This study is the story of the local Civil Rights Movement and race relations in Atlanta, Georgia from 1946 to 1981. Most examinations of the Civil Rights Movement have been written from a national perspective. These studies have presented local African American protest movements as part of a national campaign for civil rights that lasted approximately from 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to 1968, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In this context, demonstrations in Montgomery, Greensboro, Albany, Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis have been viewed as prototypical African American protest, movements and milestones in this national campaign for civil rights. First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
From the author of The Sword and the Shield, this definitive biography of the Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael offers "an unflinching look at an unflinching man" (Daily Beast). Stokely Carmichael, the charismatic and controversial Black activist, stepped onto the pages of history when he called for "Black Power" during a speech one Mississippi night in 1966. A firebrand who straddled both the American civil rights and Black Power movements, Carmichael would stand for the rest of his life at the center of the storm he had unleashed. In Stokely, preeminent civil rights scholar Peniel E. Joseph presents a groundbreaking biography of Carmichael, using his life as a prism through which to view the transformative African American freedom struggles of the twentieth century. A nuanced and authoritative portrait, Stokely captures the life of the man whose uncompromising vision defined political radicalism and provoked a national reckoning on race and democracy.
Radical Ambivalence is the first book-length study of Flannery O’Connor’s attitude toward race in her fiction and correspondence. It is also the first study to include controversial material from unpublished letters that reveals the complex and troubling nature of O’Connor’s thoughts on the subject. O’Connor lived and did most of her writing in her native Georgia during the tumultuous years of the civil rights movement. In one of her letters, O’Connor frankly expresses her double-mindedness regarding the social and political upheaval taking place in the United States with regard to race: “I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.” Radical Ambivalence explores this double-mindedness and how it manifests itself in O’Connor’s fiction.
The movement for civil rights in America peaked in the 1950s and 1960s; however, a closely related struggle, this time over the movement's legacy, has been heatedly engaged over the past two decades. How the civil rights movement is currently being remembered in American politics and culture--and why it matters--is the common theme of the thirteen essays in this unprecedented collection. Memories of the movement are being created and maintained--in ways and for purposes we sometimes only vaguely perceive--through memorials, art exhibits, community celebrations, and even street names. At least fifteen civil rights movement museums have opened since 1990; Mississippi Burning, Four Little Girls, and The Long Walk Home only begin to suggest the range of film and television dramatizations of pivotal events; corporations increasingly employ movement images to sell fast food, telephones, and more; and groups from Christian conservatives to gay rights activists have claimed the civil rights mantle. Contests over the movement's meaning are a crucial part of the continuing fight against racism and inequality. These writings look at how civil rights memories become established as fact through museum exhibits, street naming, and courtroom decisions; how our visual culture transmits the memory of the movement; how certain aspects of the movement have come to be ignored in its "official" narrative; and how other political struggles have appropriated the memory of the movement. Here is a book for anyone interested in how we collectively recall, claim, understand, and represent the past.
cent Speak Now Against the Day. His book is a stunning achievement: a sprawling, engrossing, deeply moving account of those Southerners, black and white, who raised their voices to challenge the South's racial mores. . . . (This) is an eloquent and passionate book, and . . . one we cannot afford to forget".--Charles B. Dew, New York Times Book Review.
Undaunted by the Fight is a study of small but dedicated, group of Spelman College students and faculty who, between 1957 and 1967 risked their lives, compromised their grades, and jeopardized their careers to make Atlanta and the South a more just and open society. Lefever argues that the participation of Spelman's students and faculty in the Civil Rights Movement represented both a continuity and a break with the institution's earlier history. On the one hand their actions were consistent with Spelman's long history of liberal arts and community service; yet, on the other hand; as his research documents; their actions represented a break with Spelman's traditional non-political stance and challenged the assumption that social changes should occur only gradually and within established legal institutions. For the first time in the eighty-plus years of Spelman's existence, the students and faculty who participated in the Movement took actions that directly challenged the injustices of the social and political status quo. Too often in the past the Movement literature, including the literature on the Atlanta Movement focused disproportionately on the males involved to the exclusion of the women who were equally involved, and; who, in many instances, initiated actions and provided leadership for the Movement. Lefever concludes his study by saying that Spelman's activist students and faculty succeeded to the extent they did because they "kept their eyes on the prize." They endured the struggle; he says; and, in so doing; eventually won many prizes -- some personal, others social. "Undaunted; they liberated themselves, but at the same time they liberated their school, their city and thelarger society."
The fiftieth anniversary of many major milestones in what is commonly called the African-American Civil Rights Movement was celebrated in 2013. Fifty years removed from the Birmingham campaign, the assassination of Medgar Evers, and the March on Washington and it is clear that the sacrifices borne by those generations in that decade were not in vain. Monuments, museums, and exhibitions across the world honor the men and women of the Movement and testify to their immeasurable role in redefining the United States. The second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Civil Rights Movement is a guide to the history of the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. The history of this period is covered in a detailed chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, significant legal cases, local struggles, forgotten heroes, and prominent women in the Movement. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Civil Rights Movement.
Situated on the banks of the Ohio River, Louisville, Kentucky, represents a cultural and geographical intersection of North and South. Throughout its history, Louisville has simultaneously displayed northern and southern characteristics in its race relations. In their struggles against racial injustice in the mid-twentieth century, activists in Louisville crossed racial, economic, and political dividing lines to form a wide array of alliances not seen in other cities of its size. In Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky, 1945–1980, noted historian Tracy E. K'Meyer provides the first comprehensive look at the distinctive elements of Louisville's civil rights movement. K'Meyer frames her groundbreaking analysis by defining a border as a space where historical patterns and social concerns overlap. From this vantage point, she argues that broad coalitions of Louisvillians waged long-term, interconnected battles during the city's civil rights movement. K'Meyer shows that Louisville's border city dynamics influenced both its racial tensions and its citizens' approaches to change. Unlike African Americans in southern cities, Louisville's black citizens did not face entrenched restrictions against voting and other forms of civic engagement. Louisville schools were integrated relatively peacefully in 1956, long before their counterparts in the Deep South. However, the city bore the marks of Jim Crow segregation in public accommodations until the 1960s. Louisville joined other southern cities that were feeling the heat of racial tensions, primarily during open housing and busing conflicts (more commonly seen in the North) in the late 1960s and 1970s. In response to Louisville's unique blend of racial problems, activists employed northern models of voter mobilization and lobbying, as well as methods of civil disobedience usually seen in the South. They crossed traditional barriers between the movements for racial and economic justice to unite in common action. Borrowing tactics from their neighbors to the north and south, Louisville citizens merged their concerns and consolidated their efforts to increase justice and fairness in their border city. By examining this unique convergence of activist methods, Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South provides a better understanding of the circumstances that unified the movement across regional boundaries.
Compiles information and interpretations on the past 500 years of African American history, containing essays on historical research aids, bibliographies, resources for womens' issues, and an accompanying CD-ROM providing bibliographical entries.
In 1891, when coal companies in eastern Tennessee brought in cheap convict labor to take over their jobs, workers responded by storming the stockades, freeing the prisoners, and loading them onto freight trains. Over the next year, tactics escalated to include burning company property and looting company stores. This was one of the largest insurrections in US working-class history. It happened at the same time as the widely publicized northern labor war in Homestead, Pennsylvania. And it was largely ignored, then and now. Dixie Be Damned engages seven similarly "hidden" insurrectionary episodes in Southern history to demonstrate the region's long arc of revolt. Countering images of the South as pacified and conservative, this adventurous retelling presents history in the rough. Not the image of the South many expect, this is the South of maroon rebellion, wildcat strikes, and Robert F. Williams's book Negroes with Guns, a South where the dispossessed refuse to quietly suffer their fate. This is people's history at its best: slave revolts, multiracial banditry, labor battles, prison uprisings, urban riots, and more. Neal Shirley grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and now lives in Durham, NC, where he is involved in several anti-prison initiatives and runs a small publishing project called the North Carolina Piece Corps. Saralee Stafford was born in the Piedmont of North Carolina. Her recent political work has focused on connecting the struggles of street organizations with those of anarchists in the area. She teaches gender-related health in Durham, North Carolina.
