American Civil Rights Research Articles

Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II. By Emilio Zamora and No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. By Cynthia E. Orozco

Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II. By Emilio Zamora and No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. By Cynthia E. Orozco

Free at Last: Post-Katrina New Orleans and the Future of Conspiracy

In the first year following Hurricane Katrina and the breaking of the New Orleans levees, the New Orleans-based Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of eighty-two workers from South and Central America who were stranded in the city. By 2008, the consequences of the regional reliance on slavecatchers began attracting global attention, most notably in the case of the eighty-nine Indian workers at Signal International's Pasacagoula, Mississippi shipyard. This essay explores the invocation of the American civil rights movement in contemporary transcultural dramas and the fact that another “universal” movement has been marching alongside new protesters, and demonstrates that the Free Trade movement in the US has been not only the cause of many current civil rights struggles, but also the beneficiary of the older struggle's very definition of its “cause.” New laborers in the Deep South – Latin Americans and Asians – find themselves not just homeless, but placeless post-Katrina. Black Americans who were shipped out of the city in 2005 to provide a “cleansed” urban area open to new demographics now find themselves in permanent exile, as placeless as their replacements.

World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights

World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights

Long is the way and hard: one hundred years of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

This groundbreaking collection looks at the NAACP at all levels. Celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary in February 2009, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been the leading and best-known African American civil rights organization in the United States. It has played a major, and at times decisive, role in most of the important developments in the twentieth century civil rights struggle. Drawing on original and previously unpublished scholarship from leading researchers in the United States, Britain, and Europe, this important collection of sixteen original essays offers new and invaluable insights into the work and achievements of the association. The first part of the book offers challenging reappraisals of two of the NAACP's best-known national spokespersons, Walter White and Roy Wilkins. Other essays analyze the association's cultural initiatives and the key role played by its public-relations campaigns in the mid 1950s to counter segregationist propaganda and win over the hearts and minds of American public opinion in the wake of the NAACP's landmark legal victory in Brown v. Board of Education. Others provide thought-provoking accounts of the association's complex and difficult relationship with Martin Luther King, the post-World War II Civil Rights movement, and Black Power radicals of the 1960s. The second part of the collection focuses on the work of the NAACP at state, city, and local levels, examining its grassroots organization throughout the nation from Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit in the North, to California in the West, as well as states across the South including Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. Providing detailed and fascinating information on hitherto little explored aspects of the association's work, these studies complement the previous essays by demonstrating the impact national initiatives had on local activists and analyzing the often-strained relations between the NAACP national office in New York and its regional branches.

World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights

World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights

SUPA, Selma, and Stevenson: The Politics of Solidarity in mid-1960s Toronto

The year 1965 represents a critical moment in the development and transformation of activist and student politics in the city of Toronto. This article explores the involvement of young Canadian activists with a variety of causes, such as support for African American Civil Rights, opposition to American imperialism, and the movement against the war in Vietnam. By matching their own political aspirations with those of their New Left counterparts in the United States, these activists participated in a larger transaction of radical thought, transformative strategies, protest tactics, and democratic alternatives. The adoption of this affective politics of solidarity was ultimately key to the emergence of more local, community-based activism, as well as the sharpening of an anti-imperialist critique within the emergent New Left in Canada.

Sterilization Racism and Pan-Ethnic Disparities of the Past Decade: The Continued Encroachment on Reproductive Rights

I n the late 1960s and through the 1970s, reports of coercive, involuntary, and otherwise nonconsenting sterilizations of American Indian, African American, Mexican, and Puerto Rican origin women began surfacing in the United States.1 These revelations came at a time of intense civil rights activity and political consciousness among non-white2 groups in the United States. American Indian and African American women and girls were especially impacted by sterilization abuse. In a well-known case, recounted by Jane Lawrence, Dr. Connie PinkertonUri saw a twenty-six-year-old patient in early November 1972 who visited her clinic and requested a womb transplant.3 It turned out that the woman was given a full hysterectomy (for alcohol* ism) at age twenty after being told by an Indian Health Services (IHS) > doctor that the procedure was reversible. Other scholars have noted cases of American Indian women receiving hysterectomies as young « as age eleven.4 These cases are similar to the experiences of African 2 American women and girls, such as the Reif sisters, ages twelve and i fourteen, who were the unwilling and unknowing recipients of tubai 5 17 sterilization as well as guinea pigs for intrauterine devices and what o were then experimental DepoProvera shots (along with their older ° sister, Katie) in the early 1970s.5 African American civil rights leader £ Fannie Lou Hamer was compelled to get involved in the modern civil « rights movement, in part, after receiving a Mississippi Appendectomy

Takin' It to the Streets: Hare and Madden on Civil Disobedience

Peter Hare and Edward Madden explored the concept of civil disobedience between 1968 and 1978. They sought to clarify the concept of civil disobedience by outlining its various forms, identifying its components, and describing the kinds of situation where its use is and is not legitimate. They considered a number of recent and contemporary cases, including World War II resistance efforts, the Vietnam war protests, the American civil rights and Black Power movements, protests for women's reproductive rights, and physicians' strikes. Arguing primarily on the basis of human rights theory, they conclude that civil disobedience, including violent actions, can be justified in a variety of situations. They explicitly respond to two extant arguments against robust acts of civil disobedience: that they are unwarranted because they promote social instability, and that they are unnecessary given the procedural provisions of the U.S. legal system.

Hurry Sundown: Otto Preminger, Baton Rouge, and Race, 1966–1967

By the time he began filming Hurry Sundown in 1966, independent producer-director Otto Preminger was already well-known for a series of controversial films that had successfully challenged existing censorship conventions. Working largely with local newspaper archives, this essay documents the difficulties Preminger faced while filming this racially-charged best seller on location in Louisiana. The negative critical reaction which greeted the film at the time of its release is analyzed within the context of the ongoing American Civil Rights movement.

From co‐op to co‐opt: gender and class in the early Civil Rights Movement

This essay begins with a discussion of how the Homeless Citizens League based in Dungannon and comprised almost entirely of young Catholic mothers coalesced around the issue of discriminatory housing allocation in the early 1960s. Drawing on tactics pioneered by American civil rights activists, these women challenged Unionist political domination of the town's Catholics on the street. Quickly after they began to protest, the local doctor's wife joined the group and set about professionalizing the women's advocacy efforts as the group's “chairman.” Utilizing a combination of archival research, documentary evidence, and supplementary semi‐structured interviews this essay analyzes how class and gender hierarchies interacted to change the face of the nascent housing rights movement and transform it into a middle class civil rights pressure group. I argue that by manipulating the prevailing patriarchal and middle class attitudes of their political innocence, these women were able to challenge the local council and, by extension, the state. Once the state met their initial demands, however, their own acceptance of gender and class hierarchies contributed to their complicit withdrawal from the movement.

Seattle in the 1960s: Music, Identity, and the Struggle for Civil Rights

During the 1960s, the American civil rights movement fundamentally altered the identity of Seattle’s black community. During the proceeding decades, its process of identity formation hinged on a shared appreciation and understanding of Rhythm and Blues music. Artists like Ray Charles and Jimi Hendrix benefited from this rich musical tradition. However, the intensification of racial discord politicized the African-American community. Black music became infused with overt political melodies. While remaining a key factor in shaping black identity, it also served to mobilize the broader community against racial inequality. This article explores the role of music in the construction of black identity, a process that indelibly altered the Emerald City. By drawing upon a diverse range of contemporary sources, as well as more recent literature written on thePacific Northwest, this article highlights the ways in which a specific community relates to, and is shaped by, one of its own cultural constructs. Ultimately, the article examines 1960s Seattle as a case study of the transition within black identity that occurred all across America.

On Collaborating: An Interview with José Cruz González

FALL 2009 159 On Collaborating: An Interview with José Cruz González Susan Vaneta Mason José Cruz González is a playwright, director, musician, lyricist, creator of the Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California, and Professor of Theatre Arts and Dance at California State University, Los Angeles. His parents and grandparents were farm workers and he grew up on California’s central coast. He went to college during the Mexican American Civil Rights movement where he was among the first generation of Chicano Studies students who defined and shaped Chicano theatre. González has a prolific career as a writer of youth and adult plays and has received numerous awards (Kennedy Center, NEA, TCG and others). During his development as an artist and throughout his professional career with commissions by numerous theatre companies, he has been committed to exploring diverse approaches to artistic collaboration. González’s latest play, Sunsets and Margaritas, was recently produced at the Denver Arts Center in Colorado. Susan Mason is González’s colleague at California State University, Los Angeles. She has collaborated with him on professional and academic projects. When and where did you first begin studying theatre? I did my undergraduate work at University of California San Diego in the late 1970s where I majored in U.S History/Chicano Studies and minored in Theatre. Why theatre? I knew I wanted to go to graduate school and thought theatre would help my communication skills. So I began by taking beginning, intermediate and then advanced acting. Eventually the teacher asked me to help coach ac- 160 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW tors. I was also tapping into the creativity in my childhood: painting, sketching, making things with my hands. How did theatre and Chicano Studies come together for you? Were you aware of Chicano theatre at that time? I first became aware of Chicano theatre by taking a class at UCSD from Jorge Huerta. We studied Teatro history and read plays. With that course I found my calling. Besides that, companies such as Teatro de la Esperanza toured to the university with bilingual productions. I also got to see the work of Carlos Morton who was an MFA student there. He had worked with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Tony Curiel was a graduating senior who went on to Stanford and then El Teatro Campesino. Silvia Cortez, Olga Villanueva, and Goyo Flores, a Vietnam vet, were undergrads in the program. So I got involved with the teatro group Jorge created on campus. After UCSD I went to Arizona State University and worked on my MA in theatre. I poured over everything I could find on Latino theatre, the history of the movement, when, how, Nuyorican writing. I started a teatro there. We performed with local actors and created some of our own work. At this time my focus changed to directing. I directed The Hands of God by Carlos Solórzano that became my thesis project. I was also introduced to theatre for young audiences. At that time my overall goal was to work with El Teatro Campesino or Teatro de la Esperanza: to take my training and experience back to the theatre. So after ASU, I applied to the MFA program at UC Irvine for more training in directing. What kinds of directing opportunities did you have when you completed your professional training at Irvine? How did your employment at South Coast Repertory (SCR) come about? While I was at Irvine, I had a summer internship with El Teatro Campesino. I also directed a student production of a Mexican play, Los Fantoches (The Effigies), that we took to the Edinburgh Festival. At Irvine I also worked with EOP [Education Opportunity Program] that had participated in a project called Second Lives at South Coast Rep. Second Lives was about immigrants and refugees of Orange County. I met with the project director, Michael Bigelow Dixon who invited me to assist him at SCR. And that lead to full-time employment at SCR? I began reading plays in Literary at SCR while I was still a student at Irvine. And I directed a play, Terra Nova, in a black box theatre...

White but not equal: Mexican Americans, jury discrimination, and the Supreme Court

Check out http://www.caminobluff.com/acahome.htm target=new>A Class Apart - the new PBS American Experience documentary that explores this historic case! In 1952 in Edna, Texas, Pete Hernandez, a twenty-one-year-old cotton picker, got into a fight with several men and was dragged from a tavern, robbed, and beaten. Upon reaching his home he collected his .22-caliber rifle, walked two miles back to the tavern, and shot one of the assailants. With forty eyewitnesses and a confession, the case appeared to be open and shut. Yet Hernandez v. Texas turned into one of the nation's most groundbreaking Supreme Court cases. Ignacio Garcia's White But Not Equal explores this historic but mostly forgotten case, which became the first to recognize discrimination against Mexican Americans. Led by three dedicated Mexican American lawyers, the case argued for recognition of Mexican Americans under the 14th Amendment as a ?class apart.? Despite a distinct history and culture, Mexican Americans were considered white by law during this period, yet in reality they were subjected to prejudice and discrimination. This was reflected in Hernandez's trial, in which none of the selected jurors were Mexican American. The concept of Latino identity began to shift as the demand for inclusion in the political and judicial system began. Garcia places the Hernandez v. Texas case within a historical perspective and examines the changing Anglo-Mexican relationship. More than just a legal discussion, this book looks at the whole case from start to finish and examines all the major participants, placing the story within the larger issue of the fight for Mexican American civil rights.

World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights

World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights

Ghostwriting Transnational Histories in Michelle Cliff's Free Enterprise

Abstract In this article I argue that Cliff's portrait of the nineteenth-century African American abolitionist, entrepreneur, and civil rights activist Mary Ellen Pleasant participates in a genre of subaltern historiography that I term “ghostwriting.” Cliff was inspired to write about Pleasant, who provided major funding and leadership in John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859—and indeed the stone that marks her grave reads simply: “M. E. P. She was a friend of John Brown”—because her role in the raid and in U.S. abolition is absent from nearly all historical documentation. I open the essay with the fact of Pleasant's erasure by documenting her historiographical absence and then go on to explain how Cliff ghostwrites Pleasant's story through a narrative of strategic adjacencies. Cliff enmeshes Pleasant's story with those of others engaged in contrapuntal history-telling from all over the world. This transnational network of resistance extends in Cliffs novel from the Caribbean to the Pacific to Sephardic passageways; her character bears witness to events from the Spanish Inquisition to the Civil Rights era in the U.S., a temporal span that Cliff achieves through the dynamic of haunting. Through her emphasis on the power of mutual witnessing and her use of a Decameronian plot structure, Cliff acts as a ghostwriter by first telling another person's story and, more importantly, by recounting stories of largely absent and hence ghostly subjects.

“To be Shot at by the Whites and Dodged by the Negroes”: Lyndon Johnson and the Texas NYA

Although Lyndon B. Johnson's presidential record clearly established him as a committed champion of African American civil rights, the origins of this commitment remain less clear. This article examines LBJ's record as head of the Texas National Youth Administration (NYA) in the mid-1930s to argue that he demonstrated a genuine commitment to racial equality much earlier than many accounts suggest. Furthermore, in an attempt to offer a fuller understanding of the future president's civil rights views, it provides the first analysis of this period that places Johnson's record within a comparative framework that considers the performance of other Southern NYA programs at the same time.

Music as social life: the politics of participation

People around the world and throughout history have used music to express their inner emotions, reach out to the divine, woo lovers, celebrate weddings, inspire political movements, and lull babies to sleep. In Music as Social Life, Thomas Turino explores why it is that music and dance are so often at the center of our most profound personal and social experiences.Turino begins by developing tools to think about the special properties of music and dance that make them fundamental resources for connecting with our own lives, our communities, and the environment. These concepts are then put into practice as he analyzes various musical examples among indigenous Peruvians, rural and urban Zimbabweans, and American old-time musicians and dancers. To examine the divergent ways that music can fuel social and political movements, Turino looks at its use by the Nazi Party and by the American civil rights movement. Wide-ranging, accessible to anyone with an interest in music's role in society, and accompanied by a compact disc, Music as Social Life is an illuminating initiation into the power of music.

World War II and Mexican American civil rights

Introduction by Richard Griswold del Castillo 1. Mexican Americans in 1940: Perceptions and Conditions by Richard Steele 2. The Federal Government Discovers Mexican Americans by Richard Steele 3. Violence in Los Angeles: Sleepy Lagoon, the Zoot-Suit Riots, and the Liberal Response by Richard Steele 4. The War and Changing Identities: Personal Transformations by Richard Griswold del Castillo 5. Civil Rights on the Home Front: Leaders and Organizations by Richard Griswold del Castillo Epilogue: Civil Rights and the Legacy of War by Richard Steele and Richard Griswold del Castillo

Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party. By Paul Frymer. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. xvi, 202 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 978-0-691-13081-1. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-691-13465-9.)

Paul Frymer's Black and Blue is an important book, precisely because it takes what should be so obvious to scholars and makes it appear as such. At least since the mid-1980s, scholars have debated the “rise and fall” of the labor-civil rights movement and its relationship to the power and authority of the Democratic party. Combining the methodologies of politics, the law, and history, Frymer's interdisciplinary work should help settle this long-running debate and contribute to new (and perhaps even more productive) avenues of inquiry. At the core of Black and Blue is the argument that post-World War II tensions between African American civil rights struggles, the labor movement, and the Democratic party were the products of institutional responses to the crisis of labor in the 1930s and to black demands for workplace equity that went largely ignored in the legislative arena until the 1960s. In 1935 Congress passed the Wagner Act, creating the National Labor Relations Board (nlrb), and in 1964 Congress created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (eeoc) a centerpiece of the landmark Civil Rights Act. As Frymer makes clear, each agency emerged with different institutional rules and conflicting mandates, which have since shaped American race and labor relations in profound ways. Congress empowered the nlrb to protect the rights of workers to organize unions and bargain collectively with employers, but the Wagner Act did not include provisions to protect minority workers from discrimination in the workplace or within unions. The eeoc's purpose became to take on discrimination in the workplace and within unions. The problem, however, was that Congress denied the agency the power and resources necessary to handle its tasks on its own, leading to an ever-expanding role for private lawyers and federal judges in adjudicating discrimination cases related to labor. As a result, the struggles for civil and labor rights have taken divergent paths. In Frymer's words, “U.S. national labor policy divided labor and race into separate forums, splitting the matters politically and legally, and leading to conflict instead of intersection” (p. 9).

World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights ed. by Richard Griswold del Castillo (review)

maintains a comfortable pace in relating the techniques that Arthur Hill used in solving cases and apprehending felons. Law on the Last Frontier is a refreshing look at one man’s career in the fabled Texas Ranger service, carried out in a rugged, sparsely populated area of the state during a time that is often overlooked by historians. Lantana, Texas Stephen L. Moore World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights. Edited by Richard Griswold del Castillo. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Pp. 256. Illustrations, appendices , notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0-29271-738-1. $55.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-29271-739-8. $24.95, paper.) The Mexican American struggle for civil rights predates World War II, but when hundreds of thousands of men left their segregated barrios, enlisted in the military, and went to war for the United States, they profoundly impacted the movement for Mexican American civil rights. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of other Mexican American men and women took jobs in war industries or in other factory work, where they worked alongside whites, earned equal pay, and supported the massive American war effort. Trying to create unity during the crisis , foster patriotism, and garner support for the war, the U.S. government suddenly discovered Mexican Americans as an ethnic minority that had specific needs and, most importantly, the government believed addressing those needs was in the wider national interest, at least for the moment. Mexican Americans became important to the nation at the same time that their political awareness was increasing. Through service and sacrifice in a war they were told was fought to defend freedom and democracy, many Mexican Americans, especially veterans, believed that they had demonstrated their loyalty, proven their patriotism, and earned their right to be treated as equals. They were no longer willing to tolerate second-class citizenship. Richard Griswold del Castillo documents these developments in poignant sections on Mexican American GIs, on how the war affected Mexican American women, and on how those experiences fed an evolving political consciousness. Mexican Americans had already been demanding equal educational rights for their children, but during and after the war they exhibited new energy in their demands for equal access to public places and proper representation on juries, while more people, especially veterans, felt emboldened to challenge discrimination personally and through organizations fighting for fairness and inclusion. This rising awareness found political expression through the creation of new civil rights groups like the American GI Forum, and the renewed dynamism of older established groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). Overcoming entrenched prejudice, though, was an uphill battle. Richard Steele cites a 1942 poll of white Americans conducted by George Gallup in which 12 percent felt Mexicans were as good as Americans, while 59 percent felt they were inferior. No other nationality scored that low, including others whom Americans showed prej346 Southwestern Historical Quarterly January *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 346 udice towards, like the Chinese whose immigration to the U.S. had been selectively excluded, and the Japanese, with whom the country was at war. The authors show that the growing government concern expressed for Mexican Americans, though important in the long run, was mainly pragmatic during the war. There were two main elements to the government’s position. The first was the maintenance of the “Good Neighbor” policy, which sought friendly relations with Latin American countries, especially Mexico, and so the treatment of Mexican Americans earned greater scrutiny. The second was the desire to maintain a compact between labor and capital to limit labor shortages and work stoppages in order to keep factories running and war material rolling off assembly lines. That brought in the well-intentioned Fair Employment Practices Committee, which attempted to end workplace discrimination. Civil rights gains though, have had to come from direct challenges to discriminatory laws and practices from Mexican Americans themselves. This well-written, very readable book addresses important themes and develops them in a way that will appeal to a broad audience while providing a solid grounding in the established literature and insight from primary research. The book is enhanced by a collection of well-considered appendices...