“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

The modern civil rights movement in America was directed and sustained by ministers and churches fervently proclaiming Judeo-Christian religious beliefs. Its leaders were mostly black ministers, who preached religious sermons inside and outside churches, insisting on promised rights. Its organizations were primarily black churches, along with an association of ministers; and the demonstrators were mostly their congregations. Though the movement’s base of support grew to include many who acted on other impulses, and its approach adopted tactics from Gandhi and others, the civil rights movement remained primarily a product of Judeo-Christian faith and its religious speech. Its religious speech was evident in the leadership by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was "first and foremost ’a clergyman, a Baptist preacher,’ a Christian," and he led by the religious speech of sermons, addresses, books, interviews, and demonstrations. That can be seen in each of King’s major campaigns in the modern civil rights movement. Other leaders also advocated Judeo-Christian principles and nonviolence, through speeches and pamphlets, marches, and church rallies. The triumph of the modern civil rights movement came mostly from the religious speech of the larger religious wing of ministers and congregations, not of the much smaller secular wing.

America’s decision to enter World War II further highlighted the contradictions between the nation’s democratic rhetoric and the reality of its segregated society. These contradictions that gave rise to the modern African American civil rights movement led by an African American press. Because of its transition to fascism and anti-Semitism, the positive image that many African Americans held of Germany turned into a decidedly negative one. The racist Nuremberg Laws of the Third Reich were soon compared with the Jim Crow laws of the southern United States, a comparison that began to proliferate throughout the African American press in the 1930s. This chapter examines how the African American press incorporated this analogy into a sustained campaign for civil rights in the mid-1930s and accelerated with the outbreak of World War II into the postwar period. It looks at the “Double V” campaign initiated by the Pittsburgh Courier in February 1942 and joined by African American newspapers all across the country, arguing that this was the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.

The frequent police killings during the COVID-19 pandemic forced a reckoning among Americans from all backgrounds and propelled the Black Lives Matter movement into a global force. This manuscript addresses major issues to aid practitioners in the effective treatment of African Americans via the lens of Critical Race Theory and the Bioecological Model. We place the impacts of racism on Black families in historical context and outline the sources of Black family resilience. We critique structural racism embedded in all aspects of psychology and allied fields. We provide an overview of racial socialization and related issues affecting the parenting decisions in Black families, as well as a detailed overview of impacts of structural racism on couple dynamics. Recommendations are made for engaging racial issues in therapy, providing emotional support and validation to couples and families experiencing discrimination and racial trauma, and using Black cultural strengths as therapeutic resources.

The New Career of Jim Crow Stephen Robinson (bio) Stephanie Cole and Natalie J. Ring, eds. The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012. xi + 216 pp. Notes and index. $30.00. Robert Cassanello. To Render Invisible: Jim Crow and Public Life in New South Jacksonville. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. xv + 188 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $74.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). Stephen A. Berrey. The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xiii + 331 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95 (paper); $28.99 (e-book). Audrey Thomas McCluskey. A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. x +181 pp. Notes, chronology, bibliography, and index. $40.00 (cloth); $39.99 (e-book). William E. O’Brien. Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. xv + 191 pp. Notes and index. $39.95. Ruth Thompson-Miller, Joe R. Feagin and Leslie H. Picca. Jim Crow’s Legacy: The Lasting Impact of Segregation. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. xvi + 262 pp. Notes and index. $85.00 (cloth); $28.00 (paper); $27.99 (e-book). The scholarship on the Jim Crow South has had a long career. Dating back to C. Vann Woodward’s path breaking book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), historians have sought to understand when and why de jure segregation was rolled out across the South. Woodward argued that it was the loss of restraining forces by the 1890s—Southern liberalism, radicalism, and Northern intervention—that enabled white Southern lawmakers to find a new way of enforcing strict racial hierarchies. The flexibility and experimentation in race [End Page 457] relations evident in the 1880s gave way to a more rigid system in the 1890s. Path breaking though this book was, it did not take into account earlier forms of segregation, nor did it contain any serious analysis of African Americans’ agency—a lacuna that was filled in part by Howard Rabinowitz’s insightful Race Relations in the Urban South (1978). Over the last fifteen years or so, scholars have sought to extend the contours of the debate. The essays collected in Jumpin’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (2000), edited by Jane Dailey, Glenda Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, fundamentally reshaped our approach to the Jim Crow South. Rather than interpreting this period from the 1870s to the 1970s through a white lens—and thereby implying that the maintenance of white supremacy was the fixed component—these scholars instead argued that it was black resistance to Jim Crow that was continuous. It was white resistance to black political activism (and, later, to desegregation) that was in a constant state of flux. The books under review in this essay build on the work of Dailey et al. Each explores the fruitful scholarly path of black resistance, and a white counter-resistance that was ever changing. Jim Crow, it seems, had many careers, and was forced to change as a result of the persistence of African Americans’ resistance to it. The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South, edited by Stephanie Cole and Natalie J. Ring, is a collection of essays that emerged from a 2010 conference on the segregation era. This collection reveals that Jim Crow from the very beginning was not a fixed entity. As a result, the contributors argue that the old debate over timing is ultimately a folly. Indeed, the essays in The Folly of Jim Crow expand on this essential point. A particular strength of this work—and one that informs to some extent the scholarship that follows—is that it takes the long perspective on Jim Crow. As with scholarship on the modern Civil Rights Movement or, more recently, the Reconstruction era, the chapters in this collection do not simply focus on the early years of Jim Crow, or the period of legal desegregation. Instead, they reframe the story: back into Reconstruction and forward into the post–1960s era. As a result...

12 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 82, NO 2 82 No.2 November 1968. Four years later, she launched a presidential bid that, though unsuccessful, received national attention and support. Since then, more than seventy women of color have been elected to Congress, including Carol Mosely Braun, the first Black woman elected to the Senate, in 1993 (and only the second Black senator since the Reconstruction era). It is important to note that after close to a hundred years of political mobilizing and activism, Black women are still not fully represented in Congress, and this country has never elected a Black woman to serve as the governor of a state or the president of the country. Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement The years 1954-1972, more commonly known as the modern Civil Rights Movement, were a time when Black people increased their effort and pressure to force the government to end segregation, both in theory and in practice.6 As they were during the antislavery movement of the nineteenth century, Black women were instrumental in the success of the Civil Rights Movement. Although their contributions and struggles may not be a part of the greater discussions, they must be noted and recognized in order to gain a true understanding of the role women played to advance the cause of civil rights.7 Though there are a number of Black women from the Civil Rights Movement who could (and should) be profiled—Ada Sipuel, Diane Nash, and Gloria Richardson immediately come to mind8 —this paper will specifically narrow the scope to look at those women whose contributions to strengthening the political power of the Black community were so extensive that any civil rights conversation that does not include them is not accurate, complete, or exact. These women, in a sense, are the lenses through which one can see how the Civil Rights Movement was shaped and nurtured by the commitment and contributions of Black women, as a whole. Two of the women, Dorothy I. Height and Coretta Scott King, are familiar names, but their contributions to the Civil Rights Movement may not be as well-known as they should be.9 The other three, Ella Jo Baker, Septima Poinsette Clark, and Fannie Lou Hamer, are names that may not be as familiar, but their contributions must be included (evaluated and critiqued) in the greater discussion about the Civil Rights Movement.10 Ella Jo Baker EllaJosephineBaker(December13,1903–December13,1986) worked as a field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), acting executive director for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and mentor for the students who founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).11 Born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1903, Baker was the granddaughter of slaves, and thedaughterofawaiterandateacher.In1927,afterchallenging school policies and procedures, she graduated at the top of her class from Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and moved to New York City. She quickly became involved in the struggle for Black political and economic equality and later joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League (YNCL). One year later, she was elected as the league’s first national director. In 1941, Baker began working as the assistant field secretary for the NAACP. Two years later she was promoted (without her NEVERTHELESS, THEY PERSISTED: BLACK WOMEN AND THE FIRE WITHIN THEM Examining the Legacies of Ella Jo Baker, Septima Poinsette Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dorothy Irene Height, and Coretta Scott King By: Karsonya Wise Whitehead “Too long have we been silent under unjust and unholy charges; we cannot expect to have them removed until we disprove them through ourselves.” —Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin1 Black women have historically been actively involved in political and social action. From voter registration to community activism, they have effectively organized from within and on behalf of the community. During the early days of the Women’s Movement, even though their participation was not always included in the history books, they were at the meeting tables helping to organize, fundraise, and demonstrate for change.2 They fought multiple battles, including working to end American enslavement and working to establish the right to vote for Black people. When the Civil War ended...

The modern civil rights movement formed in the years between the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965. The movement was a broad-based and multifaceted campaign to remove the legal forms of political, economic, and social discrimination against African Americans and other people of color. It was characterized by nonviolent forms of protest and civil disobedience but often met with organized violence and intimidation. Nonetheless, the decade witnessed dramatic achievements in the quest for civil rights and equality and notable successes in the effort to dismantle the segregationist Jim Crow laws.

This chapter charts the rise of the modern civil rights movement—a term that expands beyond the idea that the movement began in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus. The chapter follows the emergence of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and its legal strategies to eliminate racial segregation. Other political movements are examined as counterweights to the NAACP’s efforts to convince the Supreme Court to take on evermore civil rights cases. The chapter details the emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, respectively, taking care to add important nuances to their evolving activism.

Much of the scholarship on the modern Civil Rights Movement has recaptured dramatic and poignant events through eyewitness accounts and oral narratives—from letters, speeches, newspaper editorials, press releases, and photographs that summon vivid images of fire hoses and police dogs, peaceful protestors and violent rioters. The conventional approach (or master narrative) of civil rights history has focused almost exclusively upon the individual personalities and grassroots organizations that led the fight for equal protection under the law, desegregated lunch counters, and the right to vote in local and national elections. Rather than broaden and deepen our understanding of individual and collective forms of resistance, however, such an approach often simplifies and distorts a much more complex history of black militancy and activism in the United States. Most people come to associate the modern Civil Rights Movement with the famous names, places, and events that made headlines during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s—the murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi; Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott; Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the March on Washington; Bob Moses and Freedom Summer; Gloria Richardson and the Cambridge Movement; and Fannie Lou Hamer at the 1964 National Democratic Convention—and not the ordinary men and women who risked their lives in the face of mob violence.

Reviewed by: The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will by Russell Brooker David T. Ballantyne The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will. By Russell Brooker. ( Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. xxx, 333. $100.00, ISBN 978-0-7391-7992-5.) Russell Brooker provides an accessible overview of the black freedom struggle from the Civil War to 1950. The American Civil Rights Movement, [End Page 771] 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will is a political science– influenced accompaniment to recent syntheses of the long black civil rights struggle, such as Stephen Tuck's We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), though Brooker's account ends before African Americans made their most significant gains. His central argument concerns "people of good will"—black and white individuals who acted in African Americans' interests regardless of their motives. Black agency and pressure, not altruism, he contends, induced this conduct. The first half of his synthesis maps black activism alongside the behavior of these people of good will from 1865 to the racial nadir of the early twentieth century. The second half traces the struggle to 1950, when the southern caste system was "severely weakened" (p. xviii). The book concludes with an epilogue that reflects on connections between 1865 and 1950 and contemporary race relations. Brooker enumerates his major arguments at the outset, organizes chapters clearly, and writes in straightforward prose. He also quantifies shifting African American fortunes throughout his account, including helpful tables detailing Reconstruction-era African American college foundations, lynchings by race during "Redemption," twentieth-century black and white southern schooling data, and indices of the extent of racial segregation over time. Breaking with Tuck's nationally focused account and other scholarship examining racial unrest outside the South, Brooker portrays the civil rights struggle as a mostly southern phenomenon. His nonsouthern treatment includes shifting northern public opinion on race throughout the period, nationwide post–World War I race riots, legal decisions concerning racially restrictive covenants, and the activities of northern civil rights organizations in the South, not elsewhere. Yet while the North was a "safe haven" for African Americans in comparison with the Jim Crow South, the American civil rights struggle concerned more than destroying southern racial apartheid (p. xxi). Incorporating scholarship that examines nonsouthern civil rights struggles and that questions the nonsouthern racial consensus around the mid-twentieth century—like Thomas J. Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008)—would bring nuance to Brooker's analysis and enable him to explain with greater authority the subsequent nationwide white reaction to race that he hints at in the epilogue. Closer engagement with more recent historiography would also strengthen Brooker's discussion. First, Brooker'suse of civil rights movement to define activism between 1865 and 1950 welcomes a consideration of recent debates over the periodization of the civil rights movement—relevant works include Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past" (Journal of American History, 91 [March 2005], 1233–63) and Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang's "The 'Long Movement' as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies" (Journal of African American History, 92 [Spring 2007], 265–88). Yet in Brooker'stelling, thisworkissimply "about the civil rights movement … before it [the term] got capitalized" (p. xii). Second, given the book's justifiable emphasis on the centrality of violence in infringing on black freedoms, recent military-focused Reconstruction scholarship [End Page 772] would offer a counterpoint to Brooker's argument on the use of force to preserve black rights. The book's later portion effectively details civil rights gains and organization through the 1940s. Though social, economic, intellectual, and political developments undoubtedly weakened Jim Crow segregation by midcentury, Brooker might have engaged with works that problematize the relationship between World War II–era and later civil rights activism, such as Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein's "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement" (Journal...

In the ongoing campaigns to abolish legalized racial segregation in the United States, the nonviolent direct action protest strategy adopted by students at black and white colleges and universities in the South, referred to as the sit-ins, is considered an historically significant innovation. This act of resistance and civil disobedience had been practiced by previous generations of social and political activists. However, when the four black students at North Carolina A&T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960, who were heirs to a black and white radical tradition, decided to sit-in at the lunch counter at the Woolworth store, a new phase in the black freedom struggle in the United States was initiated. The southern college campuses spawned hundreds of willing to put their lives on the line in the cause of social justice. The sit-ins and the formation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) represented a turning point and historical marker in the evolution of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. (1) In the black freedom struggles in the Republic of South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, launching of protests by black students also marked a turning point and the onset of a new phase of the larger anti-apartheid movement. The Soweto protests in 1976 demonstrated the degree of political consciousness even among elementary and secondary school children and signaled a renewed level of resistance to South Africa's white minority government. But even earlier in the late 1960s student activists in South Africa launched a new phase in the black freedom struggle in South Africa with the formation of the Black Consciousness Movement and South African Students Organization (SASO). Under the leadership of Stephen Biko and Barney Pityana, SASO mobilized black African, Coloured, and Indian students and, according to Gail Gerhart, raised the level of political education and ideological diffusion never before achieved by any black [South African] political organization. (2) In the black freedom struggles in the United States and South Africa in the 1960s, black activism played a significant role and made distinctive contributions to the larger campaigns for social and political change. In this essay I will examine black activism at three historically black, public universities in the 1960s and 1970s--Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the University of the North and the University of the Western Cape in South Africa--focusing on the patterns of protests and the responses of university and government officials to activism. THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA While the launching of Montgomery Bus Boycott organized in December 1955 was generally considered the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement (CRM) in the United States, sociologist Aldon Morris in his book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change, published in 1984, argued that the bus boycott organized in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953, and led by Baptist minister Rev. T. J. Jemison, served as the model for the protest launched in Montgomery almost two years later. In Baton Rouge, the mobilization of the black community through church leadership, the formation of alternative means of transportation, and the filing of lawsuits to challenge segregation on public transit in the state and federal courts in Louisiana served as the model for activities that would take place in Montgomery, Alabama. Rev. Jemison became an important advisor to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the leaders of the Montgomery Improvement Association during their year-long bus protest. (3) According to Rev. T.J. Jemison, in the period between 1953 and 1960, African Americans in Baton Rouge made some attempts to desegregate eating establishments in the downtown areas, and these efforts were often led by students from Southern University. …

From its earliest origins during the slavery trade, the Reconstruction period, and Jim Crow segregation, to the dénouement of the modern Civil Rights movement, the Black Church in America has served as a vital source of collective comfort, an agent of socialization, and an outlet for active and positive social change.1 During the period of chattel slavery (c. 1619–1865), Black sacred worship emphasized an organic theology of liberation which gave its parishioners an idealistic belief that their centuries-long bondage would end by Divine intervention. In addition, the enslaved focused their spiritual energies on fashioning a communal eschatology that related their plight to a future society in which they would be treated with a degree of humanity by the dominant society. This new reality, they hoped, would allow the former slave to fully participate in American life as equal partners to their former owners.2 These lofty ideals, forged from oft-quoted historical analogies based upon preached Judeo-Christian Sacred Texts, were very important sources of inspiration to the slave and resulted in the initial configuration of an organic Black theology.3 Moreover, these theological constructs were also the primary inspiration for unique practice of Black preaching styles. Hence, these innovative practices helped to form the fundamental pillars of Black worship services well into the mid-nineteenth century. In addition, many of these religious practices carried over into the Reconstruction period when slavery had ended and well into the Civil Rights movement of the twentieth century, where the overall political objective of achieving legal and social equality was of paramount importance.

Blue Notes 2.0: The Diachronic Resonance of Langston Hughes During the George Floyd Protests: A Foreword

Ordinary' people fueled the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. They held mass meetings, marched in the streets, defied the Klan, registered to vote, and filled the jails. Music helped them in every phase of these activities. “I have stood in a meeting with hundreds of youngsters,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr., “and joined in while they sang ‘Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round.’ It is not just a song; it is a resolve. A few minutes later, I have seen those same youngsters refuse to turn around from the onrush of a police dog, refuse to turn around before a pugnacious Bull Conner [chief of police in Birmingham, Alabama] in command of men armed with power hoses. These songs bind us together, give us courage together, help us march together” (1). The following lesson plan can help students understand the vital role these freedom songs played by providing examples of how traditional songs were used and adapted to specific circumstances.

Journal Article Southern Black Women in the Modern Civil Rights Movement Get access Bruce A. Glasrud and Merline Pitre. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2013. x, 236 pp. Cloth, $47.50. Paper, $27.50.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 2, September 2014, Pages 646–647, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau438 Published: 01 September 2014

(1993). Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 112-112.