Freedom Struggles

Freedom Struggles PDF Author: Adriane Lentz-Smith
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674054180
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
For many of the 200,000 black soldiers sent to Europe with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, encounters with French civilians and colonial African troops led them to imagine a world beyond Jim Crow. They returned home to join activists working to make that world real. In narrating the efforts of African American soldiers and activists to gain full citizenship rights as recompense for military service, Adriane Lentz-Smith illuminates how World War I mobilized a generation. Black and white soldiers clashed as much with one another as they did with external enemies. Race wars within the military and riots across the United States demonstrated the lengths to which white Americans would go to protect a carefully constructed caste system. Inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric of self-determination but battered by the harsh realities of segregation, African Americans fought their own “war for democracy,” from the rebellions of black draftees in French and American ports to the mutiny of Army Regulars in Houston, and from the lonely stances of stubborn individuals to organized national campaigns. African Americans abroad and at home reworked notions of nation and belonging, empire and diaspora, manhood and citizenship. By war’s end, they ceased trying to earn equal rights and resolved to demand them. This beautifully written book reclaims World War I as a critical moment in the freedom struggle and places African Americans at the crossroads of social, military, and international history.

Freedom Struggles

Freedom Struggles PDF Author: Adriane Lentz-Smith
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674054180
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Get Book Here

Book Description
For many of the 200,000 black soldiers sent to Europe with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, encounters with French civilians and colonial African troops led them to imagine a world beyond Jim Crow. They returned home to join activists working to make that world real. In narrating the efforts of African American soldiers and activists to gain full citizenship rights as recompense for military service, Adriane Lentz-Smith illuminates how World War I mobilized a generation. Black and white soldiers clashed as much with one another as they did with external enemies. Race wars within the military and riots across the United States demonstrated the lengths to which white Americans would go to protect a carefully constructed caste system. Inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric of self-determination but battered by the harsh realities of segregation, African Americans fought their own “war for democracy,” from the rebellions of black draftees in French and American ports to the mutiny of Army Regulars in Houston, and from the lonely stances of stubborn individuals to organized national campaigns. African Americans abroad and at home reworked notions of nation and belonging, empire and diaspora, manhood and citizenship. By war’s end, they ceased trying to earn equal rights and resolved to demand them. This beautifully written book reclaims World War I as a critical moment in the freedom struggle and places African Americans at the crossroads of social, military, and international history.

Freedom Farmers

Freedom Farmers PDF Author: Monica M. White
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469643707
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.

Troublemakers

Troublemakers PDF Author: Erik S. Gellman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022660392X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
What does democracy look like? And when should we cause trouble to pursue it? Troublemakers fuses photography and history to demonstrate how racial and economic inequality gave rise to a decades-long struggle for justice in one American city. In dialogue with 275 of Art Shay’s photographs, Erik S. Gellman takes a new look at major developments in postwar US history: the Second Great Migration, “white flight,” and neighborhood and street conflicts, as well as shifting party politics and the growth of the carceral state. The result is a visual and written history that complicates—and even upends—the morality tales and popular memory of postwar freedom struggles. Shay himself was a “troublemaker,” seeking to unsettle society by illuminating truths that many middle-class, white, media, political, and businesspeople pretended did not exist. Shay served as a navigator in the US Army Air Forces during World War II, then took a position as a writer for Life Magazine. But soon after his 1948 move to Chicago, he decided to become a freelance photographer. Shay wandered the city photographing whatever caught his eye—and much did. His lens captured everything from private moments of rebellion to era-defining public movements, as he sought to understand the creative and destructive energies that propelled freedom struggles in the Windy City. Shay illuminated the pain and ecstasy that sprung up from the streets of Chicago, while Gellman reveals their collective impact on the urban fabric and on our national narrative. This collaboration offers a fresh and timely look at how social conflict can shape a city—and may even inspire us to make trouble today.

Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement

Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement PDF Author: Traci Parker
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469648687
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
In this book, Traci Parker examines the movement to racially integrate white-collar work and consumption in American department stores, and broadens our understanding of historical transformations in African American class and labor formation. Built on the goals, organization, and momentum of earlier struggles for justice, the department store movement channeled the power of store workers and consumers to promote black freedom in the mid-twentieth century. Sponsoring lunch counter sit-ins and protests in the 1950s and 1960s, and challenging discrimination in the courts in the 1970s, this movement ended in the early 1980s with the conclusion of the Sears, Roebuck, and Co. affirmative action cases and the transformation and consolidation of American department stores. In documenting the experiences of African American workers and consumers during this era, Parker highlights the department store as a key site for the inception of a modern black middle class, and demonstrates the ways that both work and consumption were battlegrounds for civil rights.

Freedom North

Freedom North PDF Author: J. Theoharis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403982503
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
The civil rights movement occupies a prominent place in popular thinking and scholarly work on post-1945 U.S. history. Yet the dominant narrative of the movement remains that of a nonviolent movement born in the South during the 1950s that emerged triumphant in the early 1960s, only to be derailed by the twin forces of Black Power and white backlash when it sought to move outside the South after 1965. African American protest and political movements outside the South appear as ancillary and subsequent to the 'real' movement in the South, despite the fact that black activism existed in the North, Midwest, and West in the 1940s, and persisted well into the 1970s. This book brings together new scholarship on black social movements outside the South to rethink the civil rights narrative and the place of race in recent history. Each chapter focuses on a different location and movement outside the South, revealing distinctive forms of U.S. racism according to place and the varieties of tactics and ideologies that community members used to attack these inequalities, to show that the civil rights movement was indeed a national movement for racial justice and liberation.

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle PDF Author: Angela Y. Davis
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608465659
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
In this collection of essays, interviews, and speeches, the renowned activist examines today’s issues—from Black Lives Matter to prison abolition and more. Activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis has been a tireless fighter against oppression for decades. Now, the iconic author of Women, Race, and Class offers her latest insights into the struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today’s struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine. Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build a movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that “freedom is a constant struggle.” This edition of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle includes a foreword by Dr. Cornel West and an introduction by Frank Barat.

Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement

Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement PDF Author: Yohuru Williams
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135980683
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
The African American struggle for civil rights in the twentieth century is one of the most important stories in American history. With all the information available, however, it is easy for even the most enthusiastic reader to be overwhelmed. In Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement, Yohuru Williams has synthesized the complex history of this period into a clear and compelling narrative. Considering both the Civil Rights and Black Power movements as distinct but overlapping elements of the Black Freedom struggle, Williams looks at the impact of the struggle for Black civil rights on housing, transportation, education, labor, voting rights, culture, and more, and places the activism of the 1950s and 60s within the context of a much longer tradition reaching from Reconstruction to the present day. Exploring the different strands within the movement, key figures and leaders, and its ongoing legacy, Rethinking the Black Freedom Movement is the perfect introduction for anyone seeking to understand the struggle for Black civil rights in America.

Before Busing

Before Busing PDF Author: Zebulon Vance Miletsky
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469662787
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
In many histories of Boston, African Americans have remained almost invisible. Partly as a result, when the 1972 crisis over school desegregation and busing erupted, many observers professed shock at the overt racism on display in the "cradle of liberty." Yet the city has long been divided over matters of race, and it was also home to a far older Black organizing tradition than many realize. A community of Black activists had fought segregated education since the origins of public schooling and racial inequality since the end of northern slavery. Before Busing tells the story of the men and women who struggled and demonstrated to make school desegregation a reality in Boston. It reveals the legal efforts and battles over tactics that played out locally and influenced the national Black freedom struggle. And the book gives credit to the Black organizers, parents, and children who fought long and hard battles for justice that have been left out of the standard narratives of the civil rights movement. What emerges is a clear picture of the long and hard-fought campaigns to break the back of Jim Crow education in the North and make Boston into a better, more democratic city—a fight that continues to this day.

Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi

Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi PDF Author: Tiyi Makeda Morris
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820347310
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Morris provides the first comprehensive examination of the Jackson, Mississippi-based women's organization Womanpower Unlimited. Originally instated in 1961 to sustain the civil rights movement, the organization also revitalized black women's social and political activism in the state through its diverse agenda and grassroots approach.

Troubled Refuge

Troubled Refuge PDF Author: Chandra Manning
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307456374
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
From the author of What This Cruel War Was Over, a vivid portrait of the Union army’s escaped-slave refugee camps and how they shaped the course of emancipation and citizenship in the United States. Chandra Manning casts in a wholly original light what it was like to escape slavery, how emancipation happened, and how citizenship in the United States was transformed. This reshaping of hard structures of power would matter not only for slaves turned citizens, but for all Americans. Integrating a wealth of new findings, this vivid portrait of the Union army’s escaped-slave refugee camps shows how they shaped the course of emancipation and citizenship in the United States. Drawing on records of the Union and Confederate armies, the letters and diaries of soldiers, transcribed testimonies of former slaves, and more, Manning allows us to accompany the black men, women, and children who sought out the Union army in hopes of achieving autonomy for themselves and their communities. It also raised, for the first time, humanitarian questions about refugees in wartime and legal questions about civil and military authority with which we still wrestle, as well as redefined American citizenship, to the benefit, but also to the lasting cost of, African Americans.