Jeffrey Helgeson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226130699
- eISBN:
- 9780226130729
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226130729.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
In 1983, black Chicagoans elected Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor. In the process, they overthrew the white Democratic machine and its regime of “plantation politics.” This book ...
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In 1983, black Chicagoans elected Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor. In the process, they overthrew the white Democratic machine and its regime of “plantation politics.” This book details the long-term development of black Chicago’s political culture, beginning in the 1930s, that both made a political insurrection possible in the right context, and informed Mayor Washington’s liberal, interracial, democratic vision of urban governance. Building upon recent studies of the “Long Civil Rights Movement,” which focus largely on a black radical tradition, this book recovers the history of a long tradition of black liberalism at the ground level. Men and women, largely unsung, made history by engaging with – rather than rejecting – the institutions and ambitions of urban life, and by connecting their individual aspirations to the collective interests of the race. They maintained popular critiques of overlapping systems of race, class, and gender inequality and developed local crucibles of black power that made pragmatic reform possible and set the stage for Washington’s victory and – in surprising ways – even the ascendance of Barack and Michelle Obama. The tragedies of incomplete and uneven racial progress are undeniable. Yet, in struggles for decent housing, good jobs, and political power over a half a century people worked to overcome racial segregation and inequality in everyday life. Consequently, this study shows that the image of the Second Great Migration as an inexorably tragic event is no longer tenable, while it also integrates the story of black urban politics into the deeply ambiguous history of American liberalism.Less
In 1983, black Chicagoans elected Harold Washington as the city’s first black mayor. In the process, they overthrew the white Democratic machine and its regime of “plantation politics.” This book details the long-term development of black Chicago’s political culture, beginning in the 1930s, that both made a political insurrection possible in the right context, and informed Mayor Washington’s liberal, interracial, democratic vision of urban governance. Building upon recent studies of the “Long Civil Rights Movement,” which focus largely on a black radical tradition, this book recovers the history of a long tradition of black liberalism at the ground level. Men and women, largely unsung, made history by engaging with – rather than rejecting – the institutions and ambitions of urban life, and by connecting their individual aspirations to the collective interests of the race. They maintained popular critiques of overlapping systems of race, class, and gender inequality and developed local crucibles of black power that made pragmatic reform possible and set the stage for Washington’s victory and – in surprising ways – even the ascendance of Barack and Michelle Obama. The tragedies of incomplete and uneven racial progress are undeniable. Yet, in struggles for decent housing, good jobs, and political power over a half a century people worked to overcome racial segregation and inequality in everyday life. Consequently, this study shows that the image of the Second Great Migration as an inexorably tragic event is no longer tenable, while it also integrates the story of black urban politics into the deeply ambiguous history of American liberalism.
Robin D. G. Kelley
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781469625485
- eISBN:
- 9781469625508
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469625485.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This book studies the history of the “long Civil Rights movement,” and tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 1940s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for ...
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This book studies the history of the “long Civil Rights movement,” and tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 1940s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. This book reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, the book reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.Less
This book studies the history of the “long Civil Rights movement,” and tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 1940s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality. The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. This book reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. After discussing the book's origins and impact in a new preface written for this twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, the book reflects on what a militantly antiracist, radical movement in the heart of Dixie might teach contemporary social movements confronting rampant inequality, police violence, mass incarceration, and neoliberalism.
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.
Jennifer Ritterhouse
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781469630946
- eISBN:
- 9781469630960
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469630946.003.0012
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
This chapter shows how race-baiting, red-baiting, and white southern liberals' own ambivalence made it impossible for a broad-based coalition to lead an ongoing fight for democratic social change, ...
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This chapter shows how race-baiting, red-baiting, and white southern liberals' own ambivalence made it impossible for a broad-based coalition to lead an ongoing fight for democratic social change, despite the large number of people who had come together at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) in 1938. Activists like Virginia Durr lobbied for anti-poll tax bills in the early 1940s without success. Meanwhile, New Deal policies gave way to mobilization for World War II, which favoured the South with defense-related and infrastructure spending but did not challenge the Jim Crow system. Black civil rights activists like A. Philip Randolph and the lawyers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the lead in a Long Civil Rights Movement that earlier efforts to bring change to the South had helped to make possible. Jonathan Daniels was never an activist but became increasingly supportive of civil rights initiatives after working as an aide to Franklin Roosevelt from 1943-1945. The chapter describes his wartime work and briefly traces the remainder of his career, including the reissue of A Southerner Discovers the South in 1970 and his death in 1981.Less
This chapter shows how race-baiting, red-baiting, and white southern liberals' own ambivalence made it impossible for a broad-based coalition to lead an ongoing fight for democratic social change, despite the large number of people who had come together at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) in 1938. Activists like Virginia Durr lobbied for anti-poll tax bills in the early 1940s without success. Meanwhile, New Deal policies gave way to mobilization for World War II, which favoured the South with defense-related and infrastructure spending but did not challenge the Jim Crow system. Black civil rights activists like A. Philip Randolph and the lawyers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took the lead in a Long Civil Rights Movement that earlier efforts to bring change to the South had helped to make possible. Jonathan Daniels was never an activist but became increasingly supportive of civil rights initiatives after working as an aide to Franklin Roosevelt from 1943-1945. The chapter describes his wartime work and briefly traces the remainder of his career, including the reissue of A Southerner Discovers the South in 1970 and his death in 1981.
John Lowney
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041334
- eISBN:
- 9780252099939
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041334.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and ...
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There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Through inquiry into influential Marxist, Black Atlantic, and African diasporic studies of jazz literature and jazz history, the introduction explains how Jazz Internationalism is distinguished by its historical scope and attention to multiple genres of jazz literature. This introduction outlines not only a history of Afro-modernist jazz literature that corresponds with the Long Civil Rights Movement, it also underscores the intertextuality of jazz literature as it evolves through several generations of black music and writing. While the primary purpose of Jazz Internationalism is not one of recovering obscure writers or texts, it does make the case for a more expansive understanding of jazz writing for both African American literary history and African diasporic studies more generally.Less
There have been a number of outstanding studies that articulate the importance of black music for “Afro-modernist” literary production since Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). Through inquiry into influential Marxist, Black Atlantic, and African diasporic studies of jazz literature and jazz history, the introduction explains how Jazz Internationalism is distinguished by its historical scope and attention to multiple genres of jazz literature. This introduction outlines not only a history of Afro-modernist jazz literature that corresponds with the Long Civil Rights Movement, it also underscores the intertextuality of jazz literature as it evolves through several generations of black music and writing. While the primary purpose of Jazz Internationalism is not one of recovering obscure writers or texts, it does make the case for a more expansive understanding of jazz writing for both African American literary history and African diasporic studies more generally.
John Lowney
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041334
- eISBN:
- 9780252099939
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041334.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Jazz Internationalism argues for the critical significance of jazz in Afro-modernist literature, from the beginning of the Great Depression through the radical social movements of the 1960s. Through ...
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Jazz Internationalism argues for the critical significance of jazz in Afro-modernist literature, from the beginning of the Great Depression through the radical social movements of the 1960s. Through consideration of literary texts that feature jazz as a mode of social criticism as well as artistic expression, it examines how jazz functions as a discourse of radical internationalism and Afro-modernism during the Long Civil Rights Movement. This book redefines the importance of jazz for African American literary history, as it relates recent jazz historiography to current theoretical articulations of black internationalism, including articulations of socialist, diasporic, and Black Atlantic paradigms. In discussing how jazz is invoked as a mode of social criticism in radical African American writing, it considers how writers such as Claude McKay, Frank Marshall Davis, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman, and Paule Marshall dramatize the possibilities and challenges of black internationalism through their innovative adaptations of black music.Less
Jazz Internationalism argues for the critical significance of jazz in Afro-modernist literature, from the beginning of the Great Depression through the radical social movements of the 1960s. Through consideration of literary texts that feature jazz as a mode of social criticism as well as artistic expression, it examines how jazz functions as a discourse of radical internationalism and Afro-modernism during the Long Civil Rights Movement. This book redefines the importance of jazz for African American literary history, as it relates recent jazz historiography to current theoretical articulations of black internationalism, including articulations of socialist, diasporic, and Black Atlantic paradigms. In discussing how jazz is invoked as a mode of social criticism in radical African American writing, it considers how writers such as Claude McKay, Frank Marshall Davis, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, Bob Kaufman, and Paule Marshall dramatize the possibilities and challenges of black internationalism through their innovative adaptations of black music.
J. Michael Butler
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781469627472
- eISBN:
- 9781469627496
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469627472.003.0006
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
In December 1974, a county deputy named Doug Raines shot a black motorist named Wendel Blackwell in the head from a three-foot distance, killing him instantly. The incident represented the ...
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In December 1974, a county deputy named Doug Raines shot a black motorist named Wendel Blackwell in the head from a three-foot distance, killing him instantly. The incident represented the culmination of years of animosity that had built between law enforcement officials and area African Americans. Escambia County SCLC president Rev. H. K. Matthews, and Rev. B. J. Brooks, the Pensacola NAACP chairman, organized mass meetings, economic boycotts, and nightly picket lines on county property to protest the suspected murder. The activities resembled those from the previous decade’s civil rights struggles across the south. Yet on February 24, 1975, deputies arrested forty-seven African Americans during a non-violent demonstration on Sheriff’s Department property, and they charged Brooks and Matthews with felony extortion for supposedly leading a threating chant. Sgt. Jim Edson exacerbated hostilities by making numerous slurs against black activists, yet Sheriff Royal Untriener blamed African Americans for the unrest that engulfed the community and refused to reprimand Edson or any other officers. The Blackwell shooting represented the pinnacle of the county’s long civil rights movement.Less
In December 1974, a county deputy named Doug Raines shot a black motorist named Wendel Blackwell in the head from a three-foot distance, killing him instantly. The incident represented the culmination of years of animosity that had built between law enforcement officials and area African Americans. Escambia County SCLC president Rev. H. K. Matthews, and Rev. B. J. Brooks, the Pensacola NAACP chairman, organized mass meetings, economic boycotts, and nightly picket lines on county property to protest the suspected murder. The activities resembled those from the previous decade’s civil rights struggles across the south. Yet on February 24, 1975, deputies arrested forty-seven African Americans during a non-violent demonstration on Sheriff’s Department property, and they charged Brooks and Matthews with felony extortion for supposedly leading a threating chant. Sgt. Jim Edson exacerbated hostilities by making numerous slurs against black activists, yet Sheriff Royal Untriener blamed African Americans for the unrest that engulfed the community and refused to reprimand Edson or any other officers. The Blackwell shooting represented the pinnacle of the county’s long civil rights movement.
Ian Rocksborough-Smith
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252041662
- eISBN:
- 9780252050336
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252041662.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This book examines how various black Chicagoans used public history to engage with civil rights struggles. Numerous efforts to promote and teach this history demonstrated how dissident left-wing ...
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This book examines how various black Chicagoans used public history to engage with civil rights struggles. Numerous efforts to promote and teach this history demonstrated how dissident left-wing political currents from previous decades remained relevant to a vibrant and ideologically diffuse African American public sphere despite widespread Cold War dispersions, white-supremacist reactions, and anti-Communist repressions. The argument in this book proceeds by demonstrating how public-history projects strategically coalesced around a series of connected pedagogical endeavors. These endeavors included the work of schoolteachers on Chicago’s South Side who tried to advance curriculum reforms through World War II and afterwards; the activities of important cultural workers, such as Margaret T. G. Burroughs and Charles Burroughs, who politicized urban space and fought for greater recognition of black history in the public sphere through the advancement of their vision for a museum; and the Afro-American Heritage Association, which expressed a politics of black left nationalism that engaged with radical politics through black public-history labors. Collectively, these projects expressed important ideas about race, citizenship, education, and intellectual labors that engaged closely with the rapidly shifting terrains of mid-twentieth-century civil rights and international anticolonialisms. Ultimately, this book offers a social history about how black left-wing cultural work in public history and similar forms of knowledge production were at the intersections of political realities and lived experience in U.S. urban life.Less
This book examines how various black Chicagoans used public history to engage with civil rights struggles. Numerous efforts to promote and teach this history demonstrated how dissident left-wing political currents from previous decades remained relevant to a vibrant and ideologically diffuse African American public sphere despite widespread Cold War dispersions, white-supremacist reactions, and anti-Communist repressions. The argument in this book proceeds by demonstrating how public-history projects strategically coalesced around a series of connected pedagogical endeavors. These endeavors included the work of schoolteachers on Chicago’s South Side who tried to advance curriculum reforms through World War II and afterwards; the activities of important cultural workers, such as Margaret T. G. Burroughs and Charles Burroughs, who politicized urban space and fought for greater recognition of black history in the public sphere through the advancement of their vision for a museum; and the Afro-American Heritage Association, which expressed a politics of black left nationalism that engaged with radical politics through black public-history labors. Collectively, these projects expressed important ideas about race, citizenship, education, and intellectual labors that engaged closely with the rapidly shifting terrains of mid-twentieth-century civil rights and international anticolonialisms. Ultimately, this book offers a social history about how black left-wing cultural work in public history and similar forms of knowledge production were at the intersections of political realities and lived experience in U.S. urban life.
Jennifer Ritterhouse
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781469630946
- eISBN:
- 9781469630960
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469630946.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 20th Century
During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. It was also a battlefield on which forces for and ...
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During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. It was also a battlefield on which forces for and against social change were starting to form. For a white southern liberal like Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, it was a fascinating moment to explore. Attuned to culture as well as politics, Daniels knew the true South lay somewhere between Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. On May 5, 1937, he set out to find it, driving thousands of miles in his trusty Plymouth and ultimately interviewing even Mitchell herself. In Discovering the South historian Jennifer Ritterhouse pieces together Daniels’s unpublished notes from his tour along with his published writings and a wealth of archival evidence to put this one man's journey through a South in transition into a larger context. Daniels's well chosen itinerary brought him face to face with the full range of political and cultural possibilities in the South of the 1930s, from New Deal liberalism and social planning in the Tennessee Valley Authority, to Communist agitation in the Scottsboro case, to planters' and industrialists' reactionary worldview and repressive violence. The result is a lively narrative of black and white southerners fighting for and against democratic social change at the start of the nation's long civil rights era. For more information on this book, see www.discoveringthesouth.org.Less
During the Great Depression, the American South was not merely "the nation's number one economic problem," as President Franklin Roosevelt declared. It was also a battlefield on which forces for and against social change were starting to form. For a white southern liberal like Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, it was a fascinating moment to explore. Attuned to culture as well as politics, Daniels knew the true South lay somewhere between Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. On May 5, 1937, he set out to find it, driving thousands of miles in his trusty Plymouth and ultimately interviewing even Mitchell herself. In Discovering the South historian Jennifer Ritterhouse pieces together Daniels’s unpublished notes from his tour along with his published writings and a wealth of archival evidence to put this one man's journey through a South in transition into a larger context. Daniels's well chosen itinerary brought him face to face with the full range of political and cultural possibilities in the South of the 1930s, from New Deal liberalism and social planning in the Tennessee Valley Authority, to Communist agitation in the Scottsboro case, to planters' and industrialists' reactionary worldview and repressive violence. The result is a lively narrative of black and white southerners fighting for and against democratic social change at the start of the nation's long civil rights era. For more information on this book, see www.discoveringthesouth.org.
