city's buses between 1955 and 1956. It explores the way in which city authorities attempted to destroy the bus boycott by using the threat of arrest and imprisonment to intimidate supporters and isolate the leadership. In response, community members resisted such repression by seeking to transform imprisonment from something to be feared into a source of pride and an act of resistance. However, the author concludes that the period from 1955 to 1960 was one of limited change in terms of movement responses to the legal repression of civil rights activity.Less
Chapter 1 focuses on the efforts of the black community in Montgomery, Alabama, to desegregate the city's buses between 1955 and 1956. It explores the way in which city authorities attempted to destroy the bus boycott by using the threat of arrest and imprisonment to intimidate supporters and isolate the leadership. In response, community members resisted such repression by seeking to transform imprisonment from something to be feared into a source of pride and an act of resistance. However, the author concludes that the period from 1955 to 1960 was one of limited change in terms of movement responses to the legal repression of civil rights activity.
W. Jason Miller
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780813060446
- eISBN:
- 9780813050713
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813060446.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature
This chapter provides an overview to the entire book by tracing King’s engagements with Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son” during the years 1956–1967. In addition to quoting Hughes’s poem from memory, ...
More
This chapter provides an overview to the entire book by tracing King’s engagements with Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son” during the years 1956–1967. In addition to quoting Hughes’s poem from memory, King also riffed on Hughes’s poem as well by changing its words to meet specific contexts. As a result of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King regularly conflated the speaker in Hughes’s poem with figures such as Sister Pollard and Rosa Parks as he expanded on ideas from the poem. Beyond simply engaging in what Keith Miller defines as “voice merging,” Hughes’s subversive reputation demanded that King sub-merge Hughes’s ideas within his own rhetoric from 1960 to 1965. Lyndon Johnson’s national address on March 15, 1965, signalled the end of the era where overt references to Hughes had to be intentionally omitted from King’s rhetoric, and Hughes’s poem reappeared in King’s addresses soon after.Less
This chapter provides an overview to the entire book by tracing King’s engagements with Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son” during the years 1956–1967. In addition to quoting Hughes’s poem from memory, King also riffed on Hughes’s poem as well by changing its words to meet specific contexts. As a result of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, King regularly conflated the speaker in Hughes’s poem with figures such as Sister Pollard and Rosa Parks as he expanded on ideas from the poem. Beyond simply engaging in what Keith Miller defines as “voice merging,” Hughes’s subversive reputation demanded that King sub-merge Hughes’s ideas within his own rhetoric from 1960 to 1965. Lyndon Johnson’s national address on March 15, 1965, signalled the end of the era where overt references to Hughes had to be intentionally omitted from King’s rhetoric, and Hughes’s poem reappeared in King’s addresses soon after.
Sarah Azaransky
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- June 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190262204
- eISBN:
- 9780190262235
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190262204.003.0007
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
In the 1950s, Cold War politics made anticolonial alliances between Africans, Asians, and black Americans suspect, as the demands of governing—as opposed to coordinating a freedom movement—redirected ...
More
In the 1950s, Cold War politics made anticolonial alliances between Africans, Asians, and black Americans suspect, as the demands of governing—as opposed to coordinating a freedom movement—redirected energies and attention. Yet India and Ghana, in particular, remained concrete examples for the network at the center of this book. Benjamin Mays returned to India in 1953 to witness the world’s largest democracy composed of people of color. Bayard Rustin went to Ghana in 1959 to coordinate an international antinuclear and antiimperial protest of French nuclear testing in the Sahara desert. Mays and Rustin were both instrumental to the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which inaugurated Martin Luther King Jr. as a civil rights leader. The decade closed with a new generation of activists and intellectuals taking lessons from the people at the center of this book to spur a mass, nonviolent American freedom movement.Less
In the 1950s, Cold War politics made anticolonial alliances between Africans, Asians, and black Americans suspect, as the demands of governing—as opposed to coordinating a freedom movement—redirected energies and attention. Yet India and Ghana, in particular, remained concrete examples for the network at the center of this book. Benjamin Mays returned to India in 1953 to witness the world’s largest democracy composed of people of color. Bayard Rustin went to Ghana in 1959 to coordinate an international antinuclear and antiimperial protest of French nuclear testing in the Sahara desert. Mays and Rustin were both instrumental to the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which inaugurated Martin Luther King Jr. as a civil rights leader. The decade closed with a new generation of activists and intellectuals taking lessons from the people at the center of this book to spur a mass, nonviolent American freedom movement.
Jonathan W. Gray
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617036491
- eISBN:
- 9781621030539
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617036491.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The statement, “The Civil Rights Movement changed America,” though true, has become something of a cliche. This book seeks to determine how, exactly, the Civil Rights Movement changed the literary ...
More
The statement, “The Civil Rights Movement changed America,” though true, has become something of a cliche. This book seeks to determine how, exactly, the Civil Rights Movement changed the literary possibilities of four iconic American writers: Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, and William Styron. Each of these writers published significant works prior to the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in December of the following year, making it possible to trace their evolution in reaction to these events. The work these writers crafted in response to the upheaval of the day, from Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro?, to Mailer’s “The White Negro” to Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” to Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, reveal much about their own feeling in the moment, even as they contribute to the national conversation that centered on race and democracy. By examining these works closely, the author posits the argument that these writers significantly shaped discourse on civil rights as the movement was occurring, but in ways that—intentionally or not—often relied upon a notion of the relative innocence of the South with regard to racial affairs, and on a construct of African Americans as politically and/or culturally naive. As these writers grappled with race and the myth of southern nobility, their work developed in ways that were simultaneously sympathetic of, and condescending to, black intellectual thought.Less
The statement, “The Civil Rights Movement changed America,” though true, has become something of a cliche. This book seeks to determine how, exactly, the Civil Rights Movement changed the literary possibilities of four iconic American writers: Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, and William Styron. Each of these writers published significant works prior to the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in December of the following year, making it possible to trace their evolution in reaction to these events. The work these writers crafted in response to the upheaval of the day, from Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro?, to Mailer’s “The White Negro” to Welty’s “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” to Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, reveal much about their own feeling in the moment, even as they contribute to the national conversation that centered on race and democracy. By examining these works closely, the author posits the argument that these writers significantly shaped discourse on civil rights as the movement was occurring, but in ways that—intentionally or not—often relied upon a notion of the relative innocence of the South with regard to racial affairs, and on a construct of African Americans as politically and/or culturally naive. As these writers grappled with race and the myth of southern nobility, their work developed in ways that were simultaneously sympathetic of, and condescending to, black intellectual thought.
John Kyle Day
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781628460315
- eISBN:
- 9781626740471
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628460315.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter narrates the dramatic socioeconomic changes occurring in the former states of the Confederacy after World War II. The changes culminated with the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of ...
More
This chapter narrates the dramatic socioeconomic changes occurring in the former states of the Confederacy after World War II. The changes culminated with the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared public school segregation unconstitutional, as well as the early events in the American Civil Rights Movement, including the Emmitt Till Lynching and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The chapter then analyses the response of white southerners to these transformative events. The white South’s response channelled into two recognized programs. Southern leaders either outright refused to implement Brown, which became known as Interposition or, called for a gradual or piecemeal implementation, which became known as moderation.Less
This chapter narrates the dramatic socioeconomic changes occurring in the former states of the Confederacy after World War II. The changes culminated with the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared public school segregation unconstitutional, as well as the early events in the American Civil Rights Movement, including the Emmitt Till Lynching and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The chapter then analyses the response of white southerners to these transformative events. The white South’s response channelled into two recognized programs. Southern leaders either outright refused to implement Brown, which became known as Interposition or, called for a gradual or piecemeal implementation, which became known as moderation.
Imani Perry
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469638607
- eISBN:
- 9781469638621
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469638607.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter traces the development of the modern civil rights movement and the eventual displacement of Lift Every Voice and Sing by “freedom songs.” Nevertheless, the anthem continued to resonate, ...
More
This chapter traces the development of the modern civil rights movement and the eventual displacement of Lift Every Voice and Sing by “freedom songs.” Nevertheless, the anthem continued to resonate, specifically in the most challenging movements in the movement.Less
This chapter traces the development of the modern civil rights movement and the eventual displacement of Lift Every Voice and Sing by “freedom songs.” Nevertheless, the anthem continued to resonate, specifically in the most challenging movements in the movement.
