National Civil Rights Research Articles

Cape Verde: the most democratic nation in Africa?

This article examines the substance behind the claim that Cape Verde, a small archipelago state off the west coast of Africa, is the best country in Africa for political rights and civil liberties. Based on interviews conducted with 22 key informants in government, the judiciary, the legislature and civil society, it explores the electoral process, the political parties, the functioning of the National Assembly, civil and political rights, the judicial system, civil society and economic equality. It finds that Cape Verde's unique geography and history have played a key role in facilitating good governance, and an open and non-violent society that values the real political gains of 1991. However, democracy has not yet eradicated either gender discrimination, dependence on the diaspora or poverty.

Race Work: The Rise of Civil Rights in the Urban West

Matthew C. Whitaker, an assistant professor of history at Arizona State University, has produced an engaging study of the civil rights movement in one major metropolitan center in the American West. Although the title suggests that the work is of broader scope, Whitaker concentrates on Phoenix, Arizona, and especially on the activities and impact of the remarkable civil rights activists Lincoln Ragsdale and Eleanor Ragsdale, who eventually became among the wealthiest and most influential African Americans in the West. Whitaker carefully documents the “race work” of the Ragsdales from the late 1940s to the end of the twentieth century. Although the West was supposedly more tolerant of diversity, immigrants quickly discovered that Phoenix's race relations resembled those in other American cities. For fifty years, the Ragsdales “helped dismantle an apartheid-like system in what is presently the fifth largest city in the United States” (p. 4). Phoenix assumed an importance in the history of the civil rights movement disproportionate to the size of its African American population. Although the number of blacks averaged only around five percent of the city's total population throughout the period, the city sometimes led the nation in securing civil rights victories. The Ragsdales helped desegregate Phoenix's schools one year before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, and they helped integrate the city's all-white neighborhoods long before Congress outlawed restrictive covenants in 1968. Race Work would have benefited from closer comparisons between Phoenix and the experiences of western urban centers with larger African American populations—such as Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and Oakland—but it succeeds in placing Phoenix within the larger context of the national civil rights movement.

Groundwork: local black freedom movements in America

Over the last several years, the traditional narrative of the civil rights movement as largely a southern phenomenon, organized primarily by male leaders, that roughly began with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and ended with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has been complicated by studies that root the movement in smaller communities across the country. These local movements had varying agendas and organizational development, geared to the particular circumstances, resources, and regions in which they operated. Local civil rights activists frequently worked in tandem with the national civil rights movement but often functioned autonomously from - and sometimes even at odds with - the national movement. Together, the path-breaking essays in Groundwork teach us that local civil rights activity was a vibrant component of the larger civil rights movement, and contributed greatly to its national successes. Individually, the pieces offer dramatic new insights about the civil rights movement, such as the fact that a militant black youth organization in Milwaukee was led by a white Catholic priest and in Cambridge, Maryland, by a middle-aged black woman; that a group of middle-class, professional black women spearheaded Jackson, Mississippi's movement for racial justice and made possible the continuation of the Freedom Rides, and that, despite protests from national headquarters, the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality staged a dramatic act of civil disobedience at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. No previous volume has enabled readers to examine several different local movements together, and in so doing, Groundwork forges a far more comprehensive vision of the black freedom movement.

“The Like of Which Is Found Nowhere Else in All the World”: Placing and Imagining an African American West

E s s a y R e v i e w “T h e L i k e o f W h i c h Is F o u n d N o w h e r e E l s e in A l l t h e W o r l d ”: P l a c i n g a n d Im a g i n i n g a n A f r i c a n A m e r i c a n W e s t M i c h a e l K. J o h n s o n W o r k s R e v i e w e d Allmendinger, Blake. ImaginingtheAfricanAmericanWest.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 161 pages, $49.95. Tyler, Texas Black Film Collection. DVD, G. William Jones Film and Video Collection/Hamon Arts Library, Southern Methodist University, 2004. $250.00. Whitaker, Matthew C. Race Work: The Rise ofCivil Rights in the Urban West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 382 pages, $35.00. Matthew Whitaker writes in Race Work that “the American West has long been narrowly labeled as a region with few if any African Americans and virtually no black history,” an area neglected by scholars of both African American and western history, in part because that history has existed outside the dominant paradigms of each field (9). As Whitaker observes, “the history of African Americans in the West is a story of urban life and ‘the struggle for racial equality,’” a history at odds with “academic and popular views of the American West” as an exceptional and egalitarian place fundamentally different from the East, replete with spectacular and rugged wilderness and empty of burdensome governmen­ tal regulations, a place where the ready availability of unclaimed land enabled “rugged Anglo American pioneers” to write their own destinies (10, 9, 9). Many African Americans, however, found that the West replicated rather than opposed eastern forms of government, the same antimiscegenation laws, the same de facto and de jure segregation, the same restrictions on land ownership, the same bigotry and discrimina­ tion. Contradicting rather than reinforcing the dominant mythology of an egalitarian and exceptional West of wilderness spaces rather than cities, of unusual freedom and democratic values rather than govemW e s t e r n A m e r i c a n L i t e r a t u r e 4 1 . 3 ( F a l l 2 0 0 6 ) : 3 3 6 - 4 4 . M i c h a e l k . J o h n s o n 3 3 7 ALFRED N.SACK p re se n ts JULY J0NE5 SPENCER W IL L IA M S Lobby card from Juke Joint (1947). Courtesy of John Kisch. Separate Cinema Archive®. mental limitations, African American experience has been ignored, un­ noticed, or deemed unimportant to the history of the development of the American West. Scholars of African American history have, in their own way, con­ tributed to this “scholarly vacuum” by focusing on national issues and leaders and often overlooking the “local ‘race men’ and ‘race women’” whose contributions to regional civil rights struggles helped feed prog­ ress at the national level (9). Recent scholarship such as Whitaker’s Race Work, Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore’s anthol­ ogy African American Women Confront the West (2003), and Taylor’s In Search of the Racial Frontier (1998) have attempted to redress the neglect African American western history has received from both fields. All three books demonstrate how regional activism in the West set precedents for later national civil rights legislation and how even small African American minority populations have had significant impacts on the social and political development of western towns and cities. Blake Allmendinger’s Imagining the African American West likewise emphasizes the importance of not subsuming multiple experiences into a single story of “typical” western (or national) experience. As Allmendinger 3 3 8 W e s t e r n A m e r i c a n L i t e r a t u r e f a l l 2 0 0...

Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America

The thirteen essays in this important collection examine grass-roots struggles for racial justice throughout the United States from 1940 to 1980. Groundwork is a tribute to John Dittmer's groundbreaking Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1994), and it emulates Dittmer's focus on grass-roots organizers, whose ties and accountability to local communities distinguished them from national civil rights leaders or federal officials and whose commitment to enabling ordinary people to acquire the means to transform their own lives made them critical agents of social transformation. The editors commend Dittmer for offering an alternative portrait of poor and working-class African American communities in an era when social science literature was saturated with images of a pathological urban underclass sowing the seeds of its destruction. And the essays continue this approach—identifying myriad contexts when poor, often illiterate folk organized to educate themselves, improve their own lives and communities, and demand their full citizenship rights. The shift away from charismatic national figures and politicians in Washington is accompanied by a determined shift away from simplistic binaries such as de jure versus de facto segregation, integration versus black power, the nonviolent South versus the militant, ghetto North—indeed, the rigid distinction of South versus North gets seriously revised in this volume. That these binaries have significantly obscured our vision and limited our knowledge of the era is borne out by the fact that almost every essay features activists who were highly significant in their own time but who are now virtually unknown. Peter Levy's essay on Gloria Richardson and the movement in Cambridge, Maryland, powerfully illustrates this point. In its tactics, constituency, and goals, the movement Richardson helped to forge in the early 1960s better resembled black power than civil rights—and as a result the media, the local establishment, Washington officials, and national civil rights leaders did not know how properly to evaluate Richardson and so deemed her irrational.

Mourning the Promised Land: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Automortography and the National Civil Rights Museum

Mourning the Promised Land: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Automortography and the National Civil Rights Museum

Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site; Birmingham Civil Rights Institute; and National Civil Rights Museum

Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site; Birmingham Civil Rights Institute; and National Civil Rights Museum

Sunbelt Revolution: The Historical Progression of the Civil Rights Struggle in the Gulf South, 1866-2000

Sunbelt Revolution offers a historical account of the emergence in the 19th century of a national consciousness of social justice and racial inequality, identifying what may have been the first organized civil rights march in the United States. The book reveals that the burden of oppression involved more than just white masters and black victims, and demonstrates that activists sometimes struggled as much among themselves as they did against the powers of injustice. Linked by the theme of civil rights reform, the essays address such topics as the early days of the American Citizens Equal Rights Association; early efforts to challenge segregation on public transportation; women's efforts at improving the daily life of black Montgomery citizens; the multiracial nature of the longshoremen's union along the Gulf Coast; philosophical differences separating local activists and national civil rights organizations; and the Biloxi beach riot and the origins of the civil rights movement on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. They highlight the forgotten or overlooked efforts of civil rights advocates such as Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, A. Phillip Randolph, and Harry T. Moore. The collection challenges preexisting notions about the identity of states rimming the Gulf of Mexico, which typically have been associated with the Deep South and conservative intransigence. It recasts the Gulf states as a region of opportunity, separate and distinct from antebellum Dixie, and includes the states of Texas and Florida, both often ignored in references to the Deep South.

Black politics and the web of joined‐up governance: compromise, ethnic minority mobilization and the transitional public sphere

In the past decade we have seen the emergence of new forms of ethnic minority political mobilization. In this paper we explore one aspect of this transformation, namely the emergence of organizations such as the National Civil Rights Movement (NCRM) and the National Assembly Against Racism (NAAR). We argue that such organizations are part of a transitional public sphere within ethnic minority politics that seeks to provide links between mainstream and alternative forms of minority political activism. Such organizations have grown partly as a result of the need to construct new channels of political involvement and engagement for minority communities. In this sense they represent a break from the dominant forms of ethnic minority politics and highlight the ways in which minority political networks have become interlinked with wider policy networks within national and local state institutions, the legal system and civil society more generally. They represent an arena of political participation that is likely to grow in importance in the coming period as ethnic minority communities exert pressure for greater influence within both national and local political institutions. Drawing on original research among a number of organizations, this paper provides an analysis of the evolution and likely impact of this sphere of minority political life.

The foundation for ADA and the rest of the story

September 26, 2003, was the 30th anniversary of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which President Richard Nixon signed into law. The last sentence of the act, known as Section 504, became the first national civil rights act for people with disabilities. No special celebrations, speeches, or fanfare occurred on September 26, 2003, but that doesn't diminish the important role that 504 has played in the development of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Cultural Space and Race: The National Civil Rights Museum and MuseumAfrica

Through an examination of two museums: The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, and MuseumAfrica in Johannesburg, South Africa, this article explores how museums as public space can display and reveal the intersection of race and culture in the recovery of a society's historical and cultural memory. The communicative role of the museum as public space is revealed as significant in fostering the development of public memory. The article is a descriptive essay, articulating the ways these two museums as public spaces provide sites for multiple interpretations of collective memory and illustrates alternate interpretations through the eyes of two authors of different races. cultural space race public memory collective memory museums

Cultural Space and Race: The National Civil Rights Museum and MuseumAfrica

Cultural Space and Race: The National Civil Rights Museum and MuseumAfrica

The Legalism Trap : Police Cooperation after the European Tampere Council

The legal status of European police cooperation is contrasted with Europol's actual practices : the laws concerning Europol are shown to legitimise policies and activities already accepted and practiced, e.g., in transnational anti-drug operations and data sharing. The methods and scope of international customs and undercover investigations are linked to judicial cooperation that runs ahead of international accords. Such practices by the authorities flout national law, police accountability, and civil rights. Discussions of international police cooperation must account for actual practices and not be limited to examination of laws and treaties.

Making connections: Today's early childhood educators discover their heritage

Making Theory and Development of Early Childhood Education come alive for elementary master's degree students in two learning sites offers opportunities and challenges. In constructing the class, a primary goal was to expose the students to the context under which early childhood educators developed programs and theories. Also, students were challenged to uncover the relationship that the education of young children had with social change and emerging human rights. Utilizing distance learning, contemporary books such as Who Moved My Cheese (Johnson, 1998) and a field trip to the National Civil Rights Museum and the Rock'n Soul Museum, students developed a sense of the place early childhood education had and continues to have in social change and the advancement of civil rights in this country.

Informal Education and the Political Conscience of the Popular Classes: The Politization of the Spanish Almanacs of the 19th Century

Extra‐institutional educational agents, namely, those operating outside the official educational system, have been more present in earlier human society than today; especially those concerning the education of the popular classes, which is the subject of this article, those popular classes having having faced great difficulties, throughout History, to access educational institutions. There have been differentforms of informal education, which have been imparted by many different agents. However, in this article we analyse only one of those agents, which were very popular among the commoners of the 19th century: almanacs, also known as calendars. These little books, being very popular amongst the commoners, became an effective means of communication of information and propaganda, an important instrument for the transmission of moral values and norms of behaviour. Thus, the instructive purposes of almanacs are inferred from the contents themselves. Although that instruction is rather elementary, it is an important means of organisation in everyday life, for they informed about local religious festivities, agricultural matters, etc. Sometimes, these almanacs could even illustrate medicine, hygiene, morals, etc. Notwithstanding their importance and influence in everyday life, the aim of this article is the study of the contribution of almanacs to people's politization. Here, we define politics as all those general questions linked to nation‐wide matters ‐ outside the sphere of local matters ‐ related to government or state, such as sovereignty, nation, war, succession, monarchy, republic, etc., and politization as having a real interest in learning about these questions. So that, through the analysis of these sources, we can affirm that almanacs have been a main instrument of politization, that purpose being clear in several of them. Their political nature has different forms, from simple reminders of important dates, to elaborated, though concise and clear, expositions explaining concepts such as national sovereignty, civil rights, republic and others.

For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer

The youngest of twenty children of sharecroppers in rural Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer witnessed throughout her childhood the white cruelty, political exclusion, and relentless economic exploitation that defined black existence in the Delta. In this intimate biography, Chana Kai Lee documents Hamer's lifelong crusade to empower the poor through collective action, her rise to national prominence as a civil rights activist, and the personal costs of her ongoing struggle to win a political voice and economic self-sufficiency for blacks in the segregated South. Lee traces Hamer's early work as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in rural Mississippi, documenting the partial blindness she suffered after being arrested and beaten by local officials for leading a group of blacks to register for the vote. Hamer's dramatic appearance at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, where she led a group from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in a bid to unseat the all-white Mississippi delegation, brought both Hamer and the virtual powerlessness of black Mississippians to the nation's attention; but the convention also marked her first debilitating encounter with the middle class of the national civil rights movement. Despite her national visibility, Hamer remained a militant grassroots leader who never stopped working for the betterment of her own community in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Among many local initiatives, she established the Freedom Farm Corporation, a revolutionary cooperative venture aimed at facilitating economic self-sufficiency for the rural poor. Lee renders Hamer's acute political instincts, her rhetorical prowess, and her skill in retooling her past to serve strategic political purposes, as well as her deep frustration with a society that was willing to hold her up as an example of individual heroism but resisted her efforts at collective transformation. Offering a complex understanding of how racism, sexism, violence, and economic injustice intersected to spur the civil rights movement and to shape, and sometimes restrict, the role of women and poor people within it, Lee illuminates the abiding links between political activism and economic transformation. The definitive biography of one of the most important civil rights activists of the twentieth century, For Freedom's Sake documents Fannie Lou Hamer's lifelong crusade to empower the poor through collective action, her rise to national prominence as a civil rights activist, and the personal costs of her ongoing struggle to win a political voice and economic self-sufficiency for blacks in the segregated South.

Memorial Agon: An interpretive tour of the national civil rights museum

In 1991, the Lorraine Motel—infamous site of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination—reopened to the public under a refurbished name and identity: the National Civil Rights Museum. Although the remodeled interior looks nothing like it did in 1968, the balcony and motel rooms where the assassination took place have been preserved as a shrine to Dr. King. This essay explores the symbolic tension between the museum and Jacqueline Smith, a former resident of the Lorraine Motel who has protested the museums appropriation of King's memory since her eviction in 1988. Although Smith disrupts the community constituted in the museum, this disruption opens a space that encourages a more critical approach to King's memory and the museum's discourse. As a representation of African American heritage and identity, the National Civil Rights Museum underscores the rhetorical complexity of public memorializing when the distinction between official and vernacular cultural expression is obscured.

Remembrance: Adult Education at the National Civil Rights Museum

Remembrance: Adult Education at the National Civil Rights Museum

Intergovernmental Relations and the Administrative Enforcement of Equal Employment Opportunity Laws

Equal employment opportunity has been an explicitly stated national goal since enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In furtherance of this goal, Congress authorized creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce compliance with the act's provisions against discrimination in employment, and to work with state and local fair employment practices agencies in their enforcement of related antidiscrimination laws. These joint efforts have led to complex intergovernmental relations among national, state, and local governmental organizations. The impetus for this study lies in understanding the relationship between national and state administrative agencies charged with enforcing antidiscrimination statutes in the public and private workplace. Such understanding is important in refining current theory and practice regarding equal employment opportunity. Although extensive literatures exist in the areas of intergovernmental relations and civil rights, research is sparse regarding the linkage between equal employment opportunity as a public policy in a federal system and its implementation through intergovernmental means.[1] Three primary questions underlie this research. First, to what extent and in what ways does the presence of overlapping authority help or hinder administrative enforcement? Second, what variation exists in the degree of interdependence between the EEOC and state fair employment practices agencies, and what effect does the degree of interdependence have on enforcement? Third, what is the nature and extent of bargaining in the development of consensus between the national agency and state entities, and how does it affect the content of contracts between them? The Evolution of Employment Discrimination Policy Employment discrimination policy has developed within the context of a federal system of governance. Both the national government and individual states create and execute policies.[2] A division of responsibility between levels of government based on the nature of the program or service provided is part of the ongoing debate over proper allocation of authority among governmental levels (Rivlin, 1992). From early conflict over slavery to clashes over desegregation and voting rights, disagreement about the nature of federalism has often centered on issues related to states rights in a federal system (Nice, 1987). Traditional views about dual federalism, in which power and responsibility is divided between the national and state governments and each exercises authority in its respective jurisdiction, reinforced the perspective that states, when enacting segregation laws, were exercising authority in their own relatively autonomous sphere. The national government, however, exerted authority in a variety of areas, including fair employment, particularly during the New Deal and Great Society periods. When the national Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted, over 20 states had some type of fair employment law, and several states had laws requiring racially segregated employment.[3] The coordinated enforcement requirement in Title VII of the act, which indicated that the newly created EEOC was to work with subnational fair employment agencies, was reinforced by views about cooperative and creative federalism. Instead of separate spheres of authority, there were areas of overlap, with power and responsibility for certain policies shared between national and state governments to varying degrees. Growing federal involvement in the implementation of civil rights policy was challenged during the Reagan administration as part of an overall effort to shift many governmental responsibilities to the states (Amaker, 1988; Nathan and Doolittle, 1987). Devolution and decentralization varied by state and program (Lester, 1986; U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, 1993). Fair housing enforcement by states increased (Lamb, 1991) and fair employment enforcement showed a mixed approach (Wood, 1990). …

Bringin' It All Back Home

PHOTO ESSAY Bringin' It All Back Home by Roland L Freeman with additional photo· by Robert T. Jones, Jr. top: Roosevelt "Booba" Barnes (1936—1996), center, electrifying the crowd on the seventh Delta Blues Cruise. Greenville, Mississippi, 1983. © 199J, Robert Tfones,Jr. previous page: Willie Foster. Greenville, Mississippi, 199-7. © 1997, Roland L. Freeman. 64 ROLAND L. FREEMAN Bo Diddley at the sixth Mississippi Delta Blues andHeritage Festival. Greenville, Mississippi, 1983.© 1997, Robert T. Jones,Jr. Bringin' ItAllBack Home 65 Muddy "Mississippi" Waters Musicians jamming at the sixth Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival. Greenville, Mississippi, 1983. C 1997, Robert T. Jones, Jr. 66 ROLAND L. FREEMAN Ijmnie Pitchford, left, playing bassforRobert "Jr." Lockwood, right, at thefourth Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival. Greenville, Mississippi, 1981. © 1997, Robert T. Jones,Jr. Bringin'ItAIlBack Home 67 Willie Dixon (191J-1992). Greenville, Mississippi, 1979. © 1997, Robert T.Jones,Jr. 68 ROLAND L. FREEMAN MississippiFife andDrum Bandatthe eighth MississippiDelta Blues andHeritage Festival, Othar Turner, JessieMae Hemphill, andAbe Young, leftto right. Greenville, Mississippi, 198;. © 1997, Robert TJones,Jr. B.B. King thanking hisfans.Jackson, Mississippi, 197j. © 1997, RolandL Freeman. 70 ROLAND L. FREEMAN Left to right Hammie Nixon (1908—1984), harmonica, ka^po, andjugplayer; Ms. Van Hunt, vocalist; andEugene Powell, guitarist at the secondMississippi Delta Blues andHeritage Festival. Greenville, Mississippi, 1979. © 1997, RolandL Freeman. Bringin'ItAIlBack Home 71 top: Luanda andEddie Cusic. IMand, Mississippi, 1997. © 1997, RolandL. Freeman. opposite: BigJoe Williams (1903—1982) at thefirst Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival. Greenville, Mississippi, 1978. © 1997, Roland L. Freeman. Bringin'ItAIlBack Home 73 Walter "Furry" lewis (1893—1981) at thefirstMississippi Delta Blues andHeritage Festival. Greenville, Mississippi, 1978. © 1997, Roland L Freeman. 74 ROLAND L. FREEMAN Utile Marcellus at thefirstMississippi Delta Blues andhleritage Festival. Greenville, Mississippi, 1978.© 1997, RolandL Freeman. Bringin' ItAllBack Home 7 5 BudSpires andJack Owens, top left to right, Alan Ijimax and Worth Long,foreground, at thefirst Mississippi Delta Blues andHeritage Festival. Greenville, Mississippi, 1978. © 1997, RolandL. Freeman. 76 ROLAND L. FREEMAN Jim Dickenson sings blues songs ofJimmy Rodgers at thefirstMississippi Delta Blues andHeritage Festival. Greenville, Mississippi, 1978. © 1997, RolandL. Freeman. Bringin' ItAllBack Home 77 Lynn White at the sixth Mississippi Delta Blues andHeritage Festival. Greenville, Mississippi, 1983.© 1997, Roland L. Freeman. ...