Civil Rights Movement Research Articles

White by Force and the Racialized State of Exception

White identity is forged through violence. The moment that whites aspired to be white, they set themselves up for immediate, inevitable failure: they try to inhabit an identity of superiority that cannot exist, and this sets them into a perpetual identity crisis, an existential emergency that threatens who they are and who they think they want to be. The ensuing identity formation—white by force—comprises an entire set of strategies, tactics, institutions, and structures meant to prop up an inherently failure-based identity and to do so through brutality, resentment, anger, contrived fear, and murder. Such an identity impacts everyone, including white people themselves, in devastating ways. In what following article, I will put forward a theoretical model called “White by Force and the Racialized State of Exception”, conceptualizing key aspects of this model to provide an emerging vocabulary for studying, discussing, and dismantling white identity, violence, authoritarianism, racism, and the existential crises that we are all facing. Our discourse around race and racism, since the Civil Rights Era, needs new language from which to diagnose an inherently violent identity formation that ultimately benefits no one, especially not people of color or white people from lower socioeconomic strata.

The “People’s Tour” as Conflict Pedagogy: Using Site Visits to Engage Students with the Struggle for Civil Rights

Winston-Salem, North Carolina, has a rich history of Civil Rights struggles and its people continue to resist racial oppression in systems of housing, labor, education, policing, transportation, and others. Dating to 1892, Winston-Salem State University (WSSU), a historically Black college/university (HBCU), has attracted students who have become organizers and activists in the fight for social justice in the local community. These include Theodosia Simpson, a leader of the radical Black women-led tobacco workers union; Carl Matthews, who started the first victorious lunch counter sit-in in North Carolina; and Dr. Larry Little, who co-founded the first official Black Panther Party chapter in the South. In that tradition, I have developed a “People’s History Tour of Winston-Salem” that takes current WSSU students outside the classroom to learn about the Civil Rights struggle at a variety of important sites. This critical pedagogy has students apply key sociological concepts that bolster their understanding of racial stratification and efforts to eradicate it. The goals of this assignment are for students to explore classroom curriculum about White supremacy, racial capitalism, and social movements at relevant historical and contemporary sites in Winston-Salem. By doing so, I aim for students to have transformative experiences that tie their readings and classroom discussions to the community spaces where that material comes alive.

(Re)Imagined Black Informational Past: Chicago’s New Negro Intercollegiate Club and the Wonder Books, 1927 & 1929

In 1927, the collective of Black students known as the Washington Intercollegiate Club of Chicago went out into their community to collect data about the various components of the Black experience. This research turned into the two editions of the Intercollegian Wonder Book. The Wonder Books present a Black past that notes a time of youth envisioning their communitythrough the lens of the New Negro Movement, galvanizing to uplift and promote a new Black present in Chicago. Our project tracks the impact of the Wonder Books by examining how they have been referenced in research and journalism since their publication.

Power in the Social Gospel: Howard Kester, Claude Williams and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union

This essay explores how social gospelers in the U.S. South organized for relational power by building institutions for economic and political democracy in the 1930s and 1940s. In their organizing, Howard Kester and Claude Williams built relational power and institutions that fed the institutional ecology of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s. While it might be surprising to find a worthwhile analysis of power by social gospelers like Kester and Williams, they keenly understood the role of power in theology, the work of the church, and movement building, especially as they organized for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU). Kester and Williams built relational power by building institutions through which grassroots people organized to build political and economic power to confront the ravages of racial capitalism.

Fragmentation of Identities: Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro

Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964) is an Obie winning play penned by a prolific writer, Adrienne Kennedy. Premiered at the 4th Street Theatre in New York City, the play has earned significant recognition for its innovative approach and poignant exploration of racial and psychological themes. The play was awarded with an Obie for Best New American Play in 1965, marking a significant milestone in Kennedy’s career and in the landscape of American Drama. Set against the backdrop of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, the play reflects the era’s racial tensions and societal pressures. The play follows Sarah, a young black woman struggling with a fractured identity. Through a series of disjointed scenes and dialogues, Sarah adopts multiple personas that represent different facets of her racial, cultural, and psychological self. This paper aims to analyze Sarah’s identity by exploring the symbolism of each persona and the impact of her parents. This paper argues that Sarah’s personas are not arbitrary but represent her profound psychological conflict and the impossibility of reconciling disparate aspects of her identity.

Influence of Historical Events on American Literature of the 21st Century

Purpose: The aim of the study was to assess the influence of historical events on American literature of the 21st century. Materials and Methods: This study adopted a desk methodology. A desk study research design is commonly known as secondary data collection. This is basically collecting data from existing resources preferably because of its low cost advantage as compared to a field research. Our current study looked into already published studies and reports as the data was easily accessed through online journals and libraries. Findings: The terrorist attacks marked a significant turning point, inspiring a wave of literature that grapples with themes of loss, trauma, and the complexities of patriotism. This era saw the rise of novels, memoirs, and poems that explore the personal and collective impact of the event, such as Don DeLillo's "Falling Man" and Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close." Additionally, the economic downturn of 2008 influenced a body of work that critiques capitalism and explores themes of financial instability and inequality, exemplified by novels like John Lanchester's "Capital" and Jess Walter's "The Financial Lives of the Poets." The rise of social movements, such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, has significantly shaped contemporary American literature, prompting a surge in works addressing racial injustice, gender equality, and social activism. Authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates with "Between the World and Me" and Angie Thomas with "The Hate U Give" provide powerful narratives that reflect the ongoing struggle for civil rights and social justice. Implications to Theory, Practice and Policy: Historical materialism, trauma theory and cultural theory may be used to anchor future studies on assessing the influence of historical events on American literature of the 21st century. Encouraging the inclusion of diverse voices and perspectives in literary production and academic studies is essential. Government and private institutions should provide funding and grants specifically aimed at supporting literary works that address significant historical events.

United for what and for whom? An analysis of White Christian nationalism in a 2023 school board election campaign

Public school board elections have become cultural battlegrounds as groups with opposing views on education, politics, religion, and social and cultural issues vie to shape public education, their communities, and the nation. To date, little research has examined White Christian nationalism as a political force shaping these elections. This paper analyzes the November 2023 State College Area School District (SCASD) school board election in a polarized Pennsylvania town, focusing on the five “United for SCASD” candidates. Using public data (e.g., Facebook, websites, radio interviews, emails from candidates to board and administrators), the paper examines how these candidates’ rhetoric – largely drawing on Civil Rights-era minoritarian framing – mobilized key White Christian nationalist tropes such as persectuion and voicelessness. The findings explore how candidates characterized desirable versus undesirable types of unity and diversity. For instance, they advocated for focusing on students’ “common humanity” and teaching American exceptionalism as unifying strategies, argued for “parents’ rights” to opt children out of objectionable material, and asserted the need for “viewpoint diversity” on the board. However, they opposed the board’s alleged ideological uniformity and “divisive” initiatives and curricula focusing on systemic inequities, especially concerning race/racism and gender. The data show some evidence of White Christian nationalist tropes, particularly beliefs in American exceptionalism, the trope of persecution and voicelessness, the assertion of a common cultural template for US public schools, and us-them binaries, in this case, between liberal board members and their constituents versus the U4SCASD slate and more "conservative," often rural, families.

Unveiling the Mask of Asia: Representation of Western and Eastern Values in Crazy Rich Asians

The release of the film Crazy Rich Asians in 2018 caused a sensation. Its all Asian cast and commercial success are extolled as a breakthrough for Asian American cinema. The author attempts to explore how the film presents the Western and Eastern values and cultures by applying Representation theory, constructed in the intersectionality of gender, race and class. The author finds the film’s release is probably the byproduct of the Feminist Movements and the Civil Rights Movement and that the representation on Eastern values is stereotyped by Western-centered ideas, thus Asian American still have a long road before they can effect a change.

Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement

Food Power Politics: The Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement

“There are some customs in the U.S. which are stronger than laws”: DeHaven Hinkson and the Fight for Equality in the Pennsylvania National Guard

ABSTRACT This article examines a little-known fight by African American veterans to desegregate the Pennsylvania National Guard from 1920 to 1948. This narrative follows the life of DeHaven Hinkson, a Philadelphia doctor, veteran, and one of the driving forces behind the movement. Building on scholarship of post–World War I activism and the Long Civil Rights Movement, this article demonstrates the need for scholars to consider not only widespread and national civil rights activism, but also the local and more traditional movements as influential in breaking the grip of Jim Crow on the United States. This article also suggests the need to examine conservative African American efforts at obtaining civil rights and how that conservatism remained a part of civil rights activism beyond the 1940s.

Learning About the Civil Rights Movement Through Multi-Perspective Biographical YA Graphic Novels

No single story can represent fully and comprehensively a complex historical movement such as the Civil Rights fight for freedom and social justice. Learning about this movement through multi-perspective biographical young adult graphic novels cultivates in students a nuanced understanding of this historical struggle, making it more concrete and relatable for student readers. In this article, we describe how teachers can use graphic novels from diverse perspectives for teaching the Civil Rights Movement.

Recipes for Life: Black Women, Cooking, and Memory

In African American history, food has functioned as expression of colonial power and control, and as a source of Black celebration and liberation. Cookbooks written by Black women from the mid-eighteenth century to late twentieth century reflect the long history of the development of African American cuisine. These texts are practical and instructional, while also offering insights into the transnational development of food as an expression of cultural history through African, Indigenous, and European influences. African Americans, and more specifically Black women, have contributed to the food history of the Southern United States by developing a distinct African American cuisine and creating the texts by which to publicly declare their knowledge and ensure its survival. By analyzing the cookbooks of Malinda Russell, Edna Lewis, Vertamae Smith-Grosvenor, and Carole and Norma Jean Darden, a timeline of cookbooks from the Civil War to the Black Power Movement can be established. Their commonalities, including the use of cookbooks as autobiographies, community memoirs, and genealogical records, are features that resonated with the Civil Rights Movement in the latter half of the twentieth century. Food is more than a means of survival. It is a constantly evolving expression of culture, people, and celebration.

Teaching Bayard Rustin to Kindergarteners: A Collaborative Self-Study into the Planning Process of a Queer Counternarrative

The authors of this self-study set out to examine their own process of developing queer counternarrative lesson plans for use in early elementary social studies classrooms. Having designed and tested a set of kindergarten lesson plans about Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s, we sought to answer the question: As teacher educators, how might we improve the practice of designing and teaching elementary, social studies curriculum using queer counternarratives for young learners? We explain the current political context for teaching LGBTQ+ history and the specific context of teaching in elementary classrooms. We examine the theoretical underpinnings of both Queer Pedagogy and child development of young learners. Using a critical friends protocol and constant comparative analysis for examining our learning, we determine that this work, rather than controversial, should be viewed as revelatory, steeped in queer pedagogy and centered in queer transgressive capital.

Authoritarian innovation in the United States: the role of dual subnational systems of labor governance

I apply Curato and Fossati's (2020) concept of “authoritarian innovation” to analyze historic changes in labor governance in the United States that have undermined democratic participation in the workplace and in the polity. Drawing from comparative political economy and welfare state theories, I argue that since the 1930s the U.S. has had not one unified, national labor regime but two competing, subnational regimes: the New Deal and its legacy in the industrialized North and West Coast, and a counter-regime based initially in the former Confederate Southern states. The more anti-union, anti-welfare, and anti-democratic Southern regime survived the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and 1970s, gained ascendance nationally with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, and expanded its boundaries in the 2010s into the deindustrialized Midwest. The “dual regime” analysis highlights critical transitions and divergent paths in the reshaping of American democracy.

Black emergency department visits for schizophrenia/psychosis following the police killing of George Floyd: An empirical test of “protest psychosis”

In the United States, there exists a large disparity in the diagnosis of schizophrenia between Black and White individuals. Some of the symptoms associated with schizophrenia, such as agitation, delusions, and non-compliance, were previously linked to a now-discontinued condition known as “Protest Psychosis.” This proposed subtype of schizophrenia diagnosis emerged during the 1950s and 1960s in response to racial tensions during the Civil Rights movement and preceded an increase in schizophrenia diagnosis among Black populations, potentially leading to racial disparities in this psychiatric condition that continue to permeate the modern context.In May 2020, the police killing of George Floyd sparked widespread protests through the Black Lives Matter Movement. Given the historical precedence of “protest psychosis” in response to the Civil Rights Movement, we examined disparities in Emergency Department (ED) visits diagnosed as schizophrenia/psychosis immediately following the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020. We used monthly data on ED visits from January 2016 to December 2020 across 5 University of California health systems. We used ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) time-series analysis to derive the residual values of ED visits diagnosed as schizophrenia/psychosis among Black persons and examined whether these residuals increased selectively among Black persons in June 2020. Results from time-series analyses indicate 34 additional ED visits above expected levels diagnosed as schizophrenia/psychosis among Black persons in June 2020 (p < 0.05), amounting to a 25% increase in these visits among Black persons. These results indicate a perpetuation of historical trends and cohere with expectations from the legacy of “Protest Psychosis”.

A Minority View: Reynell Parkins and Creative Tension in the Civil Rights Movement of Texas, 1965–1975

A Minority View: Reynell Parkins and Creative Tension in the Civil Rights Movement of Texas, 1965–1975

Introduction: Toward a Radical International Thought

Bringing together political theorists of empire with critical scholars of international relations who have interrogated the methodological nationalism (indeed the fetish of the nation-state) of their disciplines, this special issue examines the multifaceted dimensions (including political, ideological, and psycho-affective) of a radical international thought. Going beyond articulations of anti-colonial struggle at the national level, the issue charts radical theories and praxes of insurgency and revolutionary violence and brings an internationalist framework to bear on historical moments like the Spanish Civil War, the rise of anti-imperial development alternatives, and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and others. In doing so, the issue spotlights thinkers who are rarely read in a global register, such as Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Jalāl Āl-e Ahmad, Ghassan Kanafani, and Eqbal Ahmad, among others. Furthermore, the introduction argues, the essays track these understudied articulations of radical international thought in the context of the traveling projects of imperial domination to which they responded. These radical figures’ political thought and action, in turn, inspired further imperial responses, such as political assassinations in the Third World, counterrevolutionary tactics, and other modes of violence in the service of empire.

Multicultural education and global citizenship: Literature review

The aim of this study is to conduct a systematic exploration of the literature, delving into the realm of multicultural education and global citizenship. It seeks to comprehensively understand these concepts by tracing the origins and evolution of multicultural education, drawing connections to its inception during the Civil Rights Movement, and spotlighting the contributions of influential scholars in this field. The concept of global citizenship is also examined, emphasizing its relevance in an interconnected world and its alignment with the United Nations' development goals. The manuscript identifies the significance of studying multicultural education and global citizenship, including its role in promoting social cohesion, preparing students for an interconnected world, and fostering responsible citizenship. Intersectionality means promoting a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of social issues and advocating for more comprehensive approaches to equity and justice. This review has the potential to contribute to the understanding and implementation of effective multicultural education and global citizenship programs. Overall, this review of the literature aims to address literature gaps and challenges in the field and provide valuable information for educators, policymakers, and stakeholders involved in multicultural education and global citizenship.

Peran Gerakan Hak Sipil dalam Membentuk Masyarakat Amerika: Analisis Sejarah dan Dampaknya, 1950-1960

This study analyzes the important role of the Civil Rights Movement in shaping United States society through a historical approach and its impact. It explores the movement's long history, from its 19th-century roots to the monumental struggles of the 20th century, revealing how it emerged in response to rampant social, racial, and political injustice. By examining key figures, strategies, and important events, this study traces the evolution of the movement from the anti-slavery era to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Additionally, it examines the movement's impact on American society, highlighting significant transformations in law, policy, and societal perceptions of civil rights and equality. The study also documents the movement's legacy in driving systemic change and shaping views on inclusion, justice, and diversity. In conclusion, the Civil Rights Movement has played a crucial role in shaping modern American society by laying the foundation for progress toward equality, justice, and human rights, with its legacy continuing to influence ongoing struggles for a more just and inclusive society.

A Case Study of Integrating Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) and Building Information Modeling (BIM) in Heritage Bridge Documentation: The Edmund Pettus Bridge

The Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, Alabama, a symbol of the American Civil Rights Movement and an exemplar of early 20th-century engineering, stands as a testament to the progress and challenges of its era. The bridge, recognized for its pivotal role in the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” conflict and the following Selma to Montgomery marches for voting rights, also represents significant engineering achievements with its distinctive design and construction methodology. In this study, the research team presents a comprehensive framework for documenting heritage bridges by utilizing Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) technology, supplemented by other Reality Capture (RC) techniques, including Structure from Motion (SfM), 360-degree photography, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), and integrating the data within a Building Information Modeling (BIM) environment. The focus on the Edmund Pettus Bridge case study demonstrates how this novel approach can capture the intricate details of its structural and architectural features while preserving its historical narratives. The documentation outcomes, including a detailed BIM model and a set of Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) drawings, highlight the effectiveness of combining TLS and BIM in conserving unconventional heritage structures like bridges. This paper also discusses the technological challenges encountered, such as dealing with heavy traffic and environmental constraints during data acquisition and developing the BIM model and drawings. It outlines the strategies implemented to address these issues. This research contributes to preserving a severely under-represented American National Historic Landmark (NHL). It sets a precedent for documenting other non-building heritage structures, balancing technological advancements with historical integrity.