Robert Mickey
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691133386
- eISBN:
- 9781400838783
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691133386.003.0004
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics
This chapter examines the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Smith v. Allwright that challenged the restriction on suffrage: it invalidated the all-white Democratic primary and struck at the heart of ...
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This chapter examines the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Smith v. Allwright that challenged the restriction on suffrage: it invalidated the all-white Democratic primary and struck at the heart of southern politics—one-party rule based on white supremacy. It first considers the Supreme Court's challenge to the white primary in relation to rulers' dilemmas, opportunities, and options before discussing narratives of enclave experiences with the white primary challenge in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia. It then compares outer South and Deep South responses to Smith, showing that Georgia and South Carolina featured more impressive black mobilizations than Mississippi. However, the consequences of these episodes were not driven solely by such forces as economic development or black protest infrastructure. Rather, given different configurations of intraparty conflict, party–state institutions, and levels of black insurgency, Smith and the responses it invoked had different consequences for each enclave.Less
This chapter examines the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Smith v. Allwright that challenged the restriction on suffrage: it invalidated the all-white Democratic primary and struck at the heart of southern politics—one-party rule based on white supremacy. It first considers the Supreme Court's challenge to the white primary in relation to rulers' dilemmas, opportunities, and options before discussing narratives of enclave experiences with the white primary challenge in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia. It then compares outer South and Deep South responses to Smith, showing that Georgia and South Carolina featured more impressive black mobilizations than Mississippi. However, the consequences of these episodes were not driven solely by such forces as economic development or black protest infrastructure. Rather, given different configurations of intraparty conflict, party–state institutions, and levels of black insurgency, Smith and the responses it invoked had different consequences for each enclave.
Robert Mickey
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691133386
- eISBN:
- 9781400838783
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691133386.003.0003
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics
This chapter examines four important features of Deep South authoritarian enclaves on the eve of the transition: their political geography, centralization of political authority, party factionalism, ...
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This chapter examines four important features of Deep South authoritarian enclaves on the eve of the transition: their political geography, centralization of political authority, party factionalism, and latent strength of their indigenous opponents. A review of these and other characteristics of these polities suggests that modernization cannot fully explain the variation in Deep South democratization experiences. The chapter considers a causal account emphasizing the importance of regime defenders, opponents, and the institutional topography on which they battled one another. It compares the degree to which authority was centralized in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia and highlights the factionalism within Democratic parties. It concludes with a discussion of black protest capacity on the eve of the transition.Less
This chapter examines four important features of Deep South authoritarian enclaves on the eve of the transition: their political geography, centralization of political authority, party factionalism, and latent strength of their indigenous opponents. A review of these and other characteristics of these polities suggests that modernization cannot fully explain the variation in Deep South democratization experiences. The chapter considers a causal account emphasizing the importance of regime defenders, opponents, and the institutional topography on which they battled one another. It compares the degree to which authority was centralized in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia and highlights the factionalism within Democratic parties. It concludes with a discussion of black protest capacity on the eve of the transition.
Robert Mickey
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691133386
- eISBN:
- 9781400838783
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691133386.003.0008
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics
This chapter examines how the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education sparked a crisis over the desegregation of Clemson College in South Carolina. Prior to Brown, South Carolina's ...
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This chapter examines how the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education sparked a crisis over the desegregation of Clemson College in South Carolina. Prior to Brown, South Carolina's rulers sought to preempt the invalidation of state-mandated segregation by improving black education. After the ruling, they launched a strategy of massive resistance: decrying, deterring, and deferring threats to white supremacy in the public sphere. The chapter first reviews the state of black education before Brown and South Carolina's attempts to preempt the decision. It then considers the state's responses to Brown in the 1950s and early 1960s, showing that its leaders attacked both white civil society and black protest organizations. It also describes how the state bolstered its institutional resources to manage democratization pressures and concludes with an assessment of how politicians capitalized on ruling party cohesion and an improved coercive apparatus to navigate the Clemson crisis.Less
This chapter examines how the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education sparked a crisis over the desegregation of Clemson College in South Carolina. Prior to Brown, South Carolina's rulers sought to preempt the invalidation of state-mandated segregation by improving black education. After the ruling, they launched a strategy of massive resistance: decrying, deterring, and deferring threats to white supremacy in the public sphere. The chapter first reviews the state of black education before Brown and South Carolina's attempts to preempt the decision. It then considers the state's responses to Brown in the 1950s and early 1960s, showing that its leaders attacked both white civil society and black protest organizations. It also describes how the state bolstered its institutional resources to manage democratization pressures and concludes with an assessment of how politicians capitalized on ruling party cohesion and an improved coercive apparatus to navigate the Clemson crisis.
Robert Mickey
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691133386
- eISBN:
- 9781400838783
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691133386.003.0010
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics
This chapter examines how the federal government and black protest organizations intervened in southern authoritarian enclaves, with a particular focus on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting ...
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This chapter examines how the federal government and black protest organizations intervened in southern authoritarian enclaves, with a particular focus on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as well as the reform of the National Democratic Party during the period 1964–1972. It first considers state authorities' consensus preference for effecting a “harnessed revolution” before discussing the challenges posed by the Civil and Voting rights acts to southern enclaves. It then describes the degree to which outsiders interfered in enclaves' responses to these landmark statutes, including federal oversight of voting rights in the Deep South and deployments by black protest organizations. It concludes by analyzing the McGovern–Fraser national Democratic party reforms of 1968–1972.Less
This chapter examines how the federal government and black protest organizations intervened in southern authoritarian enclaves, with a particular focus on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as well as the reform of the National Democratic Party during the period 1964–1972. It first considers state authorities' consensus preference for effecting a “harnessed revolution” before discussing the challenges posed by the Civil and Voting rights acts to southern enclaves. It then describes the degree to which outsiders interfered in enclaves' responses to these landmark statutes, including federal oversight of voting rights in the Deep South and deployments by black protest organizations. It concludes by analyzing the McGovern–Fraser national Democratic party reforms of 1968–1972.
Robert Mickey
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691133386
- eISBN:
- 9781400838783
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691133386.003.0009
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics
This chapter examines how the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education sparked a crisis over the desegregation of the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens. On the eve of Brown, ...
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This chapter examines how the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education sparked a crisis over the desegregation of the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens. On the eve of Brown, Georgia's ruling party remained controlled by the rural elites and white supremacist politicians composing the faction led by Governor Herman Talmadge. Through their massive resistance, enclave rulers successfully avoided the desegregation of state-supported schools for more than six years while also gaining headway in their repression of the statewide infrastructure of black protest. The chapter first reviews the state of black education in Georgia prior to Brown and the state's attempts to preempt the ruling before discussing how factional conflict affected rulers' development of new institutional defenses to ward off democratization pressures. It then considers the Talmadgeites' attacks on black protest throughout the 1950s and concludes by explaining how Georgia's rulers mishandled the UGA crisis.Less
This chapter examines how the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education sparked a crisis over the desegregation of the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens. On the eve of Brown, Georgia's ruling party remained controlled by the rural elites and white supremacist politicians composing the faction led by Governor Herman Talmadge. Through their massive resistance, enclave rulers successfully avoided the desegregation of state-supported schools for more than six years while also gaining headway in their repression of the statewide infrastructure of black protest. The chapter first reviews the state of black education in Georgia prior to Brown and the state's attempts to preempt the ruling before discussing how factional conflict affected rulers' development of new institutional defenses to ward off democratization pressures. It then considers the Talmadgeites' attacks on black protest throughout the 1950s and concludes by explaining how Georgia's rulers mishandled the UGA crisis.
D'Weston Haywood
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469643397
- eISBN:
- 9781469643410
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643397.003.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter delineates the major arguments, questions, and historiographic interventions of the book, discussing the discourse theories that the book engages, centering especially on public spheres, ...
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This chapter delineates the major arguments, questions, and historiographic interventions of the book, discussing the discourse theories that the book engages, centering especially on public spheres, black publics, and counterpublics. It also provides a reconsideration of the critical dialogical and commercial relationship between black readers and black publishers, as well as between the publishers and their own papers.Less
This chapter delineates the major arguments, questions, and historiographic interventions of the book, discussing the discourse theories that the book engages, centering especially on public spheres, black publics, and counterpublics. It also provides a reconsideration of the critical dialogical and commercial relationship between black readers and black publishers, as well as between the publishers and their own papers.
William J. Maxwell
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691130200
- eISBN:
- 9781400852062
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691130200.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). But behind the scenes, the FBI's hostility to black protest was ...
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Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). But behind the scenes, the FBI's hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, this book exposes the Bureau's intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. Starting in 1919, year one of Harlem's renaissance and Hoover's career at the Bureau, secretive FBI “ghostreaders” monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover's death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. The official aim behind the Bureau 's close reading was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, as this book reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century. This book details how the FBI threatened the international travels of African American writers and prepared to jail dozens of them in times of national emergency. All the same, it shows that the Bureau's paranoid style could prompt insightful criticism from Hoover's ghostreaders and creative replies from their literary targets. For authors such as Claude McKay, James Baldwin, and Sonia Sanchez, the suspicion that government spy-critics tracked their every word inspired rewarding stylistic experiments as well as disabling self-censorship. Illuminating both the serious harms of state surveillance and the ways in which imaginative writing can withstand and exploit it, this book is a groundbreaking account of a long-hidden dimension of African American literature.Less
Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). But behind the scenes, the FBI's hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, this book exposes the Bureau's intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. Starting in 1919, year one of Harlem's renaissance and Hoover's career at the Bureau, secretive FBI “ghostreaders” monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover's death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. The official aim behind the Bureau 's close reading was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, as this book reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century. This book details how the FBI threatened the international travels of African American writers and prepared to jail dozens of them in times of national emergency. All the same, it shows that the Bureau's paranoid style could prompt insightful criticism from Hoover's ghostreaders and creative replies from their literary targets. For authors such as Claude McKay, James Baldwin, and Sonia Sanchez, the suspicion that government spy-critics tracked their every word inspired rewarding stylistic experiments as well as disabling self-censorship. Illuminating both the serious harms of state surveillance and the ways in which imaginative writing can withstand and exploit it, this book is a groundbreaking account of a long-hidden dimension of African American literature.
D'Weston Haywood
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781469643397
- eISBN:
- 9781469643410
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469643397.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This book conducts a close, gendered reading of the modern black press to reinterpret it as a crucial tool of black men’s leadership, public voice, public image, gender and identity formation, and a ...
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This book conducts a close, gendered reading of the modern black press to reinterpret it as a crucial tool of black men’s leadership, public voice, public image, gender and identity formation, and a space for the construction of ideas of proper masculinity that shaped the long twentieth-century black freedom struggle to promote a fight for racial justice and black manhood. Moving from the turn of the twentieth century to the rise of black radicalism, the book argues that black people’s ideas, rhetoric, and strategies for protest and racial advancement grew out of a quest for manhood led by black newspapers. Drawing on discourse theory and studies of public spheres to examine the Chicago Defender, Crisis, Negro World, Crusader, and Muhammad Speaks and their publishers during the Great Migration, New Negro era, Great Depression, civil rights movement, and urban renewal, this study engages the black press at the complex intersections of gender, ideology, race, class, identity, urbanization, the public sphere, and black institutional life. Departing from typical histories of black newspapers and black protest that examine the long roots of black political organizing, this book makes a crucial intervention by advancing how black people’s conceptions of rights and justice, and their activism in the name of both, were deeply rooted in ideas of redeeming Black men, prioritizing their plight on the agenda for racial advancement. Yet, the black press produced a highly influential discourse on black manhood that was both empowering and problematic for the long black freedom struggle.Less
This book conducts a close, gendered reading of the modern black press to reinterpret it as a crucial tool of black men’s leadership, public voice, public image, gender and identity formation, and a space for the construction of ideas of proper masculinity that shaped the long twentieth-century black freedom struggle to promote a fight for racial justice and black manhood. Moving from the turn of the twentieth century to the rise of black radicalism, the book argues that black people’s ideas, rhetoric, and strategies for protest and racial advancement grew out of a quest for manhood led by black newspapers. Drawing on discourse theory and studies of public spheres to examine the Chicago Defender, Crisis, Negro World, Crusader, and Muhammad Speaks and their publishers during the Great Migration, New Negro era, Great Depression, civil rights movement, and urban renewal, this study engages the black press at the complex intersections of gender, ideology, race, class, identity, urbanization, the public sphere, and black institutional life. Departing from typical histories of black newspapers and black protest that examine the long roots of black political organizing, this book makes a crucial intervention by advancing how black people’s conceptions of rights and justice, and their activism in the name of both, were deeply rooted in ideas of redeeming Black men, prioritizing their plight on the agenda for racial advancement. Yet, the black press produced a highly influential discourse on black manhood that was both empowering and problematic for the long black freedom struggle.
Linda O. McMurry
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195139273
- eISBN:
- 9780199848911
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195139273.003.0014
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter describes Wells-Barnett's life in Chicago. For Wells-Barnett, Chicago's social problems were inspirations for activism. The city was experiencing growing pains that challenged city ...
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This chapter describes Wells-Barnett's life in Chicago. For Wells-Barnett, Chicago's social problems were inspirations for activism. The city was experiencing growing pains that challenged city services and threatened racial tolerance. Housing and job competition created hostility that was beginning to erode black rights. Nevertheless, white reformers offered her new experiences of integration, and black protests frequently brought tangible results. Wells-Barnett began to spend more time in Chicago in 1896. At that time, she had two major outlets for her activism: the Conservator and the Ida B. Wells Club.Less
This chapter describes Wells-Barnett's life in Chicago. For Wells-Barnett, Chicago's social problems were inspirations for activism. The city was experiencing growing pains that challenged city services and threatened racial tolerance. Housing and job competition created hostility that was beginning to erode black rights. Nevertheless, white reformers offered her new experiences of integration, and black protests frequently brought tangible results. Wells-Barnett began to spend more time in Chicago in 1896. At that time, she had two major outlets for her activism: the Conservator and the Ida B. Wells Club.
Mary G. Rolinson
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807830925
- eISBN:
- 9781469602257
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807872789_rolinson
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
The black separatist movement led by Marcus Garvey has long been viewed as a phenomenon of African American organization in the urban North. But as this book demonstrates, the largest number of ...
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The black separatist movement led by Marcus Garvey has long been viewed as a phenomenon of African American organization in the urban North. But as this book demonstrates, the largest number of Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) divisions and Garvey's most devoted and loyal followers were found in the southern Black Belt. Tracing the path of organizers from northern cities to Virginia, and then from the Upper to the Deep South, the book remaps the movement to include this vital but overlooked region. It shows how Garvey's southern constituency sprang from cities, countryside churches, and sharecropper cabins. Southern Garveyites adopted pertinent elements of the movement's ideology and developed strategies for community self-defense and self-determination. These southern African Americans maintained a spiritual attachment to their African identities and developed a fiercely racial nationalism, building on the rhetoric and experiences of black organizers from the nineteenth-century South. Garveyism provided a common bond during the upheaval of the Great Migration, the book contends, and even after the UNIA had all but disappeared in the South in the 1930s, the movement's tenets of race organization, unity, and pride continued to flourish in other forms of black protest for generations.Less
The black separatist movement led by Marcus Garvey has long been viewed as a phenomenon of African American organization in the urban North. But as this book demonstrates, the largest number of Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) divisions and Garvey's most devoted and loyal followers were found in the southern Black Belt. Tracing the path of organizers from northern cities to Virginia, and then from the Upper to the Deep South, the book remaps the movement to include this vital but overlooked region. It shows how Garvey's southern constituency sprang from cities, countryside churches, and sharecropper cabins. Southern Garveyites adopted pertinent elements of the movement's ideology and developed strategies for community self-defense and self-determination. These southern African Americans maintained a spiritual attachment to their African identities and developed a fiercely racial nationalism, building on the rhetoric and experiences of black organizers from the nineteenth-century South. Garveyism provided a common bond during the upheaval of the Great Migration, the book contends, and even after the UNIA had all but disappeared in the South in the 1930s, the movement's tenets of race organization, unity, and pride continued to flourish in other forms of black protest for generations.
Karen R. Miller
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479880096
- eISBN:
- 9781479803637
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479880096.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, Economic History
This chapter shows how white liberal leaders criticized black protest and promoted the racially unequal status quo as the most sustainable urban form when confronted with the belief that the push for ...
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This chapter shows how white liberal leaders criticized black protest and promoted the racially unequal status quo as the most sustainable urban form when confronted with the belief that the push for racial equality would produce an intolerable or uncontainable level of conflict. Under pressure from African Americans and in response to shifting northern racial ideologies, Detroit's white business and municipal leaders increasingly expressed disdain for acts of racial discrimination and support for a northern racial system that they saw as more just than the South's. However, instead of considering strategies for alleviating the discrepancies between the lives of black and white Detroiters, white liberal leaders sought a way to manage racial conflicts. Even though they saw themselves as allies of all urban residents, including African Americans, the ideological limits of liberalism gave them the tools to oversee rather than resolve structural inequalities.Less
This chapter shows how white liberal leaders criticized black protest and promoted the racially unequal status quo as the most sustainable urban form when confronted with the belief that the push for racial equality would produce an intolerable or uncontainable level of conflict. Under pressure from African Americans and in response to shifting northern racial ideologies, Detroit's white business and municipal leaders increasingly expressed disdain for acts of racial discrimination and support for a northern racial system that they saw as more just than the South's. However, instead of considering strategies for alleviating the discrepancies between the lives of black and white Detroiters, white liberal leaders sought a way to manage racial conflicts. Even though they saw themselves as allies of all urban residents, including African Americans, the ideological limits of liberalism gave them the tools to oversee rather than resolve structural inequalities.
Richard A. Rosen and Joseph Mosnier
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781469628547
- eISBN:
- 9781469628561
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469628547.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter describes the role of Chambers's law practice and law firm as a locus and focal point of the African American struggle for racial equality in North Carolina from the mid-1960s onward. ...
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This chapter describes the role of Chambers's law practice and law firm as a locus and focal point of the African American struggle for racial equality in North Carolina from the mid-1960s onward. Chambers and the firm were well known to African Americans in every corner of the state, and Chambers provided legal representation, mostly free of charge, to civil rights demonstrators and activists of every persuasion and mode of protest while also advancing the interests of black citizens in other ways. In 1968, James Ferguson managed Rev. Dr. Reginald Hawkins's gubernatorial campaign, designed to energize the state's newly enfranchised black electorate. Ferguson and Adam Stein represented and insurgent, racially-mixed delegation from North Carolina at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Stein assisted striking black cafeteria workers at UNC-Chapel Hill, adroitly securing most of their goals despite a highly-charged political atmosphere. Ferguson convinced a disciplinary panel at Duke University to forego punishment of black students who had occupied the administration building. Working ceaselessly, Chambers and his partners encountered racist judges, endured the occasional missed paycheck, but kept on, persuaded that their work was essential to the goal of full black equality.Less
This chapter describes the role of Chambers's law practice and law firm as a locus and focal point of the African American struggle for racial equality in North Carolina from the mid-1960s onward. Chambers and the firm were well known to African Americans in every corner of the state, and Chambers provided legal representation, mostly free of charge, to civil rights demonstrators and activists of every persuasion and mode of protest while also advancing the interests of black citizens in other ways. In 1968, James Ferguson managed Rev. Dr. Reginald Hawkins's gubernatorial campaign, designed to energize the state's newly enfranchised black electorate. Ferguson and Adam Stein represented and insurgent, racially-mixed delegation from North Carolina at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Stein assisted striking black cafeteria workers at UNC-Chapel Hill, adroitly securing most of their goals despite a highly-charged political atmosphere. Ferguson convinced a disciplinary panel at Duke University to forego punishment of black students who had occupied the administration building. Working ceaselessly, Chambers and his partners encountered racist judges, endured the occasional missed paycheck, but kept on, persuaded that their work was essential to the goal of full black equality.
Philip F. Rubio
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807833421
- eISBN:
- 9781469604053
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807895733_rubio
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This book brings to life the important but neglected story of African American postal workers and the critical role they played in the U.S. labor and black freedom movements. It integrates civil ...
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This book brings to life the important but neglected story of African American postal workers and the critical role they played in the U.S. labor and black freedom movements. It integrates civil rights, labor, and left-movement histories that too often are written as if they happened separately. Centered on New York City and Washington, D.C., the book chronicles a struggle of national significance through its examination of the post office, a workplace with facilities and unions serving every city and town in the United States. Black postal workers—often college-educated military veterans—fought their way into postal positions and unions, and became a critical force for social change. They combined black labor protest and civic traditions to construct a civil rights unionism at the post office. They were a major factor in the 1970 nationwide postal wildcat strike, which resulted in full collective-bargaining rights for the major postal unions under the newly established U.S. Postal Service in 1971. In making the fight for equality primary, African American postal workers were influential in shaping today's post office and postal unions.Less
This book brings to life the important but neglected story of African American postal workers and the critical role they played in the U.S. labor and black freedom movements. It integrates civil rights, labor, and left-movement histories that too often are written as if they happened separately. Centered on New York City and Washington, D.C., the book chronicles a struggle of national significance through its examination of the post office, a workplace with facilities and unions serving every city and town in the United States. Black postal workers—often college-educated military veterans—fought their way into postal positions and unions, and became a critical force for social change. They combined black labor protest and civic traditions to construct a civil rights unionism at the post office. They were a major factor in the 1970 nationwide postal wildcat strike, which resulted in full collective-bargaining rights for the major postal unions under the newly established U.S. Postal Service in 1971. In making the fight for equality primary, African American postal workers were influential in shaping today's post office and postal unions.
Brent M. S. Campney
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252039508
- eISBN:
- 9780252097614
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252039508.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This chapter chronicles the long “Red Summer” and persistent racial violence throughout the 1920s. With America's entry into World War I, black populations swelled in response to labor shortages, ...
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This chapter chronicles the long “Red Summer” and persistent racial violence throughout the 1920s. With America's entry into World War I, black populations swelled in response to labor shortages, thus precipitating racial conflict over jobs and housing between white residents of northern industrial cities and the black newcomers. These tensions would culminate in the “Red Summer,” a season of race riots, conflagrations, and other types of spectacular violence. Though the wartime surge in violence would subside after 1921, racial prejudice and violence continued on. Despite these setbacks, however, black resistance likewise persisted; and this period marks the ascent of a new generation of civil rights activists, as well as a few other notable milestones such as the Thurman-Watts v. Board of Education of Coffeyville and Brown v. Board of Education decisions and the establishment of the Kansas City branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).Less
This chapter chronicles the long “Red Summer” and persistent racial violence throughout the 1920s. With America's entry into World War I, black populations swelled in response to labor shortages, thus precipitating racial conflict over jobs and housing between white residents of northern industrial cities and the black newcomers. These tensions would culminate in the “Red Summer,” a season of race riots, conflagrations, and other types of spectacular violence. Though the wartime surge in violence would subside after 1921, racial prejudice and violence continued on. Despite these setbacks, however, black resistance likewise persisted; and this period marks the ascent of a new generation of civil rights activists, as well as a few other notable milestones such as the Thurman-Watts v. Board of Education of Coffeyville and Brown v. Board of Education decisions and the establishment of the Kansas City branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
