Civil Rights Movement Research Articles

People Before Profit?

Focusing on the automobile industry in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, this article demonstrates how Ford Motor Company and General Motors challenged apartheid through adherence to the Sullivan Principles, while maintaining cordial relations with the capitalist South African government in the late-apartheid period. Designed to promote desegregation of the workplace and equal pay for equal work, the Sullivan Principles were a controversial code of conduct for US subsidiaries operating in apartheid South Africa. Leon Sullivan, an African American civil rights leader, unveiled the Principles in March 1977 with the support of US multinationals, including both Ford and GM. Drawing on archival sources from both the United States and South Africa, the author traces how these American multinational corporations did not sufficiently allay their workers' most pressing concerns, nor did they firmly challenge the South African government. The Principles’ shortcomings underscore the disconnect between the anti-apartheid movement’s calls for revolutionary transformation and the American business community’s focus on evolutionary change, thus highlighting the tensions between international capital and South Africa’s racialized labor relations.

Contributing Authors

Dr. Mary Frances Berry, professor of history and Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of twelve books, including History Teaches Us to Resist (2018). From 1980 to 2004, she was a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and from 1993–2004 served as chair. Between 1977 and 1980, Dr. Berry served as the assistant secretary for education in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. She has also served as provost of the University of Maryland and chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder. In recognition of her scholarship and public service, Professor Berry has received 35 honorary doctoral degrees and many awards.Brandon James Render is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include twentieth-century United States social and intellectual history, post-1945 social movements and “the culture wars,” and public policy. His dissertation, “Colorblind University,” traces the intellectual genealogy of race-neutral policies and practices in higher education through admissions policies, departmental structure, and curriculum design. In addition to service as a graduate research fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy in 2018–19, he is the 2021–22 Mitchem Dissertation Fellow at Marquette University.Lee Sartain is a senior lecturer in American history at the University of Portsmouth, England. His research focuses primarily on the NAACP and civil rights activism from the 1910s to the 1970s. His first book, Invisible Activists: Women of the Louisiana NAACP and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1915–1945 (2007) won the Landry Prize for best book on a southern topic. He has also published Borders of Equality: The NAACP and the Baltimore Civil Rights Struggle, 1914–1970 (2013) and coedited Long Is the Way: One Hundred Years of the NAACP (2009). Recent articles have focused on the NAACP and the Great War and on youth movements and the NAACP in New Mexico. He has also written various encyclopedia entries on the NAACP. He is a member of the Royal Historical Society.Matthew Shannon is associate professor of history at Emory & Henry College. He is the author of Losing Hearts and Minds: American–Iranian Relations and International Education during the Cold War (2017). Dr. Shannon's research has been published in Iranian Studies, Diplomatic History, International History Review, and The Sixties. He is the editor of American–Iranian Dialogues: From Constitution to White Revolution, c. 1890s–1960s (2021), and the coeditor of 9/11 and the Academy: Responses in the Liberal Arts and the 21st-Century World (2019).Quito Swan is professor of African American and African diaspora studies at Indiana University Bloomington. A historian of Black internationalism, he is the author of Pauulu's Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (2021), Black Power in Bermuda (2010), and the forthcoming Pasifika Black: Black Internationalism in Oceania. Swan has garnered several major awards for his research, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute, Australia's University of Queensland, and, most recently, Pennsylvania State's Humanities Institute.Dr. Rhonda Y. Williams, professor and John L. Seigenthaler Chair in American History at Vanderbilt University, is the author of the award-winning The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality (2004) and Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (2005). She is also the coeditor of the award-winning book series “Justice, Power, and Politics” from the University of North Carolina Press. During her tenure at Case Western Reserve University, she founded and directed the Social Justice Institute, as well as the postdoctoral fellowship in African American studies.

Francis X. Walter's From Preaching to Meddling: A White Minister in the Civil Rights Movement

Francis X. Walter's From Preaching to Meddling: A White Minister in the Civil Rights Movement

Freedom in Laughter: Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby, and the Civil Rights Movement

Freedom in Laughter: Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby, and the Civil Rights Movement

Review: American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship, by Niambi M. Carter

Review: <i>American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship</i>, by Niambi M. Carter

From Complexity to Clarity

From Complexity to Clarity

Campus Protest and Composition Pedagogy: G. David Houston’s Activist Rhetoric at Howard University

This article contributes to rhetoric and composition scholarship that develops localized institutional microhistories of rhetorical education at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) by exploring the pedagogically focused scholarship of G. David Houston, a Howard University professor of English during the period of the of the early twentieth century known as the New Negro Movement. I examine Houston's 1919 article "Reconstruction in the Teaching of English," placing the pedagogical priorities that it reveals within the context of the author's participation in on-campus activism at Howard, as reflected in his 1920 article "Weaknesses of the Negro College." Drawing on Susan Kates's concept of activist rhetorics, I demonstrate the ways in which Houston's work exemplifies an embodied pedagogy that responds directly to Howard University's unique institutional, historical, and social location. In his scholarship, Houston developed a plan for English instruction that sought to elevate the role of composition training, encourage a cross-disciplinary pedagogical model, and professionalize the teaching of English. Houston's plan reveals a kind of hybrid composition pedagogy that incorporates aspects of both the vocational and classical-liberal arts models of "Negro education" and responds directly to the needs of Black college students.

African American Civil Rights Movements to End Slavery, Racism and Oppression in the Post Slavery Era: A Critique of Booker T. Washington’s Integration Ideology

The Transatlantic Slave trade began during the 15th century when Portugal and subsequently other European kingdoms were able to expand overseas and reach Africa. The Portuguese first began to kidnap people from the West Coast of Africa and took those that they enslaved to Europe. This saw a lot of African men and women transported to Europe and America to work on the huge plantations that the Whites owned. The transportation of these Africans exposed them to inhumane treatments which they faced even upon the arrival at their various destinations. The emancipation Proclamation signed on 1st January 1863 by the United States President Abraham Lincoln saw a legal stop to slave trade. However, the African Americans that had been taken to the United States and settled especially in the Southern region faced discrimination, segregation, violence and were denied civil rights through segregation laws such as the Jim Crow laws and lynching, based on the color of their skin. This forced them especially those that had acquired an education to rise up and speak against this treatment. They formed Civil Rights Movements to advocate for Black rights and equal treatment. These protracted movements, despite continued violence on Blacks, Culminated in Barack Obama being elected the first African American President of the United States of America. To cement the victory, he won a second term, which Donald Trump failed to obtain. This paper sought to critic the philosophies of Booker T. Washington in his civil rights movement, particularly his ideologies of integration, self-help, racial solidarity and accommodation as expressed in his speech, “the Atlanta Compromise,” and the impact this had on the political and civil rights arena for African Americans.

Post Slavery and the Plight of Black Americans: An Analysis of Langston Hughes’ “Not without Laughter”

This paper discussed the lives of black Americans in the Post Slavery period. It was believed that black Americans who were former slaves were then free from being treated brutally by the slave masters and that the whipping of the so called offenders was a thing of the past. On the contrary, Black Americans were not free to receive education, have access to legal marriages, own properties and enjoy all other benefits that an American should enjoy. Life after slavery was still difficult. The reality was that black Americans were free only in a narrow sense as they were still discriminated by the government institutions. This gave rise to activism and movements such as Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement. Great Black scholars, The Talented Tenth, such as Alice Walker, Du Bois, and Langston Hughes emerged. Not without Laughter is one of the books that Langston Hughes wrote. This paper is an analysis of civil injustices that Black Americans had to endure according to Hughes in Not without Laughter. Today, the situation has not changed much as racism is still rampant as depicted by violence still perpetrated against the Blacks. The rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement worldwide against the death of Floyd in the USA gives evidence to such. One encouraging aspect, though, is that the current President, Joe Biden is against racism as he has ordered that those that killed Floyd should face the full wrath of the law.

Racism, Chronic Disease, and Mental Health: Time to Change Our Racialized System of Second-Class Care.

In this article, we describe how the “weathering hypothesis” and Adverse Childhood Experiences set the stage for higher rates of chronic disease, mental health disorders and maternal mortality seen in African American adults. We illustrate the toll that untreated and overtreated mental health disorders have on Black individuals, who have similar rates of mental health disorders as their white counterparts but have fewer outpatient mental health services and higher rates of hospitalizations. We discuss the history of Medicaid, which, while passed alongside Medicare during the Civil Rights era, was Congress’s concession to Southern states unwilling to concede federal oversight and funds to the provision of equal healthcare for poor and Black people. Medicaid, which covers 33% of all Blacks in the US and suffers from chronic underfunding and state efforts to weaken it through demonstration waivers, is a second-class system of healthcare with eligibility criteria that vary by state and year. We propose the adoption of a national, single payer Medicare for All system to cover everyone equally, from conception to death. While this will not erase all structural racism, it will go a long way towards leveling the playing field and achieving greater equity in the US.

Kneading, Needing, and Eating Black Bodies

Social workers have been on the frontlines alongside marginalized communities since the profession’s emergence. This stance continues with supporting the Black Lives Matter Movement and centering the structural inequities that the COVID-19 pandemic highlights. A narrative that centers the history of social work’s concern for Black citizenship in the profession’s formation is neglected in the literature. This historical review traces the genesis of the profession’s work to expand access to the entitlements of citizenship among Black communities. Thematic analysis of secondary sources is used to investigate the formation of the profession and its work to ensure access to resources among Blacks communities. Study findings identify that the profession emerged from the bonds between the Abolitionist Movement and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, then moved away from working with Black people during the Settlement Movement and did not return to addressing the needs of these communities until the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement. Black social workers answered the call to support Black and non-Black communities in the absence of the profession’s national organization’s presence. Social work needs, kneads, and eats Black bodies by being in complicity with systems of oppression. The history of social work and its concern and lack of concern for Black citizenship is a pedagogical innovation that addresses the historical amnesia that White domination fosters. The findings of this analysis call social workers to task to disrupt White dominant epistemologies of ignorance by incorporating this historical context into their social work pedagogy.

Political Advocacy Without a Choice

From social work’s early days, African American social workers were engaged in what today is termed as political social work, yet their work is often overlooked in both social work education and the broader retelling of our profession’s history. This article examines the early history of African American political social work, using Lane and Pritzker’s (2018) five domains of political social work. We outline ways in which African American social workers’ lived experiences led them to engage in political social work to support community survival and to challenge injustice during the Black Migration period post-slavery, the Jim Crow Era, and the Civil Rights Movement. Even as broader structural dynamics sought to exclude African Americans from the political arena, dynamic and influential African American social workers laid the groundwork for modern political social work. They politically engaged their communities, lobbied for legislation, worked in the highest levels of government, supported campaigns, and ran and held elective office to ensure that civil rights were given and maintained. This manuscript calls for a shift from social work’s white-dominant historical narrative and curricula (Bell, 2014; DeLoach McCutcheon, 2019) to assertive discussion of the historic roles African American political social work pioneers played in furthering political empowerment and challenging social injustice.

Assessing Antiracism as a Learning Outcome in Social Work Education

The current political climate and reversals of gains made during the Civil Rights Movement underscore the urgent need for preparing emerging social workers to effectively address white supremacy in social work practice. Antiracism education in social work aims to ensure competent antiracist social work practice towards the goal of eradicating white supremacy in all its forms. Given the widening racial disparities evident in income, health and educational outcomes, it is essential to examine the degree to which social work education adequately prepares emerging social work practitioners to engage in antiracist social work practice. This paper presents findings of a systematic review of social work research assessing antiracism as a learning outcome. After reviewing more than 150 studies published between 2008 and 2018, none of them focused on assessing antiracism as a learning outcome. Our review demonstrates that despite the importance of antiracist social work practice, published research on assessment of antiracism as a learning outcome is sparse and is not antiracism-focused as much as it is antiracism-inclusive. More attention to identifying and disseminating best practices for assessing student competence in antiracism practice is required to defeat white supremacy.

Disrupting narratives of racial progress: Two preservice elementary teachers’ practices

This study examined the approaches used by two preservice elementary school teachers as they designed and taught antiracist social studies lessons about civil rights history during a community-based field experience. Using a theoretical framework of racial pedagogical content knowledge (RPCK), we identified three domains of RPCK needed to enact antiracist elementary social studies teaching and analyzed how these domains surfaced during lessons and interviews. Our cross-case analysis revealed that both preservice teachers struggled to balance presenting civil rights events as historically significant while also calling their legacy into question. However, the preservice teacher who fostered dialogic and student-centered discussions was ultimately more successful with antiracist teaching. We provide implications for supporting elementary school teachers in developing social studies lessons that embody antiracism and teach the long civil rights movement.

Beauty and Power: Beauticians, the Highlander Folk School, and Women’s Professional Networks in the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract In January 1961, fifty-two African American beauticians gathered at the Highlander Folk School, a tiny bastion of racial integration perched in the mountains of Tennessee. They had come to discuss their role in the struggle against American racism. While historians have long acknowledged the importance of gendered networks and women’s organizing within the African American freedom struggle, the history of the beauticians who gathered at Highlander demonstrates the importance of professional networks as a bridge between different local struggles. In their skill at building networks, and their attention to the patient labor required of such building, beauticians were emblematic of the organizing prowess demonstrated by women throughout the civil rights movement. But unlike most African American women, beauticians had the economic independence and social prominence to gain positions of power usually reserved for men. The intersection of their class status and their gendered identity magnified the liminal status of beauticians—and gave that status special power. As they debated their role in the movement, the beauticians who gathered at Highlander struggled to navigate between autonomy and connection, and between participatory democracy and institutional hierarchy. Their struggles reveal the inevitable tension that marked social networks within a movement that challenged not only the forces of white supremacy, but also the inequalities of status and economic power that transcended the color line.

Can Police Unions Help Change American Policing?

Police unions are part of the problem in American policing. Could police unions also be part of the solution? This Comment begins by putting into practice the dialectic we must achieve at a societal level by detailing the ways in which police and Black Americans have been positioned to be in conflict from the seventeenth century to the present, and by discussing the formation of police unions. American society needs truth-telling about the history and present context that drives police officers into deadly conflict with Black Americans to heal, trust, and effectuate a more perfect system for public safety. This Comment wrestles with the need to understand several truths at once: that police organized into unions in part to protect the rank-and-file from managerial abuse; that the American policing system is in many ways designed and implemented against Black&nbsp;Americans; that police unions organized in the Civil Rights Era to protect police officers from discipline for following orders; and that deep, structural change should include police unions. Less fundamental changes that leave in place the core of American policing, without examining its racist foundations and incentives toward brutality and lethal force, will not serve to bring about lasting reconciliation. This Comment reviews several ways to improve the management of police departments put forth by labor and policing scholars and suggests that the promise of such reforms could motivate participation in a truth process. The conversation about policing reform in the United States has expanded and deepened tremendously in the past year, and it continues to evolve and take on new dimensions. This Comment urges policymakers to create a truth process as part of police reform and suggests that the process be implemented via the police unions because the voices of police organizations that represent rank-and-file officers are a critical ingredient for meaningful change.

“WOKE” in Historically Black Colleges and Universities

This research paper aims to examine and critique the impact and contribution of HBCUs in advancing societal issues and education while fostering a heightened understanding of social justice for today’s HBCU students. The purpose of this research is to discuss, expose, and share the impact HBCUs have had on the “WOKE” movement and social justice in the United States of America. The discourse centers on the development of scholars and activities who have been nurtured by and at HBCUs. The primary sources and events have been summarizing, focusing on the cause and effect of the injustice minorities face from the modern Civil Rights Era to the present day. The information/data demonstrates core components that have shaped American HBCUs from their establishments/foundation. Those ideals still evoke the same emotion of individuals who effort toward higher education decades ago up to today’s HBCU student bodies that embrace societal images upon their school. It also demonstrates how HBCUs have shown their ways of waking to societal limits in multiple forms of action to be heard through their oppression. Some sources broadly state approaches to reinstating these essential values, while some indicate the efforts to prove the name of HBCUs compared to PWIs. Some sources even show how our institutions solidify our government. This paper expresses how HBCUs in our nation keep students aware of the delinquent acts around them from social injustice and racial inequality.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Black Veterans, Politics, and Civil Rights in Twentieth-Century America: Closing Ranks

This first volume in the War and Society in Modern American History series from Lexington Books contains five essays, along with a foreword by Hal M. Friedman, an introduction by the editor Robert F. Jefferson Jr., and an afterword by Peter Karsten—all highly regarded military historians. Friedman and Jefferson cite as an inspiration Rayford Logan, who was my undergraduate adviser many years ago at Howard University. Logan's academic career was shaped by service as an officer in World War I, and he emphasized the importance of military service in the struggle for civil rights. The essays themselves, as Friedman observes, illuminate how military service influenced veterans' lives, motivated them to take up the struggle, and taught them skills in organization, leadership, and communication. The first three essays cover the period before President Harry S. Truman directed desegregation of the armed forces. Kevin D. Greene's “‘We Never Get to Be Men’”...

Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement

Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement

On Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale Figures in American Media by Claudia Schwabe

On Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale Figures in American Media by Claudia Schwabe Johanna M. Broussard (bio) Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale Figures in American Media by Claudia Schwabe. Wayne State University Press, 2019. ISBN: 9780814346013. Hardcover, paperback. It is good to be evil. At least that is what many villains who enter the cultural zeitgeist of the United States have learned in recent decades. From the cool, enigmatic power of Darth Vader to the sexy vengeance of Maleficent to the charming, seductiveness of Lucifer Morningstar, U.S. popular media is filled with villains as popular and beloved as they are evil. However, as fairy tales and myths have routinely depicted, villains and monsters are markers of otherness—an otherness to be avoided, to be feared, and, often, to be destroyed. The villains mentioned here fit the traditional role of “evil other,” and yet something about these individuals and their monstrous kin has earned admiration and sympathy from U.S. audiences. In Craving Supernatural Creatures: German Fairy-Tale [End Page 287] Figures in American Pop Culture, Claudia Schwabe sets out to answer the question of why this has occurred. Schwabe begins by discussing the impetus for writing this book: seeing Mattel’s collection of “freaky fab” Monster High Dolls, which depict high school girls who are related to the famous monsters of myth, legend, and literature, such as the young vampire Draculaura, which led to an inquiry on the marketability of monstrosity as “cool.” Her work produced a study in four parts, each focusing on U.S. film and television adaptations of a particular monster type from German folkloric and literary fairy tales of the Romantic period, such as the automaton/golem, the witch/evil queen, the big bad wolf, and the dwarf, respectively. And while each chapter has its own themes, the central theme Schwabe discusses is how U.S. adaptations often focus on humanizing and redeeming these monstrous, “evil” figures. Drawing on both her German heritage and her work as a German scholar, Schwabe’s book has many strengths, including the depth of research into the prevalence of tales involving these creatures in both the German canon and in U.S. popular media, well-written prose and carefully crafted arguments, and the meticulousness of her analysis. Her chapter on the automatons reveals how the once-menacing other that has an uncanny but unnatural resemblance to a living person has been rehabilitated into a sympathetic and tragic figure (Edward Scissorhands), a lens through which to view sexism and male chauvinism (Stepford Wives), and a reminder of anti-Semitism (The X-Files); the creation that once stood as a monster to destroy humanity through its violence now destroys humanity through a revelation of our own monstrosity. In her chapter on witches and evil queens, her analysis depicts an almost chronological shift in U.S. perception of the figure from the evil hag as presented in Disney’s Snow White, to a complicated and insecure figure in Mirror, Mirror, to a multifaceted and redeemable character in Once Upon a Time. Schwabe argues that this shift in depiction rises from the “hypothesis that villains are made and not born,” making it conceivable that they could be “unmade,” or redeemed (146). Her chapter on the Big Bad Wolf focuses on themes of “de-cursing” the wolf and lycanthrope and recasting their otherness in positive ways. Her chapter on dwarves casts recent changes to their depiction, such as Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, in light of the U.S. civil rights movement and the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, arguing that recent depictions of dwarves praise U.S. diversity through a blending of ordinary and extraordinary physicality. [End Page 288] While the breadth of texts analyzed is a strength of Schwabe’s book, it also leads into one if its weaknesses: depth of analysis. Though there is merit and logic to focusing on film and television adaptations, questions arise as to how Schwabe’s analysis would hold when such characters are adapted for use in comic books, video games, or tabletop role-playing games. While the book does an admirable job of providing deep readings and analyses of...