Desegregation and the Rhetorical Fight for African American Citizenship Rights

Desegregation and the Rhetorical Fight for African American Citizenship Rights PDF Author: Sally F. Paulson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498565271
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Focusing on the NAACP’s twentieth-century attempt to overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine through school desegregation cases, Desegregation and the Rhetorical Fight for African American Citizenship Rights analyzes the rhetorical/legal dynamics inherent in the struggle to determine African American citizenship rights. This book begins by identifying the fundamental dialectical tension existing within all American citizenship rights between the Declaration of Independence’s guarantee of “ideal equality” to all citizens as opposed to the Constitution’s privileging of local, “practical” decision-making through Article IV Sect. 2, the “privileges and immunities” clause. It contends that as a consequence of that dynamic, American citizenship rights are rhetorical concepts produced through argument grounded in “all the available means of persuasion,” including logical, emotional, and ethical appeals. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the school desegregation issue came down to a question of credibility/ethics. Recommended for scholars interested in communication, law, history, political science, and cultural studies.

Desegregation and the Rhetorical Fight for African American Citizenship Rights

Desegregation and the Rhetorical Fight for African American Citizenship Rights PDF Author: Sally F. Paulson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498565271
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Focusing on the NAACP’s twentieth-century attempt to overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine through school desegregation cases, Desegregation and the Rhetorical Fight for African American Citizenship Rights analyzes the rhetorical/legal dynamics inherent in the struggle to determine African American citizenship rights. This book begins by identifying the fundamental dialectical tension existing within all American citizenship rights between the Declaration of Independence’s guarantee of “ideal equality” to all citizens as opposed to the Constitution’s privileging of local, “practical” decision-making through Article IV Sect. 2, the “privileges and immunities” clause. It contends that as a consequence of that dynamic, American citizenship rights are rhetorical concepts produced through argument grounded in “all the available means of persuasion,” including logical, emotional, and ethical appeals. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the school desegregation issue came down to a question of credibility/ethics. Recommended for scholars interested in communication, law, history, political science, and cultural studies.

The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate

The Reconstruction Desegregation Debate PDF Author: Kirt H. Wilson
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1628954922
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
In the decade that followed the Civil War, two questions dominated political debate: To what degree were African Americans now “equal” to white Americans, and how should this equality be implemented in law? Although Republicans entertained multiple, even contradictory, answers to these questions, the party committed itself to several civil rights initiatives. When Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment, the 1866 Civil Rights Act, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fifteenth Amendment, it justified these decisions with a broad egalitarian rhetoric. This rhetoric altered congressional culture, instituting new norms that made equality not merely an ideal,but rather a pragmatic aim for political judgments. Kirt Wilson examines Reconstruction’s desegregation debate to explain how it represented an important movement in the evolution of U.S. race relations. He outlines how Congress fought to control the scope of black civil rights by contesting the definition of black equality, and the expediency and constitutionality of desegregation. Wilson explores how the debate over desegregation altered public memory about slavery and the Civil War, while simultaneously shaping a political culture that established the trajectory of race relations into the next century.

Like Wildfire

Like Wildfire PDF Author: Sean Patrick O'Rourke
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643360833
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
The sit-ins of the American civil rights movement were extraordinary acts of dissent in an age marked by protest. By sitting in at "whites only" lunch counters, libraries, beaches, swimming pools, skating rinks, and churches, young African Americans and their allies put their lives on the line, fully aware that their actions would almost inevitably incite hateful, violent responses from entrenched and increasingly desperate white segregationists. And yet they did so in great numbers: most estimates suggest that in 1960 alone more than seventy thousand young people participated in sit-ins across the American South and more than three thousand were arrested. The simplicity and purity of the act of sitting in, coupled with the dignity and grace exhibited by participants, lent to the sit-in movement's sanctity and peaceful power. In Like Wildfire, editors Sean Patrick O'Rourke and Lesli K. Pace seek to clarify and analyze the power of civil rights sit-ins as rhetorical acts—persuasive campaigns designed to alter perceptions of apartheid social structures and to change the attitudes, laws, and policies that supported those structures. These cohesive essays from leading scholars offer a new appraisal of the origins, growth, and legacy of the sit-ins, which has gone largely ignored in scholarly literature. The authors examine different forms of sitting-in and the evolution of the rhetorical dynamics of sit-in protests, detailing the organizational strategies they employed and connecting them to later protests. By focusing on the persuasive power of demanding space, the contributors articulate the ways in which the protestors' battle for basic civil rights shaped social practices, laws, and the national dialogue. O'Rourke and Pace maintain that the legacies of the civil rights sit-ins have been many, complicated, and at times undervalued.

Brown V. Board of Education at Fifty

Brown V. Board of Education at Fifty PDF Author: Clarke Rountree
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739108543
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Six American communication studies scholars contribute six chapters to the first analysis of the role that rhetoric played in establishing, defending, challenging, and overturning legalized educational segregation by race. Coverage includes a reconstruction of the rhetorical context of Plessy v. Ferguson; the Harlan dissent in Plessy; the NAACP's efforts over 40-plus years to reverse Plessy's support of educational segregation; an analysis of the Brown decision, with particular focus on the controversial use of social scientific evidence; the reaction to the Brown decision in the South; and a comparison of two major Supreme Court decisions implementing Brown. Annotation ̧2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) -- Distributed by Syndetics Solutions, LLC.

Rhetoric, Religion and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965

Rhetoric, Religion and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965 PDF Author: Davis W. Houck
Publisher: Baylor University Press
ISBN: 1932792546
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1013

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Book Description
V.2: Building upon their critically acclaimed first volume, Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon's new Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965 is a recovery project of enormous proportions. Houck and Dixon have again combed church archives, government documents, university libraries, and private collections in pursuit of the civil rights movement's long-buried eloquence. Their new work presents fifty new speeches and sermons delivered by both famed leaders and little-known civil rights activists on national stages and in quiet shacks. The speeches carry novel insights into the ways in which individuals and communities utilized religious rhetoric to upset the racial status quo in divided America during the civil rights era. Houck and Dixon's work illustrates again how a movement so prominent in historical scholarship still has much to teach us. (Publisher).

Struggle for the City

Struggle for the City PDF Author: Derek G. Handley
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271098503
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
The urban renewal policies stemming from the 1954 Housing Act and 1956 Highway Act destroyed the economic centers of many Black neighborhoods in the United States. Struggle for the City recovers the agency and solidarity of African American residents confronting this diagnosis of “blight” in northern cities in the 1950s and 1960s. Examining Black newspapers, archival documents from Black organizations, and oral histories of community advocates, Derek G. Handley shows how African American residents in three communities—the Hill district of Pittsburgh, the Bronzeville neighborhood of Milwaukee, and the Rondo district of St. Paul—enacted a new form of citizenship to fight for their neighborhoods. Dubbing this the “Black Rhetorical Citizenship,” a nod to the integral role of language and other symbolic means in the Black Freedom Movement, Handley situates citizenship as both a site of resistance and a mode of public engagement that cannot be divorced from race and the effects of racism. Through this framework, Struggle for the City demonstrates how local organizers, leaders, and residents used rhetorics of placemaking, community organizing, and critical memory to resist the bulldozing visions of urban renewal. By showing how African American residents built political community at the local level and by centering the residents in their own narratives of displacement, Handley recovers strategies of resistance that continue to influence the actions of the Black Freedom Movement, including Black Lives Matter.

The Rhetoric of Black Americans

The Rhetoric of Black Americans PDF Author: James L. Golden
Publisher: C.E. Merill Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 584

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Book Description


On Fire

On Fire PDF Author: Sean Patrick O'Rourke
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643361627
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
The social, political, and legal struggles that made up the American civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century produced and refined a wide range of rhetorical strategies and tactics. Arguably the most astonishing and certainly the least understood are the sit-in protests that swept the nation at the beginning of the 1960s. A companion to Like Wildfire: The Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Sit-Ins, this concentrated collection of essays examines the origins and rhetorical methods of five distinct civil rights sit-ins of 1960. For students of rhetoric, protest, and sociopolitical movements, this volume demonstrates how we can read the sit-ins by using diverse rhetorical lenses as essentially persuasive conflicts in which participants invented and deployed arguments and actions in attempts to change segregated communities and the attitudes, traditions, and policies that maintained segregation.

Crafting Equality

Crafting Equality PDF Author: Celeste Michelle Condit
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226922480
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Philosophers and historians often treat fundamental concepts like equality as if they existed only as fixed ideas found solely in the canonical texts of civilization. In Crafting Equality, Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites argue that the meaning of at least one key word—equality—has been forged in the day-to-day pragmatics of public discourse. Drawing upon little studied speeches, newspapers, magazines, and other public discourse, Condit and Lucaites survey the shifting meaning of equality from 1760 to the present as a process of interaction and negotiation among different social groups in American politics and culture. They make a powerful case for the critical role of black Americans in actively shaping what equality has come to mean in our political conversation by chronicling the development of an African-American rhetorical community. The story they tell supports a vision of equality that embraces both heterogeneity and homogeneity as necessary for maintaining the balance between liberty and property. A compelling revision of an important aspect of America's history, Crafting Equality will interest anyone wanting to better understand the role public discourse plays in affecting the major social and political issues of our times. It will also interest readers concerned with the relationship between politics and culture in America's increasingly multi-cultural society.

The Practice of Citizenship

The Practice of Citizenship PDF Author: Derrick R. Spires
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812295773
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
In the years between the American Revolution and the U.S. Civil War, as legal and cultural understandings of citizenship became more racially restrictive, black writers articulated an expansive, practice-based theory of citizenship. Grounded in political participation, mutual aid, critique and revolution, and the myriad daily interactions between people living in the same spaces, citizenship, they argued, is not defined by who one is but, rather, by what one does. In The Practice of Citizenship, Derrick R. Spires examines the parallel development of early black print culture and legal and cultural understandings of U.S. citizenship, beginning in 1787, with the framing of the federal Constitution and the founding of the Free African Society by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and ending in 1861, with the onset of the Civil War. Between these two points he recovers understudied figures such as William J. Wilson, whose 1859 "Afric-American Picture Gallery" appeared in seven installments in The Anglo-African Magazine, and the physician, abolitionist, and essayist James McCune Smith. He places texts such as the proceedings of black state conventions alongside considerations of canonical figures such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Frederick Douglass. Reading black print culture as a space where citizenship was both theorized and practiced, Spires reveals the degree to which concepts of black citizenship emerged through a highly creative and diverse community of letters, not easily reducible to representative figures or genres. From petitions to Congress to Frances Harper's parlor fiction, black writers framed citizenship both explicitly and implicitly, the book demonstrates, not simply as a response to white supremacy but as a matter of course in the shaping of their own communities and in meeting their own political, social, and cultural needs.