Search Results

This introductory chapter provides a background of the civil rights realignment. The conventional account treats the civil rights realignment as the disruption of one stable partisan alignment and its replacement by another alignment in which race played a defining role. The critical decisions driving this process occurred in the 1960s as national party elites grappled with the question of how to respond to pressure from civil rights activists. The choices made at the center then reverberated throughout the political system, gradually remaking both parties at the mass and middle levels. In contrast, this book argues that the partisan realignment on civil rights was rooted in changes in the New Deal coalition that emerged in the mid- to late 1930s, not the 1960s. Rather than realignment starting in Washington and diffusing out and down, state parties and locally oriented rank- and-file members of Congress provided a key mechanism for pro-civil rights forces to capture the Democratic Party from below.

This chapter looks at civil rights activists who pursued the freedom struggle through practical standards on specific aspects of segregation. Black union activists tried to break the Jim Crow system down step by step at the point of production. They first sought the right to unionize, sometimes risking their lives merely to achieve that right. Secondly, black union activists sought to use unions to end workplace discrimination, including separate and color-coded hiring lists, rates of pay, and seniority lines for white and black that, among other practices, kept blacks in the worst paid, dirtiest, and most dangerous jobs.

This chapter examines the story of white southerner civil rights activist Billy Graham. It explores Graham's efforts to encourage the American South to accept peacefully the demise of racial segregation as part of his perennial emphasis on individual personal conversion, salvation, and a personal relationship with Christ. It criticizes Graham's support to former U.S. President Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy and suggests that his commitment to the demise of racial segregation had much to do with the realization that his credibility on the national and international stages could never survive a defense of his native region's reactionary racial customs.

This chapter assesses post-civil rights activists in the juvenile justice reform movement (JJRM) from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. It examines how the JJRM's movement infrastructure, along with the regional and local political cultures that shaped the orientation of their key activists, influenced the trajectory of the campaigns. This movement infrastructure created a safe space for marginal youth and youth workers to become engaged in social activism. JJRM campaigns attempted to deinstitutionalize the juvenile justice system and combat disproportionate minority confinement. Unlike the Black Student Leadership Network (BSLN) and the movement initiatives of the 1960s, yet similar to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, JJRM networks were multiracial and multisectoral. The chapter places JJRM within the discussion of youth movement activism and intergenerational politics because the status of marginalized youth in relation to the juvenile justice system alerted social justice and civil rights activists about regressive policies impacting poor communities.

This chapter examines the story of civil rights activist Dorothy Tilly and her Methodist women's Fellowship of the Concerned in Georgia. It suggests that Tilly exemplified her Christian faith and the social reform potential of Wesleyan tradition of Protestantism to its fullest. She nudged white Southerners to do the right thing on race relations much as a mother might encourage her children and she lived a life that encouraged and fostered change, racial toleration, and inclusiveness.

This chapter examines how Philadelphia's civil rights activists tried to use the media to make de facto segregation an issue that the city's school board could not avoid. More specifically, it considers media coverage for the racial integration crisis at the Central High School of Philadelphia in Little Rock in the fall of 1957. It analyzes how the coverage of the Little Rock crisis in Philadelphia's print and broadcast media raised the profile of the city's own educational issues to a higher level than in the previous two decades. It also discusses Floyd Logan's attempts to foreground school segregation as an issue to be taken up by Philadelphia's civil rights advocates. It shows how Logan used the visibility of Little Rock as leverage to help the school segregation issue in Philadelphia reach a larger audience in the black community and set the stage for larger protests in the early 1960s.

This book begins with the story of how Texas legislators drafted a plethora of segregationist legislation designed to circumvent the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing school segregation. Mexican American and African American civil rights activists quickly organized to prevent these bills from passing. However, when a few Mexican Americans associated with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) suggested working with blacks in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), LULAC national president Felix Tijerina sternly reprimanded his colleagues, saying: “Let the Negro fight his own battles. His problems are not mine. I don't want to ally with him.” Over the next two decades, such sentiments intensified as the school desegregation battles continued.

This chapter addresses how retaliation against the voter registrants and other local civil rights advocates surfaced quickly. Fannie Lou Hamer lived like a vagabond, moving every couple of days to another sympathetic friend's home, trying to figure out what to do. No one would hire her. Her family needed her help bringing in their share of the crop, and the loss of the extra income as record keeper shattered their already fragile financial stability. Hamer faced a personal crisis; she stood before another crossroad. Registering to vote cost her the job she had held for eighteen years and people had shot up her friends' neighborhood. Yet she thought about those young people from away, who had come to Ruleville and risked their lives to help her, and her neighbors, claim their civil rights. Hamer realized that those youthful activists represented the beginning of a "New Kingdom right here on earth." She then became a field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

This chapter describes Fannie Lou Hamer's experience of police brutality while she was on a trip back to Greenwood with other civil rights activists from various Mississippi counties. This experience would test their commitment to the fight for freedom. Winona had a particularly vicious history of using violence to enforce segregation despite federal laws. No matter how well they had been prepared for getting arrested and lodging in jail, Hamer and her Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) colleagues were not prepared for what was about to happen to them. They were taken to the county jail house where they were interrogated and beaten by the police. Hamer was also raped by one of the men; the sadism-sexual pleasure from the pain, suffering and humiliation of another-was part of a pattern of domination designed to dehumanize and degrade victims. Numerous attorneys from several civil rights organizations then negotiated the activists' release. Finally, three Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) representatives secured the activists' release from jail. Throughout, Hamer's faith and commitment to the causes of freedom and equality did not waver. But the horror, the trauma of Winona stayed with her, driving her anger deep into every speech and protest song she delivered for the rest of her life.

This chapter details Fannie Lou Hamer's experiences during a trip to the newly established nation of Guinea in Africa along with other civil rights activists. Hamer felt a particular kinship with African women, most of whom wore "their heads tied up" with brightly colored scarves. She recalled how her mother would do the same thing. Guinea's education system, expanded and made available to all citizens after the French left, also impressed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists. While Hamer was in Africa, those who had counseled compromise at the Atlantic City convention assembled in New York City to discuss strategies moving forward. When Hamer returned from Africa, a deluge of requests for appearances poured in. She was a fresh and authentic face of struggle who breathed new life into a movement dominated by men. When she was not traveling out-of-state to raise money for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and SNCC, she was giving speeches in Mississippi, drumming up interest in the November Freedom Vote.

The end of the 1960s saw many psychiatrists and psychologists, along with other social scientists, accuse student activists of being mentally unstable. The same sentiments were expressed against African American civil rights activists. This view was challenged in 1970 by psychiatrist Robert Coles, who cited examples of what he called a particularly “fashionable kind of slander.” By the later 1970s, another critical narrative on radicalism emerged as many former activists and members of the counterculture of the 1960s sought professional counseling to cope with an array of problems such as alcoholism and suicidal tendencies. In a strange turn of events, antipsychiatry was blamed for the destruction of the family and the rise of a therapeutic culture, and was ultimately reviled for its rejection of the medical reality of mental illness. In the course of the 1960s and through the 1970s, research focused on schizophrenia and its etiology. By the 1980s, deinstitutionalization was in place. Antipsychiatry was also criticized as the culprit for the homelessness crisis in the 1980s.

This chapter focuses on the history of race discrimination in Forrest County, Mississippi. The discussions include the early efforts of fifteen brave black men to overturn an illegal pattern of discrimination by a Forrest County registrar; and the establishment of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission on March 29, 1956, which gathered information on civil rights activists, real and imagined, investigated meetings and other activities, and made plans to subvert them.