Civil Rights Activists Research Articles

Strategies to Develop Resilience: Lessons from a Civil Rights Activist, a Scientist, and an Astronaut.

Strategies to Develop Resilience: Lessons from a Civil Rights Activist, a Scientist, and an Astronaut.

Между церковью и государством: католическая ассоциация мексиканской молодежи в борьбе за христианский общественный порядок

This article focuses on the history of the Mexican Catholic Youth Association (MCYA), one of a few Catholic organiza-tions that emerged in Mexico in the early twentieth century. By examining the ideological foundations and activities of MCYA, the author identifies the reasons why this youth or-ganization became the major social force in the conflict be-tween the state and the church in Mexico in the second half of the 1920s. According to the author, the conflict was based on ideological confrontation: the idea of the Christian social or-der as an ideal type of social structure of the state collided with the new political course pursued by the Mexican gov-ernment. In this situation, MCYA, which was conceived as a non-political organization, quickly shifted from participants' joint religious practices and social assistance to civil rights activism in response to anti-clerical state policies. The article also draws attention to the fact that MCYA was the forerunner of several other associations which were supposed to fight against various left-wing movements and, above all, socialist movements.

Nobby, or Metamorphosis

Abstract Andrew Schelling recalls and discusses a college course, “World Poetry,” which Norman O. Brown taught at University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1974. The turbulent politics and weird, harrowing culture changes of North America set a context. Brown's class met weekly in a remote meadow ringed by second-growth redwoods. Brown developed his interest in the “law of metamorphosis,” which he thought poetry captures, and put his attention on how the human body changes, producing text as sound or performance. Using two anthologies compiled by Jerome Rothenberg, Brown drew students into a poetry that was physical, raw, multilingual, and perhaps a scriptural base for the era's counterculture. Schelling portrays Brown as a quixotic figure, Sir John Falstaff among scholars. A quick sketch of the “Santa Cruz ecosystem” brings into the mix Gregory Bateson, whose thoughts on evolution paralleled Brown's on poetry, and Jan Willis, veteran civil rights activist and scholar of Sanskrit.

‘A Democracy That Will Know Not the Differences of Race’: American ‘Globetrotting’ in South Africa from the 1920s through the 1980s in Perspective

ABSTRACT When in 1931 the United States sent an all-white track and field team to compete against an all-white South African roster, it inaugurated a series of interchanges that over the next six decades illuminated intersections between politics, race, and sport in both nations. Between the 1930s and the 1980s, these periodic sporting encounters served as lightning rods that rallied civil rights activists and anti-apartheid protestors, linking battles over sport and race in both nations. By the 1960s, as legal segregation in the US eroded while the system in South Africa hardened, titans of American sporting desegregation who championed athletes’ rights such as Jack Robinson linked their endeavours to anti-apartheid campaigns. At the end of the 1980s, two multi-racial groups of American athletes broke international anti-apartheid bans and created a new debate over the concept of athletes’ rights. As apartheid crumbled in the early 1990s, an American legal scholar sought to codify this new perspective into a federal ‘athletes’ bill of rights’, providing a paradoxical postscript for this special issue on ‘Excavating the Ancestry of “Globetrotting”: New Perspectives on the Intersection of Racial Politics, Civil Rights Struggles and Anti-Apartheid Crusades in US Track and Field from the 1920s through the 1980s’.

An Independent Scholar during the Pandemic

An Independent Scholar during the Pandemic

The Politics of White Rights: Race, Justice, and Integrating Alabama’s Schools by Joseph Bagley

Reviewed by: The Politics of White Rights: Race, Justice, and Integrating Alabama’s Schools by Joseph Bagley Michael T. Bertrand The Politics of White Rights: Race, Justice, and Integrating Alabama’s Schools. By Joseph Bagley. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. 304 pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-8203-5483-5. Joseph Bagley has written a thought-provoking, exhaustive, and depressing history of public school desegregation in the state of Alabama. Beginning with the promise of 1954’s Brown v. Board case and continuing through a litany of lesser-known yet significant Supreme Court decisions that concludes nearly twenty years later, the author tells a story that is tragic rather than uplifting. The cast of characters in his journey include governors James “Big Jim” Folsom, John Patterson, George Wallace, Lurleen Wallace, Albert Brewer, and a George Wallace reprise. Also featured are civil rights attorneys, federal court judges, and segregationist leaders of both state and local variety. The lawyers and jurists play leading roles, but it is the white supremacists who steal the show, for the lesson learned in this bittersweet tale is that Massive Resistance to racial integration never died; it simply adapted in ways that made it more effective. Perhaps a paradox that only a southerner can appreciate, it integrated itself into the legal system. But it did so only by observing the letter and not the spirit of court orders. As Bagley notes throughout the book, the goal of various governors, school board officials, and other lesser notables was to satisfy the bare minimum of requirements and never to go “beyond the law” (181). This double entendre of sorts is meaningful. It put the emphasis on “law and order,” a phrase not to be confused with Richard Nixon’s later campaign slogan that brought to mind negative images of [End Page 267] urban unrest (8). This usage was somewhat distinctive to Alabama, and the underlying message was never surrender, just retreat to a winnable position. Narrating the early history of the state’s segregationist response to civil rights activism, Bagley enumerates the activities of diehards such as “Dynamite” Bob Chambliss, Asa “Ace” Carter, and other nameless individuals responsible, respectively, for the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, the Nat “King” Cole assault, the mob incitement over Autherine Lucy, the beating of Fred Shuttlesworth, the castration of J. Edward “Judge” Aaron, and the attacks on the Freedom Riders. “Respectable” segregationist leaders understood that such violence was self-defeating. The days of Eugene “Bull” Connor and Jim Clark were past. The new strategy of defiance required mastering all possible legal means toward obstruction. Bagley has compiled and combed through a massive and impressive amount of primary materials to reconstruct the Heart of Dixie’s later and lasting reiteration of Massive Resistance. His reliance on manuscript collections, trial records and case files, government documents, commission reports, organization and personal papers, memoirs, oral histories, state archives, and newspaper files allows him to provide detailed accounts of the machinations that took place both inside and outside of courtrooms and classrooms. It is a narrative that makes sense of legal briefs and court directives, with each chapter examining a particular two-to-three year period (save for chapter one, which goes from 1954 to 1960, and the epilogue, which serves as a postmortem, putting the period from 1973 to 2017 into the historical context that he has provided). Generally devoid of legalese, Bagley provides access to the meetings, trials, legislative halls, school-board offices, and judicial chambers so instrumental to the era’s desegregation decisions. The story is one that traces white uncertainty about Brown to a certain empty phrase open to interpretation and delay—“with all deliberate speed.” Segregationist academies emerged at the same time that the state board of education employed tokenism, and governors Patterson, Wallace, Wallace, Brewer, and Wallace (again) predicted that any moves more extensive would lead to white flight. [End Page 268] White Alabamians would never accept attending schools where large numbers of their Black counterparts would be their classmates. By the end of the 1960s, impatient federal judges finally called Alabama’s deliberate deliberateness and ordered compulsory compliance. As the state’s politicians had predicted (encouraged?), white flight soared...

The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights by Thomas C. Holt

Reviewed by: The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights by Thomas C. Holt Raymond Arsenault The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights. By Thomas C. Holt. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 151. $18.95, ISBN 978-0-19-752579-1.) An abbreviated format poses a daunting challenge to any author, especially when the subject at hand is as complex and important as the American civil rights movement. Limited to approximately 120 pages of text, Thomas C. Holt had no choice but to avoid literary flourishes and potentially interesting digressions in his effort to produce a book that covers the major topics related to the history of the movement. With this restriction in mind, he set out to write a book that could transcend its brevity by keeping its "eyes on the prize," in the words of a popular movement anthem. The prize, in his view, is to capture the spirit and essence of a grassroots movement that depended heavily on the contributions and sacrifices of the mass of activists commonly known as "foot soldiers" (p. 19). Holt hopes to dispel a common misunderstanding of the civil rights struggle: the belief that the momentum and success of the movement were primarily a function of charismatic leadership and careful management from above. "Freedom," he writes in the final paragraph of the book, "is a prize won not in a single campaign, but in a long struggle waged by a determined and committed people. And, ultimately, it is not exceptional leaders but ordinary people themselves, conscious of the historical possibilities of their moment and acting collectively, who have the capacity to win that fight and change their world" (p. 120). While Holt does not deny the importance of organizational leadership, he is determined to challenge its centrality. This perspective allows him to treat leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and Stokely Carmichael as flesh and blood figures without turning them into mythic heroes. It also encourages greater appreciation for the critical role that women played in advancing the struggle, and a nuanced and balanced assessment of the relationships between local and national movements and the relative importance and connection between legal battles in the courts and the nonviolent direct-action struggle in the streets. The result is a highly sophisticated account that does full justice to both the strengths and the weaknesses of the movement. The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights is truth-telling history that studiously avoids the pitfalls of a comforting, celebratory narrative. Holt begins fittingly with a highly personal, prologue-like introduction that focuses on his grandmother Carrie Lee Fitzgerald, a Black Virginian who [End Page 423] refused to move to the back of a segregated bus in 1944. This simple act of resistance and courage, much like Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat eleven years later, introduces the intimidating world of Jim Crow that movement activists confronted in the years to come. The six chapters that follow offer an effective mix of chronological and thematic analysis, emphasizing change over time and the geographic diversity of discrimination and civil rights activism. One chapter titled "Before Montgomery" sets the stage for two chapters dealing with "Communities Organizing for Change," one subtitled "New South Cities," and the other subtitled "The New 'Old South,'" and a chapter focusing on "Organizing in the 'American Congo': Mississippi's Freedom Summer and Its Aftermath." The final two chapters address "Freedom Movements in the North" and "Legacies: 'Freedom Is a Constant Struggle.'" Despite their brevity, the six chapters offer a wealth of information and interpretive insight on the nature of the post–World War II African American freedom struggle. Holt's command of the secondary literature is sure-handed and reliable, and his conclusions about the complexities of racial discrimination and resistance bear the mark of a veteran scholar at the top of his game. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more valuable or thought-provoking introduction to the history of a movement that changed all of our lives. Raymond Arsenault University of South Florida Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Femicide, Harmful Practices, Religious Organizations and the Law in the North Caucasus

This article shows the main results of the author's practical work as a sociologist and civil rights activist. The article analyzes the results of the first qualitative research on the problems of femicide, which is based on traditions and, thanks to this, finds support and approval among residents of the North Caucasus. In the article we will consider the main forms of femicide (honor killings, female genital mutilation, and reproductive violence). The article also analyzes how the authorities and religious organizations solve the problem of femicide.

Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State

Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State

Overcoming the Irrationality of Hatred and Discrimination

John Lewis and Thomas Aquinas may seem like an unusual pairing for an essay. The first was a modern American congressman and civil rights activist, and the second was a priest, philosopher, and theologian from medieval Italy. Differences notwithstanding, their worldviews share a remarkable degree of overlap. This paper explores how each of these figures describes the development of right judgment and thus serves modern audiences seeking to understand how reason, emotion, and virtue operate in moral decision-making. Bringing them together, the author examines methods for rightly developing practical moral knowledge. Lewis’s political influence is studied theologically for how social formation, individual agency, and collective action function in perceiving and implementing natural law. Aquinas provides a theoretical framework for comprehending these concepts, by first defining synderesis and conscience, then discussing ways of knowing natural law, and, finally, explaining the virtue of prudence.

Review Essay: Texas Women’s History in 2021

Review Essay: Texas Women’s History in 2021 Rebecca Sharpless (bio) Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives. Edited by Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Stephanie Cole, and Rebecca Sharpless. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. 526. Illustrations, notes, index.) Women in Texas History. By Angela Boswell. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. Pp. 345. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights. By Gabriela González. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 261. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American, Civil Rights Activist, Texas Feminist. By Cynthia Orozco. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020. Pp. 254. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) In February 2009, one hundred historians gathered in Fort Worth at TCU to talk about the state of Texas women’s history and how it related to American history and southern history. Elizabeth Hayes Turner, the author of several influential books and articles on Texas women’s history, wanted the state to be included in a book series on southern women at the University of Georgia Press, and the gathering was intended to brainstorm topics for the book. Historians Juliana Barr, Laura Edwards, and Marjorie Spruill traveled to Texas to facilitate the conversations, setting Texas women into wider regional contexts and historiography. How far has Texas women’s history come in the years since the Fort Worth meeting? As the program for the 2021 Texas State Historical Association meeting reveals, it has moved forward significantly in some areas and barely budged in others. In that recent online gathering, eleven [End Page 301] sessions covered aspects of Texas women’s lives, from traditional topics on women’s suffrage and club activism, to queer women’s experiences in print culture and public spaces. Black women, Latinas, and White women all appeared as topics. As always, the conference presentations represented projects that are still in development and may not be available in print for a long time. But they clearly showed that Texas women’s history is going into increasingly diverse, theoretically sophisticated territory. Perhaps the most important theory informing women’s history is intersectionality, which has made its way, surely and definitely, into studies of Texas. Intersectionality, a concept first formulated by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, reminds us that human beings are the products of numerous factors, or, as some writers say, social fault lines.1 Women are not just White or female or Hispanic or working class. Any discussion of women’s experience, in Texas and elsewhere, must consider a multiplicity of influences. In addition to its original emphases on race, ethnicity, and gender, the concept of intersectionality has expanded to include sexuality. The experience of lesbians must now be a part of Texas women’s history. Straight women can no longer be the default mode, just as White women cannot be. Conference papers are one thing, of course, and published books—the results of years of effort on the part of the authors—are quite another. This essay looks at four books published since 2015, examining them for the ways in which theory, particularly intersectionality, informs scholarship on Texas women. The books differ in structure: one is an anthology of essays by individual authors, one is a synthesis of the expansive history of Texas women, and two are scholarly monographs focused on Latina activists in South Texas. But all four are scholarly productions, written by professional historians with graduate training in history, often women’s history—not lay historians or journalists—and they are deeply researched and documented. Taken as a group, these four works reveal much about the state of Texas women’s history. Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives and Women in Texas History are both synthetic works, covering long spans of time, the geography of the entire state, and the experiences of countless women. As such, they have both strengths and weaknesses. They exist only because the authors stand on the shoulders of several decades of work in the field of Texas women’s history.2 [End Page 302] The result of the 2009 Fort Worth conference was Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, edited by Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Stephanie...

Jelinek, Donald A. (2020). White Lawyer, Black Power: a Memoir of Civil Rights Activism in the Deep South

Jelinek, Donald A. (2020). White Lawyer, Black Power: a Memoir of Civil Rights Activism in the Deep South

Black Cultural Production: After Civil Rights ed. by Robert J. Patterson

Reviewed by: Black Cultural Production: After Civil Rights ed. by Robert J. Patterson Katherine Karlin (bio) Patterson, Robert J., Ed. Black Cultural Production: After Civil Rights, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2019. 282 pp. ISBN: 9780252084607. $26.00 Paperback. It would be difficult to think of a moment in which Black Cultural Production: After Civil Rights, edited by Robert J. Patterson, would land with greater resonance. The volume arrives during a season of widespread protests against police violence, a significant shift in public opinion on the connection between law enforcement and implicit bias, and a substantive debate on reform versus defunding. What began as a grass-roots effort to dismantle racist iconography—particularly statues of Confederate soldiers—has been taken up by municipal governments, which have ordered the removal of these Jim Crow-era relics by city workers, sometimes under cover of night. In the wake of these sustained protests, cultural organizations have been issuing apologies for blind spots in their diversity efforts, and a period of soul-searching—at least some of which seems to be in good faith—has begun in the fields of literature, entertainment, and the arts. On June 19, 2020, the commemoration of Juneteenth, an astonishing array of Black writers, performers, and artists gathered under the banner of Black Artists for Freedom issued a statement calling for commitments from the institutions they work with, not only to sever ties with the police, but to advance opportunities and representation. "No more stereotypes," the statement reads. "No more tokenism. No more superficial diversity. We will no longer watch Black culture be contorted into a vehicle for self-congratulation, complacency, guilt relief, experiential tourism, fetishism, appropriation, and theft" (Black Artists for Freedom). The moment of reckoning for the culture echoes the decade of the 1970s that Black Culture examines, an explosion of artistic and political activity following the conclusion of the Civil Rights era, and its eradication of Jim Crow laws. The passage of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts left huge areas of institutionally embedded racism untouched, in housing, employment, education, and healthcare. "The post-civil rights era retrenchment of a de facto segregations revealed how white supremacy and antiblack racism were interconnected, intertwined, interrelated, and deeply embedded in America's values and institutions. Neither legislative acts nor a naïve belief in the general goodness of the American people could undo their historical and emotional sentience" (Patterson, 2). The political fight shifted from Civil Rights to Black Power; demands for institutional measures like affirmative action found their footing; and the culture, in all its manifestations, reflected the push to continue the struggle against racism on a new stage. Although the accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement were finite and fulfilled, the [End Page 324] struggle had also instilled a momentum that continued into the cultural sphere long after its legislative battles had concluded. The cover of Black Cultural Production features a photo of actress Cicely Tyson, brandishing the two Emmys she won in 1974 for her lead performance in the television miniseries The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Tyson was awarded the best actress award and a special citation as "Actress of the Year"). The gleam of Tyson's smile and the shiny awards suggest a promise of a new period in the arts, one in which Black stories could be told without the use of caricature or of white interpreters. Three years after Jane Pittman established the receptivity of white audiences, as well as Black, for stories of Black lives, the miniseries Roots was a cultural juggernaut, with 100 million viewers, a record that remains, as Lisa Woolfork in her essay on "Generations" states, unbroken (59). Mainstream television comedies like "Sanford and Son," "Good Times," and "The Jeffersons" portrayed Black families in a range of socioeconomic circumstances. The theater and poetry of the Black Arts Movement was shaking up the intellectual world. In the movies, Blaxploitation, which began as a low-budget response to the erasure of Black lives from action films, grew into a multimillion-dollar industry. Women novelists like Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Octavia Butler began to publish highly personal and experimental fiction, and the editor who nurtured many of these...

KOREMATSU V. UNITED STATES: BETWEEN DISCRIMINATION AND LEGAL SECURITY

“Korematsu v. United States” is one of the most important and precedential cases in the history of United States in terms of introducing new legal practices and approaches, as well as raising people's legal and cultural awareness. This is a case that is similar in content to other controversial and almost discriminatory rulings in recent U.S. jurisprudence, but differs substantially from most of them in its paradigmatic and historical significance. Korematsu v. United States has been viewed in the US history as a model of the opposition between the need to ensure national security and the individual rights of full-fledged citizen of the country. It can be said that today the decision is completely overcome in formally, however there is a big gap between the formal overcoming of the decision and the complete exhaustion of the disputed issue within the legal society (which can only be achieved by implementing new laws and moving to a new stage of legal development). The prelude to all this was the morning of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese Air Force launched an attack against the United States Pacific Fleet, based in the waters of Oahu Island, the capital of Hawaii, at Pearl Harbor. It is safe to say that out of the losses incurred in one particular operation in the history of the United States, the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan ended in the most tragic consequences for the United States. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order N9066, initiating a controversial World War II policy with lasting consequences for Japanese Americans. The document ordered the removal of resident enemy aliens from parts of the West vaguely identified as military areas. Japanese Americans were forced to relocate to so called internment camps because they were a vulnerable group for the Japanese Intelligence Agencies, which the authorities claimed posed a potential threat to the national security. Fred Toyasaburo Korematsu was born is Oakland, California on January 30, 1919. He was a Japanese American civil rights activist, who actively resisted the execution of Order N9066 and, unlike his parents, refused to leave his place of residence and move to Internment camp, which later served as a reason for his arrest. It is still disputed whether the decision and the executive order N9066 on the relocation of Americans of Japanese descent were motivated by discrimination or the state acted simply out of a need to ensure National Security. As already mentioned, it all depends on which side we look at the overall picture from.

(Re)producing the Israeli (European) body: Zionism, Anti-Black Racism and the Depo-Provera Affair

This article examines the Depo-Provera Affair—where Israeli doctors administered the contraceptive Depo-Provera to newly immigrated Ethiopian Jewish women—to argue that the Israeli settler colonial project depends on these forms of gendered anti-Black violence, through the management of Black African bodies. In 2013, then Israeli Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman admitted that they had administered Depo-Provera to Ethiopian immigrant women without their consent, after reproductive and civil rights activists in Israel called for an investigation after a drop in the birthrate among Ethiopian women: close to 50 per cent within the previous decade. The demarcation of Blackness as a political tool necessary to advance Israeli modernity and the situating of Black bodies as antithetical to the state of Israel are not contradictory but rather illuminate Israel’s deployment of anti-Blackness through the racial and reproductive violence necessary to become part of the superior, European West.

Social Media Disinformation Bots May Harm Psychiatry

Social Media Disinformation Bots May Harm Psychiatry

Levelling up: Global examples of reducing health inequalities.

There are significant inequalities in health by socio-economic status, race/ethnicity, gender, neighbourhood deprivation and other axes of social inequality. Reducing these health inequalities and improving health equity is arguably the ‘holy grail’ of public health. This article engages with this quest by presenting and analysing historical examples of when sizeable population-level reductions in health inequalities have been achieved. Five global examples are presented ranging from the 1950s to the 2000s: the Nordic social democratic welfare states from the 1950s to the 1970s; the Civil Rights Acts and War on Poverty in 1960s USA; democratisation in Brazil in the 1980s; German reunification in the 1990s; and the English health inequalities strategy in the 2000s. Welfare state expansion, improved health care access, and enhanced political incorporation are identified as three commonly held ‘levellers’ whereby health inequalities can be reduced – at scale. The article concludes by arguing that ‘levelling up’ population health through reducing health inequalities requires the long-term enactment of macro-level policies that aggressively target the social determinants of health.

Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist. By Cynthia E. Orozco

<i>Agent of Change: Adela Sloss-Vento, Mexican American Civil Rights Activist and Texas Feminist.</i> By Cynthia E. Orozco

Facebook an Anti-Stereotyping Tool: A Case Study

Facebook, the most popular social media (SM) platform has penetrated every nook and corner of the world. SM is now treated as the ‘fifth Estate’, other than legislative, executive, judiciary, and mainstream media. The power of SM as a critique is widely acknowledged. Establishments are finding it difficult to deal with it at times. Due to its ease of usage and relative anonymity, the general public finds it very convenient to put across their viewpoints, even if it’s against the establishment. Some establishments at times are at loggerheads with champions of freedom of speech including civil rights activists. SM has been used for propaganda, marketing, and awareness campaigns. In this paper, we are proposing to use this powerful tool towards social change. Through a case study, a detailed process is being proposed for using social media, particularly Facebook as an anti-stereotyping tool. The response to an online survey, the outcome of opinion mining, and the enthusiastic response to our case study by the targeted audience validate our hypothesis that Facebook can be effectively utilized as an anti-stereotyping tool.

White Lawyer Black Power: A memoir of Civil Rights Activism in the Deep South

White Lawyer Black Power: A memoir of Civil Rights Activism in the Deep South