In the 1960s, the mainstream Protestant churches responded to an urgent need by becoming deeply involved with the national black community in its struggle for racial justice. The National Council of Churches (NCC), as the principal ecumenical organization of the national Protestant religious establishment, initiated an active new role by establishing a Commission on Religion and Race in 1963. Focusing primarily on the efforts of the NCC, this is the first study by an historian to examine the relationship of the predominantly white, mainstream Protestant Churches to the Civil Rights movement. Drawing on hitherto little-used and unknown archival resources and extensive interviews with participants, Findlay documents the churches' committed involvement in the March on Washington in 1963, the massive lobbying effort to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, their powerful support of the struggle to end legal segregation in Mississippi, and their efforts to respond to the Black Manifesto and the rise of black militancy before and during 1969. Findlay chronicles initial successes, then growing frustration as the events of the 1960s unfolded and the national liberal coalition, of which the churches were a part, disintegrated. While never losing sight of the central, indispensable role of the African-American community, Findlay's study for the first time makes clear the highly significant contribution made by liberal religious groups in the turbulent, exciting, moving, and historic decade of the 1960s.
Conventional wisdom holds that freedmen's education was largely the work of privileged, single white northern women motivated by evangelical beliefs and abolitionism. Backed by pathbreaking research, Ronald E. Butchart's Schooling the Freed People shatters this notion. The most comprehensive quantitative study of the origins of black education in freedom ever undertaken, this definitive book on freedmen's teachers in the South is an outstanding contribution to social history and our understanding of African American education.
More than 25 years have passed since South Africans were being shot or hacked or burned to death in political violence, and the memory of the trauma has faded. Nevertheless, some 20 500 people were killed between 1984 and 1994. Conventional wisdom has it that most died as a result of the ANC's people's war. Many books have been written on South Africa's political transition, but none has dealt adequately with the people's war. This book does. It shows the extraordinary success of the people's war in giving the ANC a virtual monopoly on power, as well as the great cost at which this was done. The high price of it is still being paid. Apart from the terror and killings it sparked at the time, the people's war set in motion forces that cannot easily be tamed. Violence, once unleashed, is not easy to stamp out. 'Ungovernability', once generated, is not readily reversed. For this new edition, Anthea Jeffery has revised and abridged her seminal work. She has also included a brief overview of the ANC's National Democratic Revolution for which the people's war was intended to prepare the way. Since 1994, the NDR has been implemented in many different spheres. It is now being speeded up in its second and more radical phase.
Explores the potential benefits of a government-independent, democratized Social Security system to support dependents suffering from the reduction of other government benefits.
Young People and the Struggle for Participation rethinks dominant concepts and meanings of participation by exploring what young people do in public spaces and what these spaces mean to them, individually and collectively. This book discusses how different spaces and places structure and are in turn structured by young peoples’ activities. Drawing on findings from a comparative study in eight European cities, insights into different styles of youth participation emerging from formal, non-formal and informal settings are presented. The book provides a comparative analysis of how transnational discourses, national welfare states and local youth policies affect youth participation. It also investigates how it comes about that young people get involved in different forms of participation in the course of their biographies. This book will appeal to academics, researchers and post-graduate students in the fields of youth studies, community studies, sociology of education, political science, social work, psychology and anthropology.
Since the beginning of John Paul II's papacy in 1979, the Catholic Church has been making headlines with its attempts to return Catholicism to a pre-Vatican II authoritarian church in absolute obedience to Rome. This book explores the growing progressive movement and the Vatican's attempt to squelch it.
A definitive collection of essays and documents on the movement behind Iran's mass protests Since June of 2009, the Islamic Republic of Iran has seen the most dramatic political upheaval in its three decades of rule. What began as a series of mass protests over the official results of a presidential election—engendering the slogan “Where is My Vote?”—has grown into something much larger, indeed the largest political protest since the 1979 revolution. The Green Movement has been described as “an Iranian intifada,” a “great emancipatory event,” a “grassroots civil rights movement a century in the making,” and “something quite extraordinary, perhaps even a social revolution.” What are the movement’s aims—are they revolutionary, reformist, or something else altogether? Does it have a chance of fundamentally changing Iranian politics or removing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from office? This momentous anthology explores these critical questions and others by assembling the key statements, communiqués, manifestos, interviews, and debates to have emerged from this vibrant social movement—many of which are translated and published here for the first time. This indispensable volume is the first to bring together the leading voices and key players in Iran’s Green Movement, providing an intellectual and political road map to this turning point in Iran’s history and a vital resource for the study of Iran, social movements, and the future of the Middle East.
In this powerful collection, edited by Black Girl Dangerous creator Mia McKenzie, writers, activists and artists of color share their visions for, and struggles with, solidarity at the intersections of PoC identity. How can we as Black people, Indigenous people and people of color, show up for each other? How are we succeeding and failing at that? Is there any hope for real solidarity between us? If not, what does that mean for us? If so, what will it take? Featuring Black Lives Matter organization co-founder Patrisse Cullors; activist CeCe McDonald; writer Ng c Loan Tr n; comic artist Ethan Parker; activist and organizer Jennicet GutiErrez; and more "
An “engaging and well-researched study [of] ordinary people who joined together to challenge financial institutions” (Choice). Banks and bankers are hardly the most beloved institutions and people in this country. With its corruptive influence on politics and stranglehold on the American economy, Wall Street is held in high regard by few outside the financial sector. But the pitchforks raised against this behemoth are largely rhetorical: We rarely see riots in the streets or public demands for an equitable and democratic banking system that result in serious national changes. Yet the situation was vastly different a century ago, as Christopher W. Shaw shows. This book upends the conventional thinking that financial policy in the early twentieth century was set primarily by the needs and demands of bankers. Shaw shows that banking and politics were directly shaped by the literal and symbolic investments of the grassroots. This engagement remade financial institutions and the national economy, through populist pressure and the establishment of federal regulatory programs and agencies like the Farm Credit System and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Shaw reveals the surprising groundswell behind seemingly arcane legislation, as well as the power of the people to demand serious political repercussions for the banks that caused the Great Depression. One result of this sustained interest and pressure was legislation and regulation that brought on a long period of relative financial stability, with a reduced frequency of economic booms and busts. Ironically, this stability led to the decline of the very banking politics that brought it about. Giving voice to a broad swath of American figures, including workers, farmers, politicians, and bankers alike, Money, Power, and the People recasts our understanding of what might be possible in balancing the needs of the people with those of their financial institutions.