Author: Laurie Beth Green
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807888872
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432
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Book Description
African American freedom is often defined in terms of emancipation and civil rights legislation, but it did not arrive with the stroke of a pen or the rap of a gavel. No single event makes this more plain, Laurie Green argues, than the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike, which culminated in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Exploring the notion of "freedom" in postwar Memphis, Green demonstrates that the civil rights movement was battling an ongoing "plantation mentality" based on race, gender, and power that permeated southern culture long before--and even after--the groundbreaking legislation of the mid-1960s. With its slogan "I AM a Man!" the Memphis strike provides a clarion example of how the movement fought for a black freedom that consisted of not only constitutional rights but also social and human rights. As the sharecropping system crumbled and migrants streamed to the cities during and after World War II, the struggle for black freedom touched all aspects of daily life. Green traces the movement to new locations, from protests against police brutality and racist movie censorship policies to innovations in mass culture, such as black-oriented radio stations. Incorporating scores of oral histories, Green demonstrates that the interplay of politics, culture, and consciousness is critical to truly understanding freedom and the black struggle for it.
Author: Françoise N. Hamlin
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807835498
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
Weaving national narratives from stories of the daily lives and familiar places of local residents, Francoise Hamlin chronicles the slow struggle for black freedom through the history of Clarksdale, Mississippi. Hamlin paints a full picture of the town ov
Author: Elizabeth Gritter
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813144744
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
One of the largest southern cities and a hub for the cotton industry, Memphis, Tennessee, was at the forefront of black political empowerment during the Jim Crow era. Compared to other cities in the South, Memphis had an unusually large number of African American voters. Black Memphians sought reform at the ballot box, formed clubs, ran for office, and engaged in voter registration and education activities from the end of the Civil War through the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In this groundbreaking book, Elizabeth Gritter examines how and why black Memphians mobilized politically in the period between Reconstruction and the beginning of the civil rights movement. Gritter illuminates, in particular, the efforts and influence of Robert R. Church Jr., an affluent Republican and founder of the Lincoln League, and the notorious Memphis political boss Edward H. Crump. Using these two men as lenses through which to view African American political engagement, this volume explores how black voters and their leaders both worked with and opposed the white political machine at the ballot box. River of Hope challenges persisting notions of a "Solid South" of white Democratic control by arguing that the small but significant number of black southerners who retained the right to vote had more influence than scholars have heretofore assumed. Gritter's nuanced study presents a fascinating view of the complex nature of political power during the Jim Crow era and provides fresh insight into the efforts of the individuals who laid the foundation for civil rights victories in the 1950s and '60s.
Author: Calvin White
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 1557286841
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
The Rise to Respectability documents the history of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) and examines its cultural and religious impact on African Americans and on the history of the South. It explores the ways in which Charles Harrison Mason, the son of slaves and founder of COGIC, embraced a Pentecostal faith that celebrated the charismatic forms of religious expression that many blacks had come to view as outdated, unsophisticated, and embarrassing. While examining the intersection of race, religion, and class, The Rise to Respectability details how the denomination dealt with the stringent standard of bourgeois behavior imposed on churchgoers as they moved from southern rural areas into the urban centers in both the South and North. Rooted in the hardships of slavery and coming of age during Jim Crow, COGIC’s story is more than a religious debate. Rather, this book sees the history of the church as interwoven with the Great Migration, class tension, racial animosity, and the struggle for modernity—all representative parts of the African American experience.
Author: Luther Adams
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 080783422X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
"Adams makes a splendid contribution to the historical literature of the post-World War II years in African American and U.S. urban and social history. Grounded in careful research from a variety of primary and secondary sources, this book advances a comp
Author: Bianca C. Williams
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438482698
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 395
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Book Description
Plantation Politics and Campus Rebellions provides a multidisciplinary exploration of the contemporary university's entanglement with the history of slavery and settler colonialism in the United States. Inspired by more than a hundred student-led protests during the Movement for Black Lives, contributors examine how campus rebellions—and university responses to them—expose the racialized inequities at the core of higher education. Plantation politics are embedded in the everyday workings of universities—in not only the physical structures and spaces of academic institutions, but in its recruitment and attainment strategies, hiring practices, curriculum, and notions of sociality, safety, and community. The book is comprised of three sections that highlight how white supremacy shapes campus communities and classrooms; how current diversity and inclusion initiatives perpetuate inequality; and how students, staff, and faculty practice resistance in the face of institutional and legislative repression. Each chapter interrogates a connection between the academy and the plantation, exploring how Black people and their labor are viewed as simultaneously essential and disruptive to university cultures and economies. The volume is an indispensable read for students, faculty, student affairs professionals, and administrators invested in learning more about how power operates within education and imagining emancipatory futures.
Author: Luther Adams
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807899434
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
Luther Adams demonstrates that in the wake of World War II, when roughly half the black population left the South seeking greater opportunity and freedom in the North and West, the same desire often anchored African Americans to the South. Way Up North in Louisville explores the forces that led blacks to move to urban centers in the South to make their homes. Adams defines "home" as a commitment to life in the South that fueled the emergence of a more cohesive sense of urban community and enabled southern blacks to maintain their ties to the South as a place of personal identity, family, and community. This commitment to the South energized the rise of a more militant movement for full citizenship rights and respect for the humanity of black people. Way Up North in Louisville offers a powerful reinterpretation of the modern civil rights movement and of the transformations in black urban life within the interrelated contexts of migration, work, and urban renewal, which spurred the fight against residential segregation and economic inequality. While acknowledging the destructive downside of emerging postindustrialism for African Americans in the Jim Crow South, Adams concludes that persistent patterns of economic and racial inequality did not rob black people of their capacity to act in their own interests.
Author: Aram Goudsouzian
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813175526
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
Scholars examine the activist efforts of Black Americans in Memphis in a series of essays ranging from the Reconstruction era to the twenty-first century. In An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee, eminent and rising scholars present a multidisciplinary examination of African American activism in Memphis from the dawn of emancipation to the twenty-first century. Together, they investigate episodes such as the 1940 “Reign of Terror” when Black Memphians experienced a prolonged campaign of harassment, mass arrests, and violence at the hands of police. They also examine topics including the relationship between the labor and civil rights movements, the fight for economic advancement in Black communities, and the impact of music on the city’s culture. Covering subjects as diverse as politics, sports, music, activism, and religion, An Unseen Light illuminates Memphis’s place in the long history of the struggle for African American freedom and human dignity. Praise for Unseen Light “From the aftermath of the post-Civil War race massacre to continuous violence, murder, and bitter confrontations into the twenty-first century, contributors illuminate An Unseen Light on those Black Memphians forging lives nonetheless, through negotiation, protest, music, accommodation, prayer, faith and sometimes sheer stubbornness . . . . Scholars intellectually and personally invested in the city as a site of family and community, and career, bring an unequivocal depth of understanding and richness about place and belonging that textures the pages with life, from the church pews, the music studios, or the myriad of social or political organizations, to the land itself, adding more layers to underscore how black lives have mattered in the historical grassroots building of the nation. This is thoughtful and beautiful work.” —Françoise Hamlin, author of Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle After World War II “This rich collection covers a broad range of topics pertaining to the African American freedom struggle in Memphis, Tennessee. One of its greatest strengths is the breadth of the essays, which span a long period from the end of the Civil War to the twenty-first century. An Unseen Light is a valuable addition to civil rights scholarship.” —Cynthia Griggs Fleming, author of Yes We Did?: From King's Dream to Obama's Promise “The collection did an excellent job in explaining the inner workings of Memphis . . . . The works highlighted the past actions, organizing and insurgency which created the dynamics of racism, classism, social, and political power seen in modern Memphis. I recommend this collection to those interested in the shaping of a large southern city. I also recommend to new and lifelong Memphians to provide a blueprint of the historical legacy of Memphis and how this legacy continues to impact the lives of African Americans.” —Tennessee Libraries
Author: Nan Elizabeth Woodruff
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674045335
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
This is the story of how rural Black people struggled against the oppressive sharecropping system of the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta during the first half of the twentieth century. Here, white planters forged a world of terror and poverty for Black workers, one that resembled the horrific deprivations of the African Congo under Belgium’s King Leopold II. Delta planters did not cut off the heads and hands of their African American workers but, aided by local law enforcement, they engaged in peonage, murder, theft, and disfranchisement. As individuals and through collective struggle, in conjunction with national organizations like the NAACP and local groups like the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, Black men and women fought back, demanding a just return for their crops and laying claim to a democratic vision of citizenship. Their efforts were amplified by the two world wars and the depression, which expanded the mobility and economic opportunities of Black people and provoked federal involvement in the region. Nan Woodruff shows how the freedom fighters of the 1960s would draw on this half-century tradition of protest, thus expanding our standard notions of the civil rights movement and illuminating a neglected but significant slice of the American Black experience.
Author: Milton Murayama
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824820077
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196
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Book Description
No other writer has attempted such a broad view of the nisei experience in Hawai‘i as Milton Murayama. In Plantation Boy, the third novel in a planned tetralogy that includes the highly popular All I Asking for Is My Body and Five Years on a Rock, eldest son Toshio narrates the continuing story of the Oyama family. Outspoken, proud, determined, passionate: Tosh is the voice of the rebel that authority seeks to silence; he is the proverbial "protruding nail" that Japanese tradition seeks to flatten. His fight is against not only his family’s poverty and the environment that keeps them oppressed, but also his own plantation-boy mentality. His struggles are set against the cataclysmic events of World War II—the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the internment of Japanese Americans, the heroism of the 100th and 442nd in Europe, the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in Asia—and the social and political upheavals in Hawai‘i. Here is a powerful work about Japanese in Hawai‘i that shows us more than stereotypes. By illuminating Tosh’s life, Murayama evokes a family and a community and, brilliantly, a critical vision of culture, of language, and of history itself.
