Civil Rights Campaign Research Articles

Civil rights memorials and the geography of memory

This is the first critical reading of the monuments, museums, parks, and streets dedicated to the black struggle for civil rights.The creation of memorials dedicated to the civil rights movement is a watershed event in the commemoration of southern and American history, an important reversal in the traditional invisibility of African Americans within the preservation movement. Collective memory, to be sure, is certainly about honoring the past - whether it is Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthplace in Atlanta or the memorial to Rosa Parks in Montgomery - but it is also about the ongoing campaign for civil rights and the economic opportunities associated with heritage tourism.Owen Dwyer and Derek Alderman use extensive archival research, personal interviews, and compelling photography to examine memorials as cultural landscapes, interpreting them in the context of the movement's broader history and its current scene. In paying close attention to which stories, people, and places are remembered and which are forgotten, the authors present an unforgettable story.As Dwyer and Alderman illustrate, there are reasons why memorials are not often located at the traditional core of civic space - City Hall, the Courthouse, or along Main Street - and location seriously affects their public impact. As the authors reveal, social and geographic marginalization has accompanied the creation and promotion of civil rights memorials, calling into question the relative progress that society has made in the time since the civil rights movement in America began.

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not after you: Legislative developments in relation to the mandatory retention of communications data in the European Union

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York, Madrid and London the mandatory retention of communication data by communications service providers has become a contentious issue between the governments of nation states and the communications industry and civil rights campaigners. While the former claim that such retention is necessary for the purpose of national security and the detection and investigation of crime, the latter argue that data retention represents an attack on the rights and freedoms of individuals without evidence that measures will indeed increase the security of citizens. This paper explores the legislative developments, which have taken place in the UK and the European Union in recent years, focusing in particular on the draft Directive on data retention which was adopted in February 2006. DOI: 10.2966/scrip.030406.322 © Judith Rauhofer 2006. This work is licensed through SCRIPT-ed Open Licence (SOL). * Senior Lecturer, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool. (2006) 3:4 SCRIPT-ed 323

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Early histories of the civil rights movement that appeared prior to the 1980s were primarily biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr. Collectively, these works helped to create the familiar “Montgomery to Memphis” narrative framework for understanding the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. This narrative begins with King's rise to leadership during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, and ends with his 1968 assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. Since the 1980s, a number of studies examining the civil rights movement at local and state levels have questioned the usefulness and accuracy of the King-centric Montgomery to Memphis narrative as the sole way of understanding the civil rights movement. These studies have made it clear that civil rights struggles already existed in many of the communities where King and the organization of which he was president, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), ran civil rights campaigns in the 1960s. Moreover, those struggles continued long after King and the SCLC had left those communities. Civil rights activism also thrived in many places that King and the SCLC never visited. As a result of these local and state studies, historians have increasingly framed the civil rights movement within the context of a much longer, ongoing struggle for black freedom and equality, unfolding throughout the twentieth century at local, state and national levels. More recently, a number of books have sought to place the civil rights movement within the larger context of international relations. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott next year, the event that launched King's movement leadership, it seems an appropriate point to return to the existing literature on King and to assess what has already been done, as well as to point to the gaps that still need to be filled, in what remains important field of study.

A Continuity of Conservatism: The Limitations of Brown v. Board of Education

ON MAY 17, 1954, THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT ISSUED THE landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that laws mandating racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional. Some civil rights activists reacted with caution to the decision, most conspicuously the man who had led the legal challenge against Jim Crow education, Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Nonetheless, many supporters of the civil rights cause saw the ruling as a decisive breakthrough. Charles S. Johnson, president of the black Fisk University, articulated the excited sense of expectation that the ruling would break down social barriers not only in schools but in all areas of public life: If segregation is unconstitutional in educational institutions, it is no less so unconstitutional in other aspects of our national life. (1) The New York Amsterdam News was even more emphatic, declaring that 'The Supreme Court decision is the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation. (2) Despite the initial optimism of civil rights campaigners, the process of school desegregation was beset by obstruction and delay. Although the era of massive resistance was relatively short-lived, white southerners subsequently succeeded through less confrontational tactics in restricting the implementation of the Brown decision. The defiance of federal authority by segregationists ignited a broad conservative reaction against the judicial activism of the Supreme Court, while Brown also inspired a southern white backlash against Washington that persists to the present day. My purpose is to assess how white southerners mobilized in opposition to school desegregation and then to turn to the longer-term impact of conservative political strategy. It has been argued that the Brown decision impeded the gradual process of racial change that had been taking place in the southern states since the late 1940s. According to this interpretation, the Supreme Court seriously miscalculated by selecting education as the target for a judicial assault on segregation rather than choosing the less emotionally sensitive area of voting rights or public transportation. Instead, the ruling undermined the reform of Jim Crow practices by provoking a militant backlash among southern conservatives. The integration of public facilities occurred because massive resistance stirred blacks into mobilizing a more effective protest movement that forced a previously complacent federal government to impose coercive civil rights legislation. (3) One of the principal criticisms of this analysis is that it overstates the momentum of racial reform in the pre-Brown South. The years during and immediately after World War II witnessed a resurgence in racial violence as whites attempted to repress the growing political assertiveness of the black population. Between 1941 and 1946, white lynchers murdered at least twenty-two African Americans. (4) Despite substantial increases in membership that occurred during the war, civil rights organizations struggled to score any decisive political breakthroughs. The efforts of southern blacks to build a stronger political power base through the integration of labor unions also suffered as a result of the racially divisive tactics of employers. Although there were some signs of change in the air, they were less a strong wind than a faint breeze. In the early 1950s several southern states attempted to preempt a legal challenge to public-school segregation by eliminating the most blatant disparities in educational facilities for black and white students. More than half a century after the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, white southerners were finally taking measures to provide practical meaning to the doctrine of separate but equal. Yet such action only underlined their determination to protect the social order from federal interference. Proponents of the backlash thesis are more persuasive in their assertion that the Brown decision was not the principal catalyst for the development of the civil rights movement. …

Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. xii + 330 pp. $39.50 cloth; $18.95 paper.

The US government's ideological and foreign policy imperatives during the Cold War years, argues historian and legal scholar Mary Dudziak, had a paradoxical effect on the trajectory of civil rights reform. International pressures would “simultaneously constrain and enhance civil rights reform” (11). On the one hand, the anti-communism of the Cold War era silenced the more radical opponents of American race relations, capitalism, and colonialism, leading to a “narrowing of acceptable civil rights discourse” (13). On the other hand, racist violence and the persistence of Jim Crow made it hard for government officials to portray the United States as a democratic, free, and open society, one that was vastly superior to the totalitarianism of the Soviet bloc. That proved to be a problem, however, as the Soviets and Americans competed for the allegiance of growing numbers of nations undergoing a process of decolonization. Civil rights activists skillfully took advantage of the opening provided by the Cold War, aggressively and sometimes successfully advancing their campaign for civil rights.

"You Understand My Condition": The Civil Rights Congress in the Los Angeles African-American Community, 1946-1952

In 1946 Johnie J. Mullins wrote a frustrated letter to the editor of People's World, California's premier communist newspaper: have sold the [People's] Daily World at all the union meetings in Los Angeles.... I was one that helped get it started. Sold the Peoples' World on the WPA. But, he went on, it was no longer the same old paper: All I... read was of some Negro case.... It seems to me that you are putting the Negroes first.1 While the California Communist Party and its most important affiliate, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), gave increasing attention in the late 1940s to defending their own civil rights in the face of virulent anticommunism, they nonetheless launched aggressive campaigns to defend the city's rapidly expanding black working-class population. Indeed, the CRC, which essentially operated as the civil rights wing of the Communist Party, did put Negroes first. Motivated by both a sincere belief in racial equality and the hope that the wartime in-migration of African Americans would provide a solid base for the Communist Party, the CRC launched a dramatic civil rights campaign in the Los Angeles black community. Though historians describe the 1930s as the heyday of communist ac-

Postmodern Europe and the Resources of Communal Identities in Northern Ireland

Abstract. Irish Nationalist and Ulster Unionist communal identities have territorial, cultural and economic resources. Catalysts that have mobilized these resources and produced political action include 19th century famine and the Northern Ireland civil rights campaign of the late 1960s. As we approach the 21st century and the conditions and concepts of postmodernity initiate change in the structure and operation of the state, the European Union may realize its potential to affect the resources of communal identity and produce further change in the constitution and structural alignment of Irish Nationalist and Ulster Unionist identities. EU integration and structural initiatives have postmodernist contingencies that are beginning to redefine the structural space of Northern Ireland. The future development of these contingencies will be a fundamental factor in determining the extent to which Irish Nationalist and Ulster Unionist communal identities escape the embrace of modernity and develop with the postmodern world.

Divided We Litigate: Addressing Disputes among Group Members and Lawyers in Civil Rights Campaigns

Divided We Litigate: Addressing Disputes among Group Members and Lawyers in Civil Rights Campaigns

"Are We Men?": Prince Hall, Martin Delany, and the Masculine Ideal in Black Freemasonry, 1775-1865

There is hardly a more original experiment in social (re)production of black masculine ideal than in ritual formalizations of identity and ideality in African-American Freemasonry. Probably no other cultural movement before Civil Rights campaigns of twentieth century has been more emblematic of social and psychic drama of black masculinity in American cultural context. And yet, so little about historical and cultural impact of black Freemasonry has caught scholar's attention. Even though black Freemasonry offered African-American male his first opportunity to find himself (Crawford 18), in words of one early scholar, academic neglect of its historical and cultural impact has been rule. Through their Masonic affiliation, well-known ex-slaves and free black men like David Walker, William Wells Brown, Josiah Henson, John Marrant, Richard Allen, and Booker T. Washington, for example, were helped, as it were, along the to selfhood (Crawford 18).1 The present essay maps a course along Masonic road to self-hood which, in its aim to make men, is as determinately masculinist as it is Masonic. More specifically, I delineate how black Freemasonry in colonial and Victorian eras helped invent black masculine ideal philo-

"A Tremor in the Middle of the Iceberg--From a Stone that the Builders Rejected": Black and White in Mississippi

“A Tremor in the Middle of the Iceberg — from A Stone That the Builders Rejected”: Black and White in Mississippi David Chalmers (bio) Nicolaus Mills. Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964 — The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992. 222 pp. Notes and index. $22.50 (cloth); $9.95 (paper). John Dittmer. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. 530 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95. Charles M. Payne. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 525 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $28.00. Eric R. Burner. And Gently He Shall Lead Them: Robert Parris Moses and Civil Rights in Mississippi. New York: New York University Press, 1994. 294 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $24.95. Kay Mills. This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. New York: Dutton, 1993. 390 pp. Notes and index. $24.00 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). Seth Cagin and Philip Dray. We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi. New York: Bantam, 1988. 613 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $5.95. Jack Nelson. Terror in the Night: The Klan’s Campaign Against the Jews. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. 287 pp. Illustrations and index. $22.00. Adam Nossiter. Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994. 303 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $22.00 (cloth); $12.00 (paper). Doug McAdam. Freedom Summer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. x 333 pp. Notes and index. $11.95. At a 1994 Freedom Summer anniversary reunion in Jackson, Mississippi, SNCC staffer Chuck McDew described the showing of an advance print of the film Mississippi Burning to the students at Jackson State University. When the students applauded and cheered the movie’s story, which was, as McDew described it, about “the bonding of two heroic FBI guys who had come down to Mississippi to save the poor darkies,” it was clear that there was a lot of history that needed learning. Perhaps it was because the condition of black people seemed more hopeless and the struggle more brutal in Mississippi that it became the ultimate 1960s test of youthful courage and social justice in America. The first SNCC and CORE, volunteers, mostly black, rode the buses into Mississippi in the summer of 1961. With a solidarity forged in jail, they provided the shock troops of the movement. Led by Robert Moses, a twenty-six-year-old New York City math teacher, they turned to voter registration. Joined by black Mississippi students and teenagers, they faced unremitting violence. As they commented ironically about the national government that gave them no help or protection, there was a town in Mississippi named “Liberty” and a Department in Washington called “Justice.” Three years later they brought in the summer volunteers, mostly young upper-middle-class northern whites, and with the volunteers came the national media. Altogether, the SNCC and CORE staffers in Mississippi numbered perhaps half a hundred, plus approximately 650 volunteers who worked during some portion of the 1964 summer, some 80 who stayed afterward, and another smaller group who came in for a reduced program the next summer. In addition, various groups of doctors, nurses, lawyers, ministers, priests, rabbis, educators, and psychologists offered some support for the volunteers and activists. Within two years more, most of those who had come from outside were gone, leaving the local folk to fight on. The struggle produced martyrs, legends, controversy, and a continuing flow of books, which until now have focused on those who came from the outside. 1 In the 1990s, as the focus of civil rights history has shifted from national leadership, organizations, laws, and institutions to what David Garrow calls “locally based understanding,” 2 the Mississippi story has increasingly come to focus on “local people,” the title of John Dittmer’s history of the Mississippi struggle and the subject of Charles Payne’s equally fine study of the organizing tradition. Other recent books include investigations of the Ku Klux Klan Neshoba County...

Northern protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the civil rights movement

After the triumphs of Montgomery and Selma, Martin Luther King, Jr., rallied his forces and headed north. The law was on his side, the nation seemed to be behind him, the crusade for civil rights was rapidly gathering momentum--and then, in Chicago, heartland of America, the movement stalled. What happened? This book is the first to give us the full story--a vivid account of how the Chicago Freedom Movement of 1965-1967 attempted to combat northern segregation. Northern Protest captures this new kind of campaign for civil rights at a fateful turning point, with effects that pulse through the nation's race relations to the day. Combating the outright, unconstitutional denial of basic political and civil rights had been King's focus in the South. In the North, the racial terrian was different. James Ralph analyzes the shift in the planning stages--moving from addressing public constitutional rights to private--impact legal rights--as King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) mounted an unprecedented attack on housing discrimination, one of the most blatant social and economic inequities of urban America. A crisis in the making is unfolded as King, the SCLC, and a coalition of multiracial Chicago civil rights groups mobilize protests against the city's unfair housing practices. Ralph introduces us to Chicago's white ethnics, city officials, and business and religious leaders in a heated confusion of responses. His vibrant account--based in part on many in-depth interviews with participants--reveals the true lineaments of urban America, with lessons reaching beyond the confines of the city. The Chicago Freedom Movement is given a national context--as King envisioned it, and as it finally played out. Here, the Chicago crusade becomes emblematic of the civil rights movement today and tomorrow. Ralph argues that this new push for equality in more private realms of American life actually undermined popular support for the movement and led to its ultimate decline.

Fair Employment and Religion in Northern Ireland: An Overview

Unlike many of the issues raised during the Northern Ireland Civil Rights campaign of the late 1960s, employment discrimination has remained high on the political agenda, leading to two major pieces of legislation, in 1976 and 1989. Briefly examines the background to the claim of religious discrimination against Catholics, before going on to review analyses of the 1971 and 1981 censuses, the main statistical source on patterns of employment in Northern Ireland, which confirm that there are significant differentials in the socio‐economic profiles of the Catholic and Protestant communities. In addition, discusses the monitoring provisions of the 1989 Fair Employment Act and points to some current debates on how the future effectiveness of the Act should be assessed.

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:Freedom Summer, by Doug McAdam.We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi, by Seth Cagin and Philip Dray.Mississippi Burning. Produced and directed by Alan Parker,LOSING THE DISARMAMENT RACE by Lawrence S. WittnerMinutes to Midnight: Nuclear Weapons Protest in America, by Frances B. McCrea and Gerald E. Markle.From Protest to Policy: Beyond the Freeze to Common Security, by Pam Solo.

We are not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi.

We are not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi.

We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi

We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi

The New York City Rent Strikes of 1963-1964

The New York City rent strikes of the early 1960s were failures in the struggle to mobilize poor people. For decades social settlements and neighborhood radicals had practiced rent bargaining. However, the 1963 civil rights campaign tipped the balance, resulting in a reckless organization of rent strikes to force landlords to make repairs. Radicals mobilized few of the poor, but their "unions" inadvertently provided many with entrée to the city's liberal bureaucracies, most notably, the New York City Housing Authority.

The militant‐moderate agitator: Daniel O'Connell and catholic emancipation in Ireland

An analysis of O'Connell's campaign for Catholic civil rights in the early nineteenth century demonstrates the use of antithetical, militant‐moderate, agitational strategies. By provocation and coercion he induced Parliament to accede to Catholic demands, while at the same time he controlled his turbulent followers with moderate strategies. O'Connell's rhetorical choices were effective because 1) he personified Irish needs and attitudes, and 2) his militancy coincided with English images of Irish disloyalty.

Born-Again Clones

T HE TERMS and clone, which have appeared in media with increased frequency in recent years, have acquired new meanings that demonstrate how media persons, who may be viewed as lexical avant-garde of contemporary American English, produce semantic change via language play. According OED (1: 1003), phrase again has been in language since 1382: WyclifJohn iii.3 But a man schal be agen. It was listed as a subentry in Noah Webster's American Dictionary of English Language (1828), where it was defined as to be regenerated and renewed; receive spiritual life. John iii. The phrase continued be listed as a subentry in other precursors Webster's Third (Goodrich and Porter 1875, Harris and Allen 1913, Neilson and Knott 1934). However, again was eliminated from Webster's Third (Gove 1961). Why? Perhaps answer lies in fact that in early 1960s again did not have sufficient currency be included, even as a subentry, in Webster's Third, for at that time phrase was used almost exclusively by Baptists. However, again was born again, this time as a hyphenated adjective, as a result of several major political and social events. The term began gain wide currency throughout nation in late 1960s as a result of civil-rights campaign. In 1976, was given a further boost by election of Jimmy Carter, a selfacknowledged Baptist, as President of United States and by popularity of confessional best seller Born Again, which was written by convicted Watergate offender Charles Colson (Wills 1979, p. 154). By 1978, had achieved such currency that it was added The World Book Dictionary (a lexicon that is revised yearly in order keep abreast of living language), where it was defined as follows: adj. U.S. believing in personal conversion as a way salvation through Christ; evangelical. Born-again is currently used not only as an adjective describing one who has accepted Christ, but also in media refer one who has been reborn or revitalized in any fashion, as following examples demonstrate. Rodney Dangerfield, who resumed his career as a comedian at age of 40, was characterized by Chicago Tribune (20 July 1980, sec. 6, p. 1) as the comic. Author Howard Fast, who was an admitted Communist in 1950, by spring of 1980 had become a born-again yankee (People Weekly, 7 Apr. 1980, p. 119). An article in

Britain, Ireland and Ulster

Over twelve years have passed since the Autumn of 1968, when the gathering momentum of the campaign for civil rights in Northern Ireland forced the re-opening of the unanswered questions and unfinished business of Anglo-Irish relations, on reluctant governments in Dublin, London, and Belfast. The activities of the Civil Rights Movements – especially the march in Derry on October 5, 1968 – and the reactions to them of the Stormont Government, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and groups of protestant ultras, conventionally provide the turning point after which the intractable realities of Northern Ireland's problems showed themselves afresh. A protracted and murderous war of attrition, which continues to this day, was the result.

Social Democrats and Northern Ireland, 1964-1970

The current stage of the Irish struggle for independence began in 1967 with a civil-rights campaign; less than two years later, in August 1969, British troops were sent into action, and a year later they were meeting armed resistance from the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). Conflict between the British government and the Catholic people of the North has been sustained ever since. The government responsible for sending in the troops was in the hands of the Labour party. The Ulster crisis confronted the Labour party with a classic dilemma: how to relate their reformist tradition to their commitment to the economic framework of capitalism and the imperial interests it generates. The fundamental contradiction of these aims and the consequent bankruptcy of the social democrats' reformism was clearly demonstrated as the crisis developed.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.