Civil Rights Movement Research Articles

Mexican American Civil Rights and Pentecostalism - New Mexico's Moses: Reies López Tijerina and the Religious Origins of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. By Ramón A. Gutiérrez. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2022. Pp. ix, 545. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65.00 cloth; $65.00 e-book.

Mexican American Civil Rights and Pentecostalism - New Mexico's Moses: Reies López Tijerina and the Religious Origins of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. By Ramón A. Gutiérrez. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2022. Pp. ix, 545. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 65.00 e-book. - Volume 80 Issue 2

American Legal Realism and the Revitalization of Literary Realist History

American Legal Realism and the Revitalization of Literary Realist History

An Artist Speaks “The intellect travels in many different directions”: Talkin’ with Eleo Pomare (1937–2008)

This interview with Eleo Pomare focuses on his role as the choreographer of mature creative works that intermingle with his formation as a Black artist and activist after he returned from Europe to live and work in New York in the mid-1960s. It begins with discussion of his creative work in the community during the period of the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights. Pomare reflects upon his early training and choreographic experiments as well as describes the construction of some of his best-known performance works. He ends with some thoughts on political advocacy and his influence on dance policy and dance criticism, and throughout the conversation Pomare shares insights about his philosophy as a Black dance artist.

Book Review: The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights by Thomas Holt

Book Review: <i>The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights</i> by Thomas Holt

Sutton E. Griggs and Thomas R. Dixon: A Reconstruction Call and Response

Sutton E. Griggs and Thomas R. Dixon: A Reconstruction Call and Response

Jonathan Chism. Saints in the Struggle: Church of God in Christ Activists in the Memphis Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968.

In Saints in the Struggle, Chism’s meticulous, exhaustive research and extensive interviews, as well as his careful, straightforward, honest “warts-and-all” prose style make this work a significant contribution to the story of Memphis and to the history of religion and the civil rights movement more broadly. On April 3, 1968, the night before the shot rang out in the Memphis sky, Martin Luther King had to be coaxed (against his own desire to rest after a death threat had upset his plane ride to Memphis to support the sanitation workers’ strike) into appearing at the Mason Temple Church of God in Christ auditorium. He had not planned to attend, but the crowd assembled there wanted to hear him. And he gave, of course, one of the most memorable addresses in American history, one that seemed to presage his fate the next day. His theme of having been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land, was a common one in his addresses, one he had reprised repeatedly in years past, each time varying it a little to fit the occasion and the audience. It had been, for years, one of his greatest hits. But its appearance that night proved especially memorable—for all the wrong reasons.

African Americans’ Success in Alabama Before Obama: 1988-2008

The period between 1988-2008 represented an era of distinct contrasts for African Americans in Alabama. Although African Americans had considerable success following the Civil Rights Movement by1990, many of their children still attended all-black schools in poor racially isolated crime-ridden communities, and 38% of blacks lived in families with incomes below the poverty line, compared to an 18% state average. Politically, the period saw significant gains by African Americans. By the early 1990s the state had more than 700 black elected officials, one of the nation’s highest, which led to calls to create a district to elect an African American congressman. In 1992, such a district emerged, Alabama’s seventh as a result of a federal court-approved redistricting plan. Earl Hilliard, a state senator for Birmingham was elected to the seat becoming the first African American congressman since reconstruction. However, redrawing the seventh district proved costly to Democrats because it made two other congressional districts pro-Republican by taking away large chunks of black voters from the second and sixth districts. This paper examines the continuing challenges facing Alabama’s African American community at the close of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first centuries

Walker Empowering Women in Meridian

With the picture of personal struggle to overcome the patriarchal society, Alice Walker has concentrated on the empowerment of female values for the establishment and preservation of social and individual female identity in Meridian. Portrayed as a poor, uneducated, and a black girl, Meridian faces social and culturally harsh treatment and black males have behaved her as a toy resulting in double patriarchy. Her attachment with the Civil Rights Movement has brought a transformation and realization within her, which has ultimately enabled her to exist and revolt against male hegemony. Following the feminism as its theoretical tool, this research examines on how a neglected, uneducated poor black girl Meridian transfers herself into an independent woman having her own identity with representative character of an empowered woman. This article tries to examine how Walker has empowered females in the novel, Meridian.

Just Because We’re Small Doesn’t Mean We Can’t Stand Tall: A Child and Youth Rights Movement

In this article, the authors share their research on a curriculum for social justice, truth, and then reconciliation as put forth by the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society (Caring Society). The Caring Society is a non-profit organization that advocates for equity and social justice for First Nations children and creates social justice educational materials for Canadian learners. The authors provide an overview of the Caring Society campaigns and educational research. More specifically, they discuss how the Caring Society is creating educational resources that center a child and youth-driven civil rights movement across the school curriculum. Such curricular and pedagogical approaches focus on truth and then reconciliation, Indigenous sovereignty, and position a social justice pedagogy. They then discuss some of the ways we might advocate relational forms of citizenship that seek to honour the truth, and then reconciliation education.

Dateline 1977: The LHRT as Connective Tissue

Dateline 1977: The LHRT as Connective Tissue

Parliamentary Dress

Parliamentary Dress

The Blue Beret

The Blue Beret

How do Political Opportunity Structures affect the success of social movements in China and the USA?

This paper investigates the effects political opportunity structures have on the mobilisation, organisation, and outcomes of civil rights movements in the USA and Hong Kong. The Civil Rights Movement between the 1950s-60s and the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement of 2019 are used as case studies in this research. The paper examines the various attributes of both regions’ political input and output structures while examining how the movement was organised and strategised. It then considers whether either movement can be deemed successful. Through comparative analysis, it contrasts the assessments made in both case studies to determine which factor discussed had the most significant impact on the success of both campaigns. It finds that the initial hypothesis put forth can be disproved and that a fluid link between the movement and institutional elites plays the most critical role in the success of both movements.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note

Freedom Time: New Directions in Civil Rights Movement Scholarship

Freedom Time:New Directions in Civil Rights Movement Scholarship Paige A. McGinley (bio) Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation. By Julius B. Fleming Jr. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 322 pages. $89.00 (cloth). $29.00 (paper). Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson. By Shana L. Redmond. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 208 pages. $94.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement. By Victoria W. Wolcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 272 pages. $30.00 (cloth). $29.95 (paper). In December 2015, a group of scholars and activists, including Percy Green II, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tef Poe, Jamala Rogers, and George Lipsitz, gathered to discuss the "generations of struggle" in the Black freedom movement, particularly in relation to the Ferguson rebellion in the St. Louis region. Moderated by Elizabeth Hinton and introduced by Walter Johnson, the discussion ranged widely, with Rogers noting that "the connection between the generations is real, and some of the alleged intergenerational tensions are not," and Lipsitz observing that "we ought to understand that for Black people, the issue of generations is different because no group of people on earth has to struggle as much just to have succeeding generations, to create the possibility that there will be another generation at all."1 I introduce this important conversation's meditation on the notion of "generations" because of what might be at stake in describing these three new books as "a new generation" of scholarship—a discarding of the past, a confrontation or overthrow, complete with oedipal overtones. This is not the state of affairs I am attempting to chart. Civil rights movement scholarship has changed in recent decades, of course: firsthand (or nearly so) eyewitness accounts and analysis (by Aldon Morris, Clayborne Carson, Judy Richardson, and others) gave way to works that challenged the spatial and temporal bounds of "the movement" (Martha Biondi, Glenda [End Page 153] Gilmore, Hasan Jeffries, Komozi Woodard) as well as those that emphasized a grassroots organizing tradition (John Dittmer, Charles Payne, Barbara Ransby). And while Julius B. Fleming Jr.'s Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation, Shana L. Redmond's Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson, and Victoria W. Wolcott's Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement are profoundly distinct, they each add new dimension and texture to our understanding of Black aesthetic expression and political practice at midcentury. Whether they represent a "new generation" is less important, perhaps, than the new discoveries they make possible, the new ways of assembling the past that they model, and the new space they open up for an engagement with a past and a project that, as Fleming notes, remains "unfinished." The ongoing unfinishedness of past liberation struggles infuses these three works, each of which charts precise and evocative temporalities of struggle. The question of time and the midcentury movement frequently comes up as a set of questions about periodization and designation: Is the civil rights era properly described as the years from the Brown decision (1954) to the passage of the Voting Rights Act (1965)? What kinds of historiographic narratives does a framework of the long civil rights movement make possible or preclude? What is at stake in discussing the midcentury movement as an intensification of or a signal departure from what came before? Is it more appropriate to think of the Black freedom struggle as beginning the moment enslaved Africans touched the soils of the Americas? While not the central concern of the three books considered here, each necessarily reckons with the question of periodization and terminology. But time and temporality are analytic—and affective—categories within each work as well, with Wolcott and Fleming signaling the temporal dimensions of their investigations in their very titles. The phrase "civil rights movement" scarcely appears in Redmond's Everything Man, and not without good reason: whether for reasons of Robeson's communist associations, ill health, or personal choice, Robeson had a tenuous association with the narrowly construed "classical phase" of the movement. And yet he gave shape and sound...

My Selma: True Stories of a Southern Childhood at the Height of the Civil Rights Movement by Willie Mae Brown

Reviewed by: My Selma: True Stories of a Southern Childhood at the Height of the Civil Rights Movement by Willie Mae Brown Kara Forde Brown, Willie Mae My Selma: True Stories of a Southern Childhood at the Height of the Civil Rights Movement. Farrar, 2023 [240p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780374390235 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780374390242 $9.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 7-10 In this powerful memoir, artist Willie Mae Brown recounts striking stories of growing up in Selma, Alabama during the early years of the civil rights movement. Her salient first-hand narrative places readers directly into the sights, smells, and sounds of her hometown, which Brown understandably has complicated feeling about, referring to the city as “My own Selma. A Selma that brought me joy, troubled me, and baptized me into racial injustice and into the race for justice.” Each chapter reads like its own episodic story, some intimate like the Christmas when Brown, nicknamed Hundey, received a brown-skinned doll of her own, and others upsetting, such as an instance when a threatening man tried to enter the house knowing that Hundey and her little sister were alone. As she grows older, Brown’s memories intersect with broader historical moments, like when she attended a speech about voting rights by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One final harrowing story reveals the white supremacist racial violence hidden in the shadows of the South, with the exact details of a cousin’s death still a mystery within her family decades later. A succinct afterward hones in on Brown’s determination to use her voice to share these stories of Selma, because “Hope is in the telling.” Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

From the Ashes of the Old: The Old Left and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1957–1965

How did the “Old Left”—the socialist milieu of the 1930s and 1940s—shape the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s? Focusing on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), this article examines several mechanisms of Old Left influence: personnel overlap, network ties, and organizational alliances. New findings on the Old Left backgrounds of Rev. Joseph Lowery, C. T. Vivian, and many of Martin Luther King Jr.’s teachers and friends are presented. The support that SCLC received from “red” labor unions is also highlighted. The picture that emerges is not the elaborate Communist conspiracy imagined by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI but rather a transfer of skills, money, and ideas that strengthened SCLC and influenced its strategic agenda. However, the repression and stigmatization of the Old Left during the Cold War led many SCLC activists to hide or downplay their connections to the socialist movement, which has distorted both popular and scholarly understanding of the civil rights movement.

Fostering social justice leaders through the social action, leadership and transformation (SALT) model

Fostering social justice leaders through the social action, leadership and transformation (SALT) model

The Natural Law and Interreligious Social Advocacy: The Civil Rights Movement-Era Case of William J. Kenealy, SJ

Before the Second Vatican Council, the efficacy of dialogue between Catholics and non-Catholics was often disputable. Nevertheless, the practical reality of American religious pluralism necessitated Catholic engagement with non-Catholics around pressing social issues. This reality was especially evident in the Civil Rights Movement, during which pro-equality Catholics considered how to politically effectuate the legal recognition of racial equality. Through a case study of former Boston College Law School Dean William J. Kenealy, this article proposes that pro-equality Catholics turned to the Natural Law as a foundation for interreligious social advocacy during the Civil Rights Movement. After exploring Kenealy’s formative intellectual influences, this article identifies the philosophical and historical features of the Natural Law that made it appear particularly ripe for promoting interreligious consensus around racial equality. In concluding, this article suggests that the resonances between Kenealy’s work and the National Catholic Welfare Conference’s 1958 pastoral letter on racial equality reflect the Natural Law’s prominent role in American Catholic thinking about civil rights at mid-century.

The Nun Hit by a Brick: Sister Angelica Schultz and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Chicago

In 1966, Sister Angelica Schultz, OSF suffered a head wound when hit by a brick thrown by a member of an angry mob of white Catholics during Martin Luther King Jr.’s Chicago Freedom Movement. The incident made her possibly the first American religious to be injured by a member of her own faith in a civil rights march. We examine what motivated her to step into the street as a “white ally” for racial justice (to use today’s term), her own analysis of the events, and how it impacted her life by drawing on newspaper articles, Sister Angelica’s own writings, interviews with civil rights leaders and other members of her order, and information from family members. We also examine the power that Sister Angelica possessed as a white Catholic sister, how she put that power to use for racial justice, and how that power was limited in differing contexts.