Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement

Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement PDF Author: Jack M. Bloom
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025304247X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Revised and updated: the award-winning historical analysis of the civil rights movement examining the interplay of race and class in the American South. In Race, Class, and the Civil Rights Movement, sociologist Jack M. Bloom explains what the civil rights movement was about, why it was successful, and why it fell short of some of its objectives. With a unique sociohistorical analysis, he argues that Southern racist practices were established by the agrarian upper class, and that only when this class system was undermined did the civil rights movement became possible. He also demonstrates how the movement was the culmination of political struggles beginning in the Reconstruction era and influenced by the New Deal policies of the 1930s. Widely praise when it was first published 1987, Race, Class, and the Civil Rights Movement was a C. Wright Mills Second Award–winning book and also won the Gustavus Myers Center Outstanding Book Award. In this second edition, Bloom updates his study in light of current scholarship on civil rights history. He also presents an analysis of the New Right within the Republican Party, starting in the 1960s, as a reaction to the civil rights movement.

Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement

Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement PDF Author: Jack M. Bloom
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025304247X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Get Book

Book Description
Revised and updated: the award-winning historical analysis of the civil rights movement examining the interplay of race and class in the American South. In Race, Class, and the Civil Rights Movement, sociologist Jack M. Bloom explains what the civil rights movement was about, why it was successful, and why it fell short of some of its objectives. With a unique sociohistorical analysis, he argues that Southern racist practices were established by the agrarian upper class, and that only when this class system was undermined did the civil rights movement became possible. He also demonstrates how the movement was the culmination of political struggles beginning in the Reconstruction era and influenced by the New Deal policies of the 1930s. Widely praise when it was first published 1987, Race, Class, and the Civil Rights Movement was a C. Wright Mills Second Award–winning book and also won the Gustavus Myers Center Outstanding Book Award. In this second edition, Bloom updates his study in light of current scholarship on civil rights history. He also presents an analysis of the New Right within the Republican Party, starting in the 1960s, as a reaction to the civil rights movement.

A More Beautiful and Terrible History

A More Beautiful and Terrible History PDF Author: Jeanne Theoharis
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807075876
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Praised by The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Bitch Magazine; Slate; Publishers Weekly; and more, this is “a bracing corrective to a national mythology” (New York Times) around the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. This fable, featuring dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, has shuttered the movement firmly in the past, whitewashed the forces that stood in its way, and diminished its scope. And it is used perniciously in our own times to chastise present-day movements and obscure contemporary injustice. In A More Beautiful and Terrible History award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis dissects this national myth-making, teasing apart the accepted stories to show them in a strikingly different light. We see Rosa Parks not simply as a bus lady but a lifelong criminal justice activist and radical; Martin Luther King, Jr. as not only challenging Southern sheriffs but Northern liberals, too; and Coretta Scott King not only as a “helpmate” but a lifelong economic justice and peace activist who pushed her husband’s activism in these directions. Moving from “the histories we get” to “the histories we need,” Theoharis challenges nine key aspects of the fable to reveal the diversity of people, especially women and young people, who led the movement; the work and disruption it took; the role of the media and “polite racism” in maintaining injustice; and the immense barriers and repression activists faced. Theoharis makes us reckon with the fact that far from being acceptable, passive or unified, the civil rights movement was unpopular, disruptive, and courageously persevering. Activists embraced an expansive vision of justice—which a majority of Americans opposed and which the federal government feared. By showing us the complex reality of the movement, the power of its organizing, and the beauty and scope of the vision, Theoharis proves that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the progress that occurred. A More Beautiful and Terrible History will change our historical frame, revealing the richness of our civil rights legacy, the uncomfortable mirror it holds to the nation, and the crucial work that remains to be done. Winner of the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize in Nonfiction

Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction PDF Author: Kate Masur
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324005947
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History Finalist for the 2022 Lincoln Prize Winner of the 2022 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 A groundbreaking history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, Northern and Southern, in the decades before the Civil War. The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states’ insistences that states were merely trying to maintain the domestic peace with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, and they fought in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. Long stymied by hostile white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, the movement’s ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, particularly among supporters of the new Republican party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were the landmark achievements of the first civil rights movement. Kate Masur’s magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Activists such as John Jones, a free Black tailor from North Carolina whose opposition to the Illinois “black laws” helped make the case for racial equality, demonstrate the indispensable role of African Americans in shaping the American ideal of equality before the law. Without enforcement, promises of legal equality were not enough. But the antebellum movement laid the foundation for a racial justice tradition that remains vital to this day.

Race Work

Race Work PDF Author: Matthew C. Whitaker
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803260276
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Nearly sixty years ago, Lincoln and Eleanor Ragsdale descended upon the isolated, somewhat desolate, and entirely segregated city of Phoenix, Arizona, in search of freedom and opportunity?a move that would ultimately transform an entire city and, arguably, the nation. Race Work tells the story of this remarkable pair, two of the most influential black activists of the post?World War II American West, and through their story, supplies a missing chapter in the history of the civil rights movement, American race relations, African Americans, and the American West. ø Matthew C. Whitaker explores the Ragsdales? family history and how their familial traditions of entrepreneurship, professionalism, activism, and ?race work? helped form their activist identity and placed them in a position to help desegregate Phoenix. His work, the first sustained account of white supremacy and black resistance in Phoenix, also uses the lives of the Ragsdales to examine themes of domination, resistance, interracial coalition building, race, gender, and place against the backdrop of the civil rights and post?civil rights eras. An absorbing biography that provides insight into African Americans? quest for freedom, Race Work reveals the lives of the Ragsdales as powerful symbols of black leadership who illuminate the problems and progress in African American history, American Western history, and American history during the post?World War II era.

Lighting the Fires of Freedom

Lighting the Fires of Freedom PDF Author: Janet Dewart Bell
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620973367
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Recommended by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Book Riot and Autostraddle Nominated for a 2019 NAACP Image Award, a groundbreaking collection of profiles of African American women leaders in the twentieth-century fight for civil rights During the Civil Rights Movement, African American women did not stand on ceremony; they simply did the work that needed to be done. Yet despite their significant contributions at all levels of the movement, they remain mostly invisible to the larger public. Beyond Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King, most Americans would be hard-pressed to name other leaders at the community, local, and national levels. In Lighting the Fires of Freedom Janet Dewart Bell shines a light on women's all-too-often overlooked achievements in the Movement. Through wide-ranging conversations with nine women, several now in their nineties with decades of untold stories, we hear what ignited and fueled their activism, as Bell vividly captures their inspiring voices. Lighting the Fires of Freedom offers these deeply personal and intimate accounts of extraordinary struggles for justice that resulted in profound social change, stories that are vital and relevant today. A vital document for understanding the Civil Rights Movement, Lighting the Fires of Freedom is an enduring testament to the vitality of women's leadership during one of the most dramatic periods of American history.

Gender in the Civil Rights Movement

Gender in the Civil Rights Movement PDF Author: Peter J. Ling
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135669139
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
In a new anthology of essays, an international group of scholars examines the powerful interaction between gender and race within the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy.

White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-civil Rights Era

White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-civil Rights Era PDF Author: Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
ISBN: 9781588260321
Category : Civil rights movements
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Is a racial structure still firmly in place in the United States? White Supremacy and Racism answers that question with an unequivocal yes, describing a contemporary system that operates in a covert, subtle, institutional, and superficially nonracial fash on. Assessing the major perspectives that social analysts have relied on to explain race and racial relations, Bonilla-Silva labels the post-civil rights ideology as color-blind racism: a system of social arrangements that maintain white privilege at all levels. His analysis of racial politics in the United States makes a compelling argument for a new civil rights movement rooted in the race-class needs of minority masses, multiracial in character - and focused on attaining substantive rather than formal equality.

I Am a Man!

I Am a Man! PDF Author: Steve Estes
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080787633X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The civil rights movement was first and foremost a struggle for racial equality, but questions of gender lay deeply embedded within this struggle. Steve Estes explores key groups, leaders, and events in the movement to understand how activists used race and manhood to articulate their visions of what American society should be. Estes demonstrates that, at crucial turning points in the movement, both segregationists and civil rights activists harnessed masculinist rhetoric, tapping into implicit assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality. Estes begins with an analysis of the role of black men in World War II and then examines the segregationists, who demonized black male sexuality and galvanized white men behind the ideal of southern honor. He then explores the militant new models of manhood espoused by civil rights activists such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and groups such as the Nation of Islam, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Black Panther Party. Reliance on masculinist organizing strategies had both positive and negative consequences, Estes concludes. Tracing these strategies from the integration of the U.S. military in the 1940s through the Million Man March in the 1990s, he shows that masculinism rallied men to action but left unchallenged many of the patriarchal assumptions that underlay American society.

Women, Race, & Class

Women, Race, & Class PDF Author: Angela Y. Davis
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307798496
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women. “Angela Davis is herself a woman of undeniable courage. She should be heard.”—The New York Times Angela Davis provides a powerful history of the social and political influence of whiteness and elitism in feminism, from abolitionist days to the present, and demonstrates how the racist and classist biases of its leaders inevitably hampered any collective ambitions. While Black women were aided by some activists like Sarah and Angelina Grimke and the suffrage cause found unwavering support in Frederick Douglass, many women played on the fears of white supremacists for political gain rather than take an intersectional approach to liberation. Here, Davis not only contextualizes the legacy and pitfalls of civil and women’s rights activists, but also discusses Communist women, the murder of Emmitt Till, and Margaret Sanger’s racism. Davis shows readers how the inequalities between Black and white women influence the contemporary issues of rape, reproductive freedom, housework and child care in this bold and indispensable work.

A Century of Segregation

A Century of Segregation PDF Author: Leland Ware
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498564704
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book examines the history of racial segregation in America and many of the heroic battles that were waged against the system. From the 1930s to the 1960s court challenges were won and laws were enacted that killed Jim Crow. However, despite considerable advances, substantial barriers to racial equality persist.