Black Freedom Movement Research Articles

Locating the Civil Rights Movement: An Essay on the Deep South, Midwest, and Border South in Black Freedom Studies

Locating the Civil Rights Movement: An Essay on the Deep South, Midwest, and Border South in Black Freedom Studies

James Baldwin's Narrative of Black-White Kinship

In my larger project, I study James Baldwin’s interventions into black freedom movements and I examine his critical dialogue with white people in his time. At the heart of his interventions is a concept that I call boundness — a concept that posits white and black people in America as bound together in what is “literally and morally a blood relationship.” Baldwin describes America as a deeply troubled house in which white people commit violence against and deny their fundamental relatedness to black people. My claim is that the political power of Baldwin’s rhetorical deployment of boundness lies in the disruptive capacity of centering intimacy and impurity in theorizing about race. In the black and white framework, race making has been grounded in myths of and desire for white purity and separation. Impurity and intimacy are Baldwin’s correctives. In this conference paper, using two different texts, I will present Baldwin’s concept of boundness and I will examine some of the rhetorical techniques of Baldwin’s interventions. In particular, I will study the larger kinship narrative, his destabilization of racial categories and his selective use of racial signifiers. I will pay particular attention to Baldwin’s interventions into black nationalist movements and integrationist movements in his time, and I will consider what political space his ideas can open for us today.

A new deal for all?: race and class struggles in Depression-era Baltimore

In A New Deal for All? Andor Skotnes examines the interrelationships between the Black freedom movement and the workers' movement in Baltimore and Maryland during the Great Depression and the early years of the Second World War. Adding to the growing body of scholarship on the long civil rights struggle, he argues that such border state movements helped resuscitate and transform the national freedom and labor struggles. In the wake of the Great Crash of 1929, the freedom and workers' movements had to rebuild themselves, often in new forms. In the early 1930s, deepening commitments to antiracism led Communists and Socialists in Baltimore to launch racially integrated initiatives for workers' rights, the unemployed, and social justice. An organization of radicalized African American youth, the City-Wide Young People's Forum, emerged in the Black community and became involved in mass educational, anti-lynching, and Buy Where You Can Work campaigns, often in multiracial alliances with other progressives. During the later 1930s, the movements of Baltimore merged into new and renewed national organizations, especially the CIO and the NAACP, and built mass regional struggles. While this collaboration declined after the war, Skotnes shows that the earlier cooperative efforts greatly shaped national freedom campaigns to come—including the civil rights movement.

“Kind of a Secular Sacrament”: Father Geno Baroni, Monsignor John J. Egan, and the Catholic War on Poverty

The author argues that social activist Catholic priests such as John J. Egan and Geno Baroni created a Catholic War on Poverty through Catholic civil rights organizations that included the National Catholic Conference of Interracial Justice and the development of community antipoverty organizations. Informed by the theology and social teachings of the Second Vatican Council, Egan, Baroni, and others saw the national War on Poverty as an extension of the civil rights movement. Their efforts led to the eventual formation of the Campaign for Human Development, the Catholic Church’s official antipoverty organization that continues to fight poverty in the twenty-first century.

Radical Women in the Struggle: A Review of Recent Literature on the Civil Rights and Black Freedom Movements

Radical Women in the Struggle: A Review of Recent Literature on the Civil Rights and Black Freedom Movements

The Business of black power: community development, capitalism, and corporate responsibility in postwar America

The Business of Black Power emphasizes the centrality of economic goals to the larger black freedom movement and explores the myriad forms of business development in the Black power era. This volume charts a new course for Black power studies and business history, exploring both the business ventures that Black power fostered and the impact of Black power on the nation's business world. Black activists pressed business leaders, corporations, and various levels of government into supporting a range of economic development ventures, from Black entrepreneurship, to grassroots experiments in economic self-determination, to indigenous attempts to rebuild inner-city markets in the wake of disinvestment. They pioneered new economic and development strategies, often in concert with corporate executives and public officials. Yet these same actors also engaged in fierce debates over the role of business in strengthening the movement, and some African Americans outright rejected capitalism or collaboration with business. The ten scholars in this collection bring fresh analysis to this complex intersection of African American and business history to reveal how Black power advocates, or those purporting a Black power agenda, engaged business to advance their economic, political, and social goals. They show the business of Black power taking place in the streets, boardrooms, journals and periodicals, corporations, courts, and housing projects of America. In short, few were left untouched by the influence of this movement.

War! what is it good for?: black freedom struggles and the U.S. military from World War II to Iraq

African Americans' long campaign for right to fight forced Harry Truman to issue his 1948 executive order calling for equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces. In War! What Is It Good For?, Kimberley Phillips examines how blacks' participation in the nation's wars after Truman's order and their protracted struggles for equal citizenship galvanised a vibrant antiwar activism that reshaped their struggles for freedom. Using an array of sources--from newspapers and government documents to literature, music, and film--and tracing the period from World War II to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Phillips considers how federal policies that desegregated the military also maintained racial, gender, and economic inequalities. Since 1945, the nation's need for military labour, blacks' unequal access to employment, and discriminatory draft policies have forced black men into the military at disproportionate rates. While mainstream civil rights leaders considered the integration of the military to be a civil rights success, many black soldiers, veterans, and antiwar activists perceived war as inimical to their struggles for economic and racial justice and sought to reshape the civil rights movement into an antiwar black freedom movement. Since the Vietnam War, Phillips argues, many African Americans have questioned linking militarism and war to their concepts of citizenship, equality, and freedom.

The Port Huron Statement at Fifty

The Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society, written fifty years ago this June, is the most ambitious, the most specific, and the most eloquent manifesto in the history of the American Left. It is also, at just over 25,000 words, undoubtedly the longest one. But it had to be lengthy to accomplish its aim—to propose an entire "agenda for a generation." Consider the variety of topics about which Tom Hayden and his fellow delegates to that SDS meeting held at the FDR Camp in Port Heron, Michigan, had intelligent and provocative things to say: moral values, American politics, the U.S. economy, the nation's intellectual and academic life, the labor movement, the cold war, the nu-clear arms race, the anticolonial revolution, and a vivid description of why the black freedom move-ment was so pivotal to the birth of a new Left. All this was informed by a sensibility attuned to what one might call the "national psychology." And that's just a summary of the first half of the statement.

Populism—Bringing Culture Back In

Populism—Bringing Culture Back In

Brokering Culture: Elma Lewis, Cultural Politics, and Community Building in Postwar Boston

Elma Lewis was an artist, educator, and bridge leadership activist. Her lifelong commitment to institution building linked earlier, foundational, community "uplift" efforts of the 1930s and 1940s to broader, sustained struggles for educational equality, economic justice, and community control during the 1960s and 1970s. The cultural programs and institutions that she founded were integral to the articulation of black community consciousness that developed in postwar Boston and, ultimately, formed the "cultural base" upon which increased calls for "community control" and sustained organizing and mobilizing efforts were launched during the late 1960s and early 1970s—most notably, those around the long struggle for educational equality. On the whole, her work was part of a broader tradition of black women's activism that contributed to ongoing community-building efforts central to the postwar black freedom movement in Boston and the nation.

“I GUESS I’M BECOMING MORE AND MORE MILITANT”: ARTHUR ASHE AND THE BLACK FREEDOM MOVEMENT, 1961–1968

Previous articleNext article No Access“I GUESS I’M BECOMING MORE AND MORE MILITANT”: ARTHUR ASHE AND THE BLACK FREEDOM MOVEMENT, 1961–1968Eric Allen HallEric Allen HallEric Allen Hall is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, GA. Search for more articles by this author Eric Allen Hall is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, GA.PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 96, Number 4Fall 2011African Americans and the History of Sport A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.96.4.0474 Views: 205Total views on this site Copyright 2011 ASALHPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell (review)

Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell (review)

BLACK AND RED: BLACK LIBERATION, THE COLD WAR, AND THE HORNE THESIS

This essay examines the groundbreaking scholarship of historian Gerald Horne, focusing particularly on what I term the thesis: the argument that white supremacy and anticommunism were the major forces shaping post-World II life and politics in the United States, with significant implications for African-descended and colonized people globally. Locked in a Manichean struggle with the Soviet Union for global supremacy, U.S. cold warriors, he argues, realized that legal or Jim Crow segregation was the Achilles heel for Washington's propaganda campaign to win the hearts and minds of people throughout the emerging As a result, U.S. government officials brutally suppressed W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Paul Robeson, William L. Patterson, Ferdinand Smith, and other African American leftists who pursued an antiracist, anti-imperialist, proletarian internationalist agenda. Simultaneously, the U.S. ruling class acquiesced to civil rights reforms for African Americans and other people of color out of fear that legal racial segregation would invalidate the U.S. claim to being the leader of the democratic free world. The postwar suppression of the left created an ideological vacuum in African American communities. Various forms of narrow nationalism, embraced by black nationalists and anticommunist liberals, filled this gap, with the latter achieving political hegemony within African American communities in the 1950s. Anticommunism and white supremacy, Horne concludes, profoundly shaped the trajectory of freedom movements across the African Diaspora. The Cold War, then, represented a rupture in African American life and political advancement. This argument runs through many of Horne's works. (1) Certainly, Home was not the first person to advance this argument. African American leftists during the McCarthy period were keenly aware of the connections between anticommunism and opposition to legal racial segregation. (2) Brenda Gayle Plummer, Carol Anderson, Nikhal Pal Singh, Penny Von Eschen, Kevin Gaines, Mary Dudziak and other scholars have offered perspectives that brilliantly explicate this relationship. (3) However, none have looked at the Cold War's impact on black life in the United States and across the African Diaspora as closely as Gerald Home. Indeed, it is hardly an overstatement to argue that his voluminous scholarship represents the most insightful work on the Black-Red encounter during the Cold and the transnational links between postwar African American freedom struggles and those in the Third World. (4) His work speaks directly to the continuing debates on the black-red encounter, as well the Red Scare's impact on postwar black freedom movements. (5) Above all, his scholarship has important implications for appreciating the impact of the Global Cold War on the African Diaspora worldwide. (6) Without question, his work will profoundly shape future interpretations of African American history and African Diaspora Studies, and many of the senior and junior researchers in these fields have acknowledged the debt they owe to Horne? (7) Given space limitations, I have decided to discuss five works: Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (1986); Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (2000); Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (1995); Cold in a Hot Zone: The United States Confronts Labor and Independence Struggles in the British West Indies (2007); and The End of Empires: African Americans and India (2008). These were chosen because 1 believe they effectively capture the thrust and key interventions of the Horne thesis in several historiographical trends. THE RED SCARE AND THE POSTWAR BLACK FREEDOM MOVEMENT In Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War; Horne posits what would become a major argument in this and several other works. …

A Twentieth-Century Triangle Trade: Selling Black Beauty at Home and Abroad, 1945–1965

This study examines the careers of African American beauty culturists as they worked in the United States, Europe, and Africa between 1945 and 1965. Facing push back at home, African American beauty entrepreneurs frequently sought out international venues that were hospitable and receptive to black Americans in the years following World War II. By strategically using European sites that white Americans regarded as the birthplace of Western fashion and beauty, African American entrepreneurs in the fields of modeling, fashion design, and hair care were able to win accolades and advance their careers. In gaining support abroad, particularly in Europe, these beauty culturists capitalized on their international success to establish, legitimize, and promote their business ventures in the United States. After importing a positive reputation for themselves from Europe to the United States, African American beauty entrepreneurs then exported an image of themselves as the world's premier authorities on black beauty to people of color around the globe as they sold their products and marketed their expertise on the African continent itself. This essay demonstrates the important role that these black female beauty culturists played, both as businesspeople and as race leaders, in their generation's struggle to gain greater respect and opportunity for African Americans both at home and abroad. In doing so it places African American beauty culturists within the framework of transatlantic trade networks, the Black Freedom Movement, Pan-Africanism, and America's Cold War struggle.

A Twentieth-Century Triangle Trade: Selling Black Beauty at Home and Abroad, 1945–1965

This study examines the careers of African American beauty culturists as they worked in the United States, Europe, and Africa between 1945 and 1965. Facing push back at home, African American beauty entrepreneurs frequently sought out international venues that were hospitable and receptive to black Americans in the years following World War II. By strategically using European sites that white Americans regarded as the birthplace of Western fashion and beauty, African American entrepreneurs in the fields of modeling, fashion design, and hair care were able to win accolades and advance their careers. In gaining support abroad, particularly in Europe, these beauty culturists capitalized on their international success to establish, legitimize, and promote their business ventures in the United States. After importing a positive reputation for themselves from Europe to the United States, African American beauty entrepreneurs then exported an image of themselves as the world's premier authorities on black beauty to people of color around the globe as they sold their products and marketed their expertise on the African continent itself. This essay demonstrates the important role that these black female beauty culturists played, both as businesspeople and as race leaders, in their generation's struggle to gain greater respect and opportunity for African Americans both at home and abroad. In doing so it places African American beauty culturists within the framework of transatlantic trade networks, the Black Freedom Movement, Pan-Africanism, and America's Cold War struggle.

Climbin' Jacob's ladder: the black freedom movement writings of Jack O'Dell

Climbin' Jacob's ladder: the black freedom movement writings of Jack O'Dell

Patrick D. Jones . The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee . Cambridge : Harvard University Press . 2009 . Pp. 318. $45.00.

The burgeoning scholarship on civil rights clashes outside the South is not only timely and insightful, but many of these works further complicate and challenge longstanding assumptions about the black freedom movement of the twentieth century. Patrick D. Jones's book contributes to this body of literature by using Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as a case study for advancing this continued conceptualizing and re-examining of the broader movement for racial equality. Alongside Joe William Trotter's Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–1945 (1985; rev. 2007), Jack Dougherty's More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (2004), and Andrew Witt's The Black Panthers in the Midwest: The Community Programs and Services of the Black Panther Party in Milwaukee, 1966–1977 (2007), Jones's work adds to the scholarly girth of the black experience in this particular city, an important and unique industrial hub of the North. One of the strengths of this text is the author's exposition of resistance to fair housing and employment equality by the highest-ranking local government officials—politicians and decision makers who also dominated leading civic institutions. White city dwellers and suburbanites also emerged as oppositional forces, particularly in response to the open housing campaign led by Father James Groppi and the NAACP Youth Council, although Jones emphasizes that the Milwaukee struggle was indeed a biracial one. As a result of Jones's thorough research on the struggle for fair housing, his book offers insight into why “inner cores” across the nation have expanded geographically and why the economies of these regions have become disturbingly depressed. Deeply affected by massive deindustrialization and economic restructuring, many of these areas began their steep decline before or during the very period in which demands for more attention to such socioeconomic trends were loudest.

There's always work at the post office: African American postal workers and the fight for jobs, justice, and equality

This book brings to life the important but neglected story of African American postal workers and the critical role they played in the U.S. labor and black freedom movements. Historian Philip Rubio, a former postal worker, integrates civil rights, labor, and left movement histories that too often are written as if they happened separately. Centered on New York City and Washington, D.C., the book chronicles a struggle of national significance through its examination of the post office, a workplace with facilities and unions serving every city and town in the United States.Black postal workers--often college-educated military veterans--fought their way into postal positions and unions and became a critical force for social change. They combined black labor protest and civic traditions to construct a civil rights unionism at the post office. They were a major factor in the 1970 nationwide postal wildcat strike, which resulted in full collective bargaining rights for the major postal unions under the newly established U.S. Postal Service in 1971. In making the fight for equality primary, African American postal workers were influential in shaping today's post office and postal unions.

Faithful to My Father's Dream

It has been more than a year since I sat with my older brother at my father's side, watching him slowly succumb to pancreatic cancer. At the age of seventy-two, James Bevel had seen and experienced more than most men. As I looked at him, I thought about the father he was to me, the civil rights leader he was to many, and the flawed and troubled man whose fate seemed to coincide with one of the subjects in the great Greek tragedies he enjoyed so much. My father was from the same generation as the grandparents of many of my peers. It is a struggle for people of my generation to understand how far African Americans have come since the days of slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow, and the black freedom movement. In the era of Twitter, Facebook, iPhones and other daily distractions, few take time to reflect on the struggles that shaped our present and future.

Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South. By Leslie Brown. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xvi, 451 pp. Cloth, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3138-0. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-5835-6.)

Leslie Brown's book on gender, class, and black community development in Durham, North Carolina, follows a 2005 study by Christine Greene (Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina) in charting the dynamics of survival and protest in Durham's African American community. The books complement each other nicely: Brown covers the period from emancipation through segregation to the early days of the civil rights movement in the 1930s, and Greene picks up the story in the 1940s. Brown succinctly lays out her thesis: Set against the emancipation and political economy of race in North Carolina, this book explores upbuilding as a gendered praxis, drawing attention to African American women as the central constituency of black migration, urbanization, industrialization, and proletarianization… . Using gender to pull apart Durham's remarkable range of black experiences sheds light on the motivations for and the substance of black activism, revealing the reasons African Americans made varying choices: black contingencies faced discreet economic, political, social, and racial challenges that sometimes pulled them in opposing directions. (p. 15)