Bloody Tuesday: The Untold Story of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa

Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement

ABSTRACT Historically, scholars have grouped Elia Kazan’s Pinky with other 1949 ‘race problem’ films by white filmmakers (Home of the Brave, Lost Boundaries, and Intruder in the Dust), thus limiting their analyses to the genre conventions of dramas and passing narratives. While insightful, previous scholarship has failed to consider how Pinky reflects the possibilities and limitations of Black citizenship in relation to not only the American postwar moment, but also the legacy of the plantation – the film’s primary setting and the source of conflict. Released at a time when discourse around the rising civil rights movement, desegregation, and the Red Scare made the postwar South a key space for negotiation of minorities’ national belonging, Pinky, I argue, reveals a deep schism between the cultural and legal definitions of citizenship in postwar America. Foregrounding the film’s geographies and drawing on Michael Bibler’s queer reading of the ‘meta-plantation’ and Cheryl Harris’ concept of ‘whiteness as property’, this article posits that in attempting to reconcile the sensibilities of the ‘Old South’ and the demands of the Cold War containment culture, Pinky ultimately reveals the inadequacies of both cultural models. At a time when concerns over property damage outweigh concerns for Black lives and when white savior narratives (such as The Help [2011] and Green Book [2018]) continue to captivate the American public, this article fills a gap in the history of the construction of Black citizenship on film by untangling the relationship between whiteness, sexuality, and property ownership in Pinky.

From the beginning of 1969, panicked Irish diplomats based across the United States beseeched Iveagh House, the headquarters for the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, to release an updated policy on raising Northern Ireland as an issue at the United Nations Security Council. These requests resulted from an influx of pressure from Irish Americans who were becoming increasingly concerned about the unfolding situation in Northern Ireland. Following the heavily publicised scenes from Derry on 5 October 1968, which showed police officers beating and dragging civil rights protestors on the city’s streets, Irish American interest in the Northern Irish civil rights movement proliferated across the country and across different sections of the diasporic community. While historians have found that the Irish government neglected to effectively monitor the emerging civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, Irish diplomats in the US paid careful attention to how Irish Americans felt about and reacted to the nascent movement in Northern Ireland from early on. Using government documents from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, this article examines the reaction from the Irish embassy and consulates to Irish American lobbying, analysing how factors such as class, political ideology and attitudes towards national identity differentiated these responses. This article argues that fissures in the relationship between the state and sections of its diaspora in the US, which stemmed from divisions over the Irish Civil War, contributed to the heightened sensitivity towards Irish American attitudes and actions as tensions began to rise in Northern Ireland.

The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement, by YazdihaHajar. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023. 286 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780691246475.

Teaching for Change: How Septima Clark Led the Civil Rights Movement to Voting Justice by Yvonne Clark-Rhines (review)

This study is the first scholarly exploration of the Women of Operation Breadbasket (WOB). Founded in 1967 by Rev. Mrs. Willie T. Barrow, the WOB was the direct-action unit of Operation Breadbasket-Chicago (OB-C), the economic justice arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the North. Placing Black women at the forefront of the movement in Chicago, the WOB empowered them to assert their agency in the pursuit of social change within their communities. Yet, the WOB remains woefully understudied, rendering it virtually invisible to scholars and the broader public. Consequently, fundamental questions emerge: What were the origins of the WOB? Who was Rev. Barrow, and what role did she play in the WOB? How did the WOB advance the civil rights movement in Chicago? What new insights can we gain by studying the WOB as an organizational site in the civil rights movement? To address these questions, I draw on womanist sociological theory to examine an intrinsic case study of the WOB, recovering this lost chapter in the Chicago civil rights movement. I conclude by considering how the mere existence of WOB is instructive and generative, opening up new avenues for future research.

In 1947, the NAACP sent its petition An Appeal to the World to the United Nations, placing the fight of African Americans for equality and rights before the international community. Although the petition did not achieve concrete results, it generated wide influence both at home and abroad. This paper examines its historical significance on three levels. First, during the early Cold War, An Appeal to the World exposed racial discrimination in the United States, pressing the government to issue the report To Secure These Rights and a series of executive orders that advanced civil rights legislation. Second, on the international stage, the petition resonated with decolonization movements, inspiring anti-colonial struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and providing a reference point for human rights debates at the UN. Third, for the NAACP itself, it accumulated transnational resources and experience, laying the groundwork for legal battles such as Brown v. Board of Education. In this sense, An Appeal to the World was not only an unfinished attempt but also a key turning point in the maturation of the American civil rights movement.

ABSTRACTThe role of Black World War II veterans in the Civil Rights Movement has been well documented, but the effect of Black military service on Black voting patterns remains unclear. Combining detailed information on World War II enlistments and Civil Rights Commission data on voter registration by race, we estimate the role of Black veterans in high‐risk political participation in the US South. Each Black drafted man increased Black voter registration by more than two additional Black registrants after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We further show that Black veterans in higher‐status military positions increased Black voter registration more than veterans overall. We also find that Black military service had a similar effect on the presence of Black civil rights groups and reactionary White nationalist organizations.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s – aimed at abolishing legalized racial segregation and discrimination across the United States – found expression in Nebraska in many ways. From college protests to marches in Lincoln, the movement found a home within the youth and counterculture communities of Lincoln and Omaha. But less known is the way the movement impacted Native American populations, especially those in remote Nebraska communities. “Just as young Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans across the nation were learning the lessons of the black experience of the 1960s and expressing their identity as they sought to claim their own niche in society in the early 1970s, so too Mexican Americans and Indians were becoming more visible in Nebraska,” write authors James C. Olson and Ronald C. Naugle.1 The most visible push for Native American civil rights could be seen in the efforts of the American Indian Movement, an indigenous rights organization established in 1968 in Minneapolis. The organization emerged on the national scene following its occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969 before taking over Mount Rushmore and the Mayflower II. In Nebraska, AIM garnered headlines while protesting the February 1972 death of Raymond Yellow Thunder, a 51-year-old Lakota man whose beaten body was found in a pickup truck in Gordon. But even before Yellow Thunder’s death, Native American people in Nebraska towns like Alliance and Scottsbluff fought for their civil rights following the deaths of Native people in jails and at the hands of non-Native perpetrators. Native advocates succeeded in creating a state organization charged with monitoring Native issues and legislation and coordinating the efforts of state agencies as they responded to Native needs and concerns. The Nebraska Unicameral chartered the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs in 1971 under the leadership of Leonard Springer, vice-chair of the Omaha tribe and leader in the Native American Church. While many historians mark the first instance of American Indian activism in Nebraska as the 1972 AIM march in Gordon following Yellow Thunder’s death, still others point to the efforts of Native people in western Nebraska to call attention to the deaths of Native inmates as among the first examples of indigenous activism in the state. And still others argue the long road to civil rights for Natives in Nebraska began even earlier. Author David Christensen argues that the roots of civil rights for Native people in Nebraska developed in the early 20th century in western Nebraska’s potato fields.

In a world increasingly challenged by various forms of violence, the search for a sustainable alternative has become a central academic preoccupation. This paper posits that the life and teachings of Jesus Christ offer a historically profound and ethically compelling framework for non-violent practice. Through a critical analysis, the study clarifies key concepts of violence and peace, distinguishing between negative peace and positive peace and defining core principles such as agape and redemptive suffering. The paper's theoretical framework leverages the ethical tension between Christian pacifism and Just War Theory, while utilizing Conflict Transformation Theory to bridge theological concepts with real-world applications. The findings show that Christ's model, as demonstrated by the Civil Rights Movement and modern peacebuilding, provides a pragmatic approach for resisting oppression and achieving reconciliation. The paper acknowledges common critiques regarding the model's realism in state-level conflicts but argues that it fundamentally reorients the practice of security from militarism to a peacebuilding framework. Ultimately, the research concludes that Christ's example is an enduring and effective model for fostering a just and peaceful society.

Bob Dylan’s song “The Death of Emmett Till” is not only an artistic portrayal of the 1955 Emmett Till tragedy but also an important work for analyzing racial issues in America from a new historicist view. Through its lyrics and melody, the song vividly tells the story of the Till case, highlighting the oppression of African Americans under Southern white supremacy and Jim Crow laws. Its widespread interpretation has played a key role in advancing the Civil Rights Movement, raising public awareness and prompting reflection on racial inequality. It highlights the song’s dual role as both a historical record and an active part in shaping history. In the context of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, “The Death of Emmett Till” has been shared, reinterpreted, and reproduced, becoming a key cultural symbol for addressing racial injustice. Its influence goes beyond time and continues to impact ongoing discussions about racial issues.

ABSTRACT While often relying on their protagonist’s persistent misogyny, Langston Hughes, Simple stories are, paradoxically, where some scholars have located his feminist aesthetic. We can further understand the truth of this seeming paradox through a comparative analysis of two writers influenced by the Simple stories. In the United States, Alice Childress’s Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life, writing alongside Hughes, indexed and fomented the nascent civil rights movement through the development of a female protagonist who embodies Claudia Jones’s theory of the political potential of Black working women. In Kenya, Wahome Mutahi’s Whispers column adapted Hughes to portray postcolonial urbanization and satirize the elite political class through a hard-drinking writer-protagonist, a close foil for the author himself, who struggles with his wife and daughter. With attention to depictions of patriarchy and its boundaries, as well as models of revolutionary love that the stories depict, this article shows how Mutahi’s and Childress’s revisions of Hughes’s Simple stories reveal the depth of his feminist aesthetic, and, moreover, the value of episodic realist fiction as a tool for analyzing the dialectical emergence of gender with race and class.

ABSTRACT In this autobiographical article, the veteran writer Michael Gonzales reflects upon Black culture in Harlem in the decades following Langston Hughes’s death in 1967. While alluding to films, authors, and musicians who helped shape Black expression, Gonzales provides a snapshot of Black working-class life for Harlemites, especially young Black men, during the early stages of the post–civil rights era. In doing so, Gonzales sheds important light on cultural experiences that swayed his decision to become a writer.

Bloody Tuesday: The Untold Story of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa by John M. Giggie (review)

ABSTRACTObjectiveThis study seeks to assess the association between in utero exposure to racial violence during the Civil Rights movement and pubertal development and fertility outcomes within the Bogalusa Heart Study population.MethodsUtilizing a prospective cohort design, Bogalusa Heart Study participants born between 1960 and 1970 were categorized based on their gestational age during peak racial violence events in Bogalusa. Exposure was defined as being in utero during the first trimester during February–July 1965. Pubertal development was assessed using age at menarche for girls and Tanner staging at age 13 for boys (n = 1945) and girls (n = 1970). Fertility outcomes, including fertility issues and miscarriage, were obtained by self‐report from the Bogalusa Babies study (2012–2016).ResultsIn utero exposure to racial violence was associated with earlier age at menarche in girls (−0.43 years, p < 0.001) and delayed pubertal development in boys (−0.54 Tanner stage at age 13; p = 0.02). An imprecise estimated increased odds of miscarriage (OR = 2.02, 95% CI: 0.92 to 4.47) and fertility issues (OR = 2.66, 95% CI: 0.62 to 11.32) were observed. Analysis by race did not show a significant interaction.ConclusionIn utero exposure to racial violence during the first trimester of pregnancy was associated with an earlier age at menarche in girls and slower pubertal development in boys. The findings underscore the importance of considering maternal stressors, specifically racial violence, in understanding variations in reproductive development.

ABSTRACT It is necessary to draw from and push forward the Black radical tradition to realize a world free from racial capitalism. Drawing on the work of Keri Day, I argue that the Azusa Street Revival represents a stream of the Black radical tradition. Further, I contend that the civil rights movement associated with Martin Luther King Jr. represented a continuation of this stream. Specifically, I argue that the Azusa Street Revival and the Beloved Community as envisioned and built by King formed what I call anti-political communities. I refer to these communities as anti-political because they reject the politics of racial capitalism and begin the work of building outside its domain via the Black radical tradition. These anti-political communities tore down racial capitalism through the new kind of community they built, and they have lessons for how we can do so in the present.

“Common Sense School Discipline,” Repurposing Civil Rights Era Policy, and the End of Liberal Order

Civil rights and social justice continue to be an issue on the American consciousness. Activities that foster historical empathy provide students with the skills to connect how certain enduring issues, such as racism and the struggle for civil rights, have their foundations in the past. In this article, the author provides two activities that focus on the debate between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois and their ideas regarding civil and political rights at the turn of the 20th century. To guide students in understanding the relevance of the past to the present, they examine speeches from two prominent leaders of what many call the Early Civil Rights Movement. Each activity is designed to develop students’ perspective recognition and contextualization skills and requires the analysis of primary sources in order to draw informed conclusions, which are key to strengthening students’ historical empathy skills. The two historical empathy activities provide students an opportunity to recognize how people from the same time and race may view an issue or event in multiple ways.

ABSTRACT The Black imagination has been the driving force behind much of America’s movements for liberation, including the Civil Rights Movement, the March on Washington, Freedom Riders, and Black Lives Matter. U.S. civics classrooms need to be inclusive of Black imagination. Currently, civics learning goals are anchored in white nationalist views that position white males as heroes who tamed the world and developed modern democratic nations. This type of civics education pacifies the masses and assuages collective anger, reducing the insurgent activism that can brew in environments of critical civics education. Drawing on a larger comparative case study project, this article deconstructs how young people utilize rap lyrics as both written and oral storytelling to reflect, critique, and articulate their senses of justice and conceptualizations of human flourishing. This article examines how rap literacy aligns with the objectives of critical civic learning, equipping young people to develop critical perspectives on justice, and offers implications for the future of civics education.