Struggle For Racial Justice Research Articles

Response to Ribuffo, McCarraher, and Shannon

34Historically Speaking · September/October 2004 ica. Yet the history presented in Catholicism andAmerican Freedom cannot bring itself to see "life" as an issue ofequivalent moral gravity . The power ofMcGreevy's earlier work, Parish Boundaries, derives from its dramatic presentation of the tragic confrontation between two goods: the struggle for racial justice and the integrity of local communities . For most of Catholicism and American Freedom, tragic conflict gives way to an evasive "tension." By the end of the discussion of "life" even this comparatively tame tension dissipates for lack of sufficient moral focus. The book ends with a whimper rather than a bang. This may indeed reflect the actual state ofAmerican Catholicism today. However , even Thomas Haskell would concede thatobjective historyinvolves the imposition ofsome inescapablymoral interpretive frameworkon the fluxofreality. McGreevy's straining after neutrality on "life" issues appears less a heroic achievement ofobjectivity than an abdication ofinterpretive responsibility. ChristopherShannon isassistantprofessorof history at Christendom College. His most recent book is A World Made Safe for Differences (Rowman andLittlefield, 2000). Response t? Ribuffo, McCarraher, and Shannon John T. McGreevy Leo Ribuffo challenges me to more fully integrate Catholic politicians and political activists into myaccount. Fair enough. In partmy explanation for the modest attention devoted to John Kennedy, Al Smith, and Joseph McCarthy is that I wrote an intellectual history not a political one, and I do discuss how Catholic and non-Catholic intellectuals understood the Smith campaign in 1928 and Kennedy's handling ofthe religious issue in 1960. What does seem notable byits absence in CAAF, in retrospect, is a thorough treatment ofreligion and politics at the local level, where the parallels between the neighborhood -based, male-dominated parish structure and the neighborhood-based, male-dominated ward structure deserve much closer attention. Ribuffo adds that more sustained treatment offigures such as Phyllis Schlafly (or, I might add, William F. Buckley) would have widened the scope of a narrative too concerned with Catholic responses to American liberals at the expense ofCatholic influence on the modern conservative movement. Again, a reasonable point. Still, fine books on the relationship between Catholics and modern conservatives do exist.1 And within the 100,000 words bequeathed me byWW. Norton I thought it more important to focus on the dominant Catholic intellectual tradition —suspicious ofliberalism, certainly, but dismissive (atleastuntil the 1980s) oíNational Review-style free market economics. Ribuffo also makes a broader claim: that I place too great an emphasis on "words" or more particularly "clergy and leading theologians " at the expense ofstudying the behavior oflay Catholics. CertainlyI do notintend to argue that all lay Catholics reflexively obeyed priests and bishops. (And some ofthe figures discussed at length in the book, including Orestes Brownson,James McMaster , andJacques Maritain, were not priests.) Or that all "Catholic" immigrants to the United States from Italy, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, or anywhere else were Catholic in a meaningful sense. What I can do is point to a subculture ofremarkable density and scope and askwhat ideas and practices sustained it. Thatall Catholics did notagreeupon or even care about the contours of those ideas and practices is unremarkable, and we should avoid placing upon Catholics a burden of coherence not impressed upon, say, followers ofJohn Dewey. Better simply to demonstrate that this subculture and its ideas had consequences. Three examples: 180,000 nuns worked in the United States by the 1960s, staffing the world's largestprivate school system and running the world's largestsystem ofprivate hospitals . And yet we have many more competent books onJane Addams and her circle at Hull House than on any aspect ofthe history ofwomen religious. Or again: in the last two weeks I received two books for review, one a biography of Peace Corps leader and vicepresidential candidate Sargent Shriver and one of 1968 presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy.2 Both books emphasize theimportance these men placed on Catholic social thought. McCarthy, in particular, was influenced by the work of French philosopher Jacques Maritain. But how many historians can spell Maritain? Or finally: I discuss at some length in CAAF the work ofJohn Ford, SJ. (not, sigh, the movie director). Ford was perhaps the most influential American Catholic moral theologianinthe two decades afterWorld War ?: advising bishops and cardinals on knotty ethical...

Reporting Triumph, Saving a Nation: "Interesting Juxtapositions" in John W. De Forest's Civil War

More than perhaps any other fiction of American Civil War, John W. De Forest's 1867 novel Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty depicts warfare as an indispensable component of domestic prosperity, with veterans and civilians collaborating to realize war's potential for social uplift. Scenes of combat show De Forest's reader what Union veteran endured and survived for sake of new nation, while central narrative of courtship, marriage, and sexual betrayal extends cultural trauma of civil war-the perpetual threat that meaningful social structure can be lost to a domestic, internal enemy--to comfortable world of reader's own recognizable personal space. Writing home front and battlefield as mutually supportive rhetorical locations rather than distinct and separate narrative subjects, De Forest militarizes postwar American family and turns epistemology of war into a domestic commodity. Published only two years after Appomattox, De Forest's Civil War signifies neither a struggle for racial justice nor a rejuvenated federalism but a crisis of individual responsibility to complementary ideals of family and nation. For De Forest, reading and writing war is logical extension of it, as reading and writing embody a necessary personalized reaction to event. In such acts of introspection, however, individuality becomes an illusion, surrendered to an imaginary political collective in service of postwar American nationalism. Personal and national destiny are linked in Miss Ravenel's Conversion from novel's opening sentence, which aligns beginning of war with first stirrings of a love story: It was shortly after capitulation of loyal Fort Sumter to rebellious South Carolina that Mr. Edward Colburne of New Boston made acquaintance of Miss Lillie Ravenel of New Orleans. (1) The first meeting of novel's protagonists is chronologically marked by start of war; not surprisingly, their eventual union in marriage happens only after war has been satisfactorily concluded. In between their meeting and their marriage, these lovers--like nation they represent--endure tribulations of betrayal and bloodshed, family division and sacrifice. The resolution of love story explains parallel triumph of Union victory: once-separated lovers and warring elements of their nation have sailed separately over stormy seas, but now they are in a quiet haven, united so long as life shall last (467, emphasis added). While De Forest was by no means first or only novelist to use creation of an American family as a metaphor for Civil War (or perhaps to use war as a metaphor for nationalist potential inherent within American family), (2) he was first to support such a metaphor with detailed descriptions of what actually happened on battlefield based on personal combat experience. He saw a causal relationship between war he had fought with army and an upper middle-class stability based on expansion of free labor that Union victory represented to him--what James A. Hijiya calls a pursuit of New World gentility. (3) The American future, De Forest predicts, will be marked by peaceful industry, as ennobling as [Colburne's] fighting (468). From opening lines quoted above, novel establishes a narrative scheme in which dramatic possibilities of love and war, both readily available to popular imagination of 1867, are comparable ways to organize knowledge and understanding across broadly symbolic political lines. (4) It was unquestionably, narrator continues, the southern rebellion which brought Miss Ravenel and Mr. Colburne into juxtaposition (3). The remainder of novel will show that interesting juxtaposition--of Lillie and Colburne, of North and South, of morality and vice, and ultimately of war story and love story--drives De Forest's vision of war and its legacy. …

On Brown v. Board of Education's 50th Anniversary: To Integrate or Separate Is Not the Question

By ending official apartheid, Brown represented a great victory in the struggle for racial justice in the United States. Following more than a decade of inaction as a result of its all deliberate speed formulation, and in response to the then prevailing sentiment among the proponents of Brown, the Supreme Court began to push for the integration of school districts that engaged in segregation by law or practice. This integrationist push lasted from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. Beginning in the mid-1970s the Court began to limit the remedies for segregation by law or practice, and beginning in the early 1990s the Court began to relieve previously segregated districts of any further obligation to desegregate. The result has been a substantial resegregation in fact of the public schools over the past decade and a half. In addition, beginning in the mid-1970s the Court refused to intervene in cases challenging the exclusionary zoning tactics of suburban communities to which many whites have fled to avoid integration; and in cases challenging states' substantial reliance on local funding of public schools, the impact of which has been to leave the poorer, disproportionately minority school districts unable to provide an education of comparable quality to the richer, largely white suburbs. The paper argues that the United States remains a highly racialized and racist society with gross disparities and inequalities based on race, that focusing on adequate funding for segregated schools rather than on integration would not likely have made a substantial difference in the current status of the black community, and that through its decisions the Supreme Court has sanctioned the institutionalization of a system that is now separate and unequal. The paper then argues that both an integrationist and a more separatist approach are consistent in theory with what a non-racist society entails, but that under either approach in the context of an inegalitarian and hierarchical society the black community will likely continue to bear disproportionately the hardships of American life; and that the achievement of racial justice, while not reducible to a class struggle, requires an inter-racial and inter-ethnic struggle for racial and social justice of all who suffer from the institutionalized inequality of this society.

Anne Braden: Subversive Southerner

Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South by Catherine FoslThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South

Anne McCarty Braden (1924-2006) rejected her segregationist, privileged past to become one of the civil rights movement's staunchest white allies. In 1954 she was charged with sedition by McCarthy-style politicians who played on fears of communism to preserve southern segregation. Though Braden remained controversial-even within the civil rights movement-in 1963 she became one of only five white southerners whose contributions to the movement were commended by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his famed Letter from Birmingham Jail. Braden's activism ultimately spanned nearly six decades, making her one of the most enduring white voices against racism in modern U.S. history. Subversive Southerner is more than a riveting biography of an extraordinary southern white woman; it is also a social history of how racism, sexism, and anticommunism intertwined in the twentieth-century South as ripples from the Cold War divided the emerging civil rights movement.

Response to Langdon Gilkey's Inaugural Address at the Niebuhr Society, 22 November 2003 in Atlanta

After applauding Professor Gilkey for focusing attention on Reinhold Niebuhr's book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, I framed my response by setting forth seven salient elements of Niebuhr's political theory. After affirming Gilkey's portrayal of the differences between our contemporary situation and that which Niebuhr addressed in the 1930s, I focused on a third characteristic of Niebuhr's thought that Gilkey neglected to mention, namely, the impact of his thought on African-American activists in their struggle for racial justice in the United States. That impact mainly pertained to his perceptive analysis of power conflicts among social groups and especially the societal power of racism. Niebuhr's sensitivity to that problem was heightened during his ministry in Detroit and thereafter. Thus, Martin Luther King, Jr, his protégé, Jesse Jackson and many others came to view Niebuhr as a major source of inspiration for their struggle. But, in spite of Niebuhr's appreciation of Gandhi and his support of King's non-violent resistance approach, they disagreed about the moral value of pacifism. Most importantly, I join with another African-American scholar in pointing out Niebuhr's uncritical paternalistic assumptions about African Americans and their struggle.

Subversive southerner: Anne Braden and the struggle for racial justice in the Cold War South

Anne McCarty Braden (1924-2006) rejected her segregationist, privileged past to become one of the civil rights movement's staunchest white allies. In 1954 she was charged with sedition by McCarthy-style politicians who played on fears of communism to preserve southern segregation. Though Braden remained controversial-even within the civil rights movement-in 1963 she became one of only five white southerners whose contributions to the movement were commended by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his famed Letter from Birmingham Jail. Braden's activism ultimately spanned nearly six decades, making her one of the most enduring white voices against racism in modern U.S. history. Subversive Southerner is more than a riveting biography of an extraordinary southern white woman; it is also a social history of how racism, sexism, and anticommunism intertwined in the twentieth-century South as ripples from the Cold War divided the emerging civil rights movement.

Dissent in the heartland: the sixties at Indiana University

Introduction Prologue 1. The Dawn of Dissent 2. The Awakening of Activism 3. The Antiwar Movement 4. A Precarious Peace 5. Student Rights/Civil Rights: African Americans and the Struggle for Racial Justice 6. The Women's Movement: An Idea Whose Time Had Come 7. Bloomington and the Counterculture in Southern Indiana Epilogue: The End of an Era at Indiana University Conclusion Acknowledgments Bibliography Index

Carry me home: Birmingham, Alabama: the climactic battle of the civil rights revolution

A major work of history, investigative journalism that breaks new ground, and personal memoir, Carry Me Home is a dramatic account of the civil rights era's climactic battle in as the movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., brought down the institutions of segregation.The Year of Birmingham, 1963, was one of the most cataclysmic periods in America's long civil rights struggle. That spring, King's child demonstrators faced down Commissioner Bull Connor's police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches for desegregation -- a spectacle that seemed to belong more in the Old Testament than in twentieth-century America. A few months later, Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated with dynamite, bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killing four young black girls. Yet these shocking events also brought redemption: They transformed the halting civil rights movement into a national cause and inspired the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished legal segregation once and for all.Diane McWhorter, the daughter of a prominent white Birmingham family, brilliantly captures the opposing sides in this struggle for racial justice. Tracing the roots of the civil rights movement to the Old Left and its efforts to organize labor in the 1930s, Carry Me Home shows that the movement was a waning force in desperate need of a victory by the time King arrived in Birmingham. McWhorter describes the competition for primacy among the movement's leaders, especially between Fred Shuttlesworth, Birmingham's flamboyant preacher-activist, and the already world-famous King, who was ambivalent about the direct-action tactics Shuttlesworth had been practicing for years.Carry Me Home isthe first major movement history to uncover the segregationist resistance. McWhorter charts the careers of the bombers back to the New Deal, when Klansmen were agents of the local iron and coal industrialists fighting organized labor. She reveals the strained and veiled collusion between Birmingham's wealthy establishment and its designated subordinates -- politicians, the police, and the Klan.Carry Me Home is also the story of the author's family, which was on the wrong side of the civil rights revolution. McWhorter's quest to find out whether her eccentric father, the prodigal son of the white elite, was a member of the Klan mirrors the book's central revelation of collaboration between the city's Big Mules, who kept their hands clean, and the scruffy vigilantes who did the dirty work.Carry Me Home is the product of years of research in FBI and police files and archives, and of hundreds of interviews, including conversations with Klansmen who belonged to the most violent klavern in America. John and Robert Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, George Wallace, Connor, King, and Shuttlesworth appear against the backdrop of the unforgettable events of the civil rights era -- the brutal beating of the Freedom Riders as the police stood by; King's great testament, his Letter from Birmingham Jail; and Wallace's defiant stand in the schoolhouse door. This book is a classic work about this transforming period in American history.

Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xi + 323 pp. $59.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.

Judith Stein recounts two histories in tandem that all too frequently are narrated separately: “that of a changing [American] economy and that of changing race relations” (2). The brilliant originality of Running Steel is to bring the history of civil rights in employment together with larger questions of national, indeed international, post-1945 political economy. The struggle for racial justice appears neither a beneficiary nor a casualty of an easily invoked but vaguely defined “liberalism,” as in so many other studies. Instead, the limits of fair employment prove an integral part of the making and unmaking of a political and economic totality with quite specific elements seemingly unconnected to race relations. In contrast to currently fashionable neoliberal accounts, Stein concludes “it was the foreign commitments and economic policies of liberalism, not the excesses of racial reformers or the racism of the culture, that transformed American politics in the postwar era” (6).

Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950-1970.

In the 1960s, the mainstream Protestant churches responded to an urgent need by becoming deeply involved with the national black community in its struggle for racial justice. The National Council of Churches (NCC), as the principal ecumenical organization of the national Protestant religious establishment, initiated an active new role by establishing a Commission on Religion and Race in 1963. Focusing primarily on the efforts of the NCC, this is the first study by an historian to examine the relationship of the predominantly white, mainstream Protestant Churches to the Civil Rights movement. Drawing on hitherto little-used and unknown archival resources and extensive interviews with participants, Findlay documents the churches' committed involvement in the March on Washington in 1963, the massive lobbying effort to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, their powerful support of the struggle to end legal segregation in Mississippi, and their efforts to respond to the Black Manifesto and the rise of black militancy before and during 1969. Findlay chronicles initial successes, then growing frustration as the events of the 1960s unfolded and the national liberal coalition, of which the churches were a part, disintegrated. While never losing sight of the central, indispensable role of the African-American community, Findlay's study for the first time makes clear the highly significant contribution made by liberal religious groups in the turbulent, exciting, moving, and historic decade of the 1960s.

Towards racial j ustice? A re-evaluation of anti-racism

In this paper I suggest that the weakness of much anti-racism stems from its inaccurate conceptual and analytical base and its inadequate analysis of socio-economic reality. The result has been the formu lation of unrealistic policies which had negative consequences for individuals, groups and society, and the widespread rejection of all anti-racism. I suggest that a potentially radical way forward in the struggle for racial justice involves the resurrection of some currently discredited concepts in the framework of a broader movement for human rights which acknowledges the interaction and intersection of class, gender (and other) oppressions.

The United Nations and the Human Rights Issue

I am now the United States Ambassador to the United Nations for Special Political Affairs. Part of my function in that job is to involve the United States mission at the United Nations in the global concerns of the Carter Administration about repression and injustice. Andrew Young is the central figure in the world on these questions. It is extraordinary that the United States is represented by Young because the various facets of the struggle for human rights in this country are reflected in his life. He worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King, which means that he is a link to the central figure of our generation in the struggle for racial justice, but beyond that particular association he has the extraordinary capacity to be overwhelmingly human in a scene where that is unheard of. For the first time since Eleanor Roosevelt represented the United States at the United Nations, an American is the central figure of the nerve center of our effort to promote human rights-that is to reduce suffering-in the world. That is the central fact about Andrew Young representing us at the United Nations. It is profitable for us as a nation and for that effort to have him there. He is both symbol and leader, inspiring those who work to speed the realization of Martin Luther King's dream. Periodic disagreement about specific views or statements is a small price to pay for the great benefits that flow from having such a man as our chief representative at the United Nations.

Measuring the Effectiveness of a Communication

The author here presents a simple method of testing the effectiveness of a communication using a simulated pretest-posttest design. In the particular communication package studied, the intent was to effect an increase in knowledge of local pastors about the denomination's program in behalf of racial justice, to motivate them to greater personal participation in the struggle for racial justice, and to spur their congregations to a greater participation in the "Neighbors in Need" all-church offering designated for this cause. While the author found a significant gain in information following introduction of the communications package, he found no significant difference in behavior---as measured by personal participation of pastors in the struggle for racial justice, individual contributions of pastors to the "Neighbors in Need" offering, and influence of pastors upon their congregations to contribute to this offering. When a businessman wants to judge the effectiveness of a particular advertising campaign ("Buy Baker's Beans"), he has a wealth of methods and tech