African American Struggle Research Articles

Hugh Davis, “We Will Be Satisfied with Nothing Less”: The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. 232. Cloth $45.00.

Hugh Davis, <i>“We Will Be Satisfied with Nothing Less”: The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction</i>. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. 232. Cloth $45.00.

Pursuing the Dream of Educational Equality

Pursuing the Dream of Educational Equality Gregg L. Michel (bio) Sarah Caroline Thuesen. Greater than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919–1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. xv + 366 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00. Tracy E. K’Meyer. From Brown to Meredith: The Long Struggle for School Desegregation in Louisville, Kentucky, 1954–2007. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. xii + 221 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. More than sixty years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the racial composition of American public schools has faded as a major educational concern for most Americans. Today, preserving—or even achieving—racial diversity in classrooms has taken a backseat to seemingly more pressing issues, as debates over student achievement, standardized testing, teacher training and accountability, and state funding have revealed. At the same time, Supreme Court decisions have freed schools and localities from the burden of having to address enduring racial imbalances in their student populations. The current debates about race, public education, and Brown itself inform Sarah Caroline Thuesen’s and Tracy E. K’Meyer’s compelling studies of race and schools in North Carolina and Louisville in the twentieth century. Each book situates Brown and its legacy in the broader historical context. By doing so, they shift our focus to alternative strategies for educational improvement and uncover different perspectives on Brown’s long and contested legacy. Brown was neither inevitable nor the only possible path toward educational advancement for African Americans. Thuesen’s work on North Carolina explores the long-term, deeply felt, but ultimately unsuccessful efforts by black educators, parents, and reformers to achieve equalization of black and white schools rather than the wholesale integration of public schools in the state. Similarly, K’Meyer’s study of Louisville shows that criticism that court-ordered busing and other strategies to achieve mixed classrooms were flawed, misguided, and deeply unpopular has served to obscure the reservoir of support for such policies that existed at the time of Brown and that persisted for decades after. [End Page 176] Taken together, the books simultaneously demonstrate that goals other than full school desegregation commanded support among African Americans, while reaffirming popular support for it once Brown made school desegregation the law of the land. Greater Than Equal focuses on the middle decades of the twentieth century, when black education in North Carolina expanded significantly and drew support from white political leaders. The growth and development of black schools reflected the importance African Americans attached to education and to schools as sources of community pride, personal advancement, and, most significantly, the rights of first-class citizenship. As the segregationist system hardened in the early twentieth century, political rights and civic equality, the typical markers of citizenship, were out of reach for most African Americans. With these avenues toward citizenship blocked, African Americans “looked to public education as their way back to the civic foundations of American life” (p. 8). But any hope of achieving such a goal required vast improvements to the quality of black schooling: more and better school buildings, better-trained teachers, broader curricula, and equitable funding. These gains could only be won with the support of white leaders who saw increased funding for black schools as a means of defusing black agitation and containing demands for full citizenship. The equalization campaigns undertaken by black communities throughout North Carolina starting in the 1920s and continuing through the 1950s testify to the deep faith many placed in education as the key to citizenship. Yet their gains, while real, were limited and served to expose “the inherent limitations of any fight for equality in a deeply segregated society” (p. 2). Equalization efforts in North Carolina gained momentum in the years after World War I. Black leaders initially focused on redressing the inadequate number and poor quality of schools serving black children. The situation was especially grim in rural areas, where run-down, one-room schools impeded instruction and distracted students. In response, black leaders cultivated ties with state officials who proved willing to support African American schools out of a sense of paternalistic duty as...

The Struggles of African Americans and the ‘Inspiration View’ and ‘Opium View’ of the Black Faith

The Struggles of African Americans and the ‘Inspiration View’ and ‘Opium View’ of the Black Faith

Historical dictionary of the civil rights movement

The fiftieth anniversary of many major milestones in what is commonly called the African-American Civil Rights Movement was celebrated in 2013. Fifty years removed from the Birmingham campaign, the assassination of Medgar Evers, and the March on Washington and it is clear that the sacrifices borne by those generations in that decade were not in vain. Monuments, museums, and exhibitions across the world honor the men and women of the Movement and testify to their immeasurable role in redefining the United States. The second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Civil Rights Movement is a guide to the history of the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. The history of this period is covered in a detailed chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, significant legal cases, local struggles, forgotten heroes, and prominent women in the Movement. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Civil Rights Movement.

Manchild in the Compromised Land: Intertextuality and Arna Bontemps's Lonesome Boy

Arna Bontemps’s Lonesome Boy (1955) sets forth a deceptively simple scenario: the protagonist, a gifted child trumpeter from the rural South, runs away to the fertile “party-gras” of New Orleans. This boy, Bubber, has a compulsion to play his horn “so fast and so loud and so high” (22) that no stern warning from his grandfather can blunt his drive for self-gratification through these continuous bouts of playing. Just as his career begins to flourish, earning him both material success and local renown (including numerous engagements around the city and at posh venues like “white-columned houses in the country” [13]), he precipitously returns to Grandpa and the family farm. A harrowing encounter at a “very special party” (14), what we eventually learn is a soiree hosted by the devil, triggers his abrupt about-face. Whether he actually encounters anything supernatural or evil at the devil’s ball is a moot point; a homeboy has returned, seeking what Houston A. Baker, Jr. describes in Blues Journeys Home (1985) as “the fine goodness of ancestral / Caring” (23-24). Readers of all ages are tasked with making sense of this confluence among music, magic, and moral choices. Critical response has assessed Lonesome Boy’s capacity to allegorize or otherwise comment on African American social struggle. Bontemps observed in 1948: “Creative writing, it seems, has often been the hand-maiden to social policy” (“Literature” 5). Yet he insisted that not all black texts, including children’s books such as Lonesome Boy, were suited to political ends, at least in the sense of explicitly attacking racist ideologies or asserting a vogue or “authentic” blackness. Lonesome Boy could easily relate to the biblical allegory of the prodigal son, someone who misuses an inheritance to some degree, returns home to reclaim or reconstitute it, and reenters the family even though he may leave it again as a grown adult. Although Bubber’s musical obsession may foreshadow the zeal of radical activists of the civil rights era, Blyden Jackson argues that Lonesome Boy can be read “in perfect innocence of anything except its story.” His trajectory to fame is “too pathologically escapist” (37) to be viable as a long-term model for anyone, let alone young people.

Sarah Caroline Thuesen. Greater than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919–1965.

Sarah Caroline Thuesen. Greater than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919–1965.

Is Violence Sometimes a Legitimate Right? An African-American Dilemma

AbstractThe contrast, often painted in simplistic colours, between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as civil rights campaigners bolsters an erroneous reading of the freedom struggle of African-Americans, leaving the impression that the resort to violence and self-defence propounded by Malcolm X was a purely circumstantial departure from the general strategy of the civil rights movement.In fact, both of them reflected long on the capacity of violence and a contrario of non-violence to bring about political and social transformation in the context of the extreme brutality and oppression being suffered by African-Americans. Their dilemma stemmed from an old intellectual tradition of the America of the slave period. Well before the ideas of Gandhi won over the African-American elite, and even before Henry David Thoreau laid the theoretical basis for civil disobedience, African slaves gave thought to the legitimacy and effectiveness of violence to amend their situation. The importance of the non-violent movement in the United States and the historical significance of Martin Luther King cannot be understood unless a true measure is taken of the anti-slavery struggle. While within the religious domain, the Black Church played a major role in dissuading violence, secular thought in favour of legitimate forceful rebellion also found itself confronted by a counter-argument which advanced the power of social change and resistance to injustice that non-violence could effect. This article particularly addresses the challenges to their consciences that confronted the militants of non-violence in their campaign for the abolition of slavery and notably those facing the central figure of that struggle, the former slave become the apostle of liberation, Frederick Douglass.

Greater Than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919-1965

Journal Article Greater Than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919–1965 Get access Sarah Caroline Thuesen. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. xviii, 366 pp. $45.00.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 1, June 2014, Pages 310–311, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jau173 Published: 01 June 2014

The Fourteenth Amendment and The African American Struggle for Civil Rights

The Fourteenth Amendment and The African American Struggle for Civil Rights

Greater Than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919–1965. By Sarah Caroline Thuesen (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2013) 384 pp. $45.00 cloth and e-book

<i>Greater Than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919–1965.</i> By Sarah Caroline Thuesen (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2013) 384 pp. $45.00 cloth and e-book

Sarah Caroline Thuesen. Greater than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919–1965. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013. 366 pp. Cloth: $45.00

Sarah Caroline Thuesen. Greater than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919–1965. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013. 366 pp. Cloth: $45.00 - Volume 54 Issue 2

A Fair Deal for Immigrants? The Truman Administration and Immigration Policy Reform

This article offers a critique of President Harry Truman's contribution to twentieth-century immigration reform. It challenges the view that he presided over an era of groundbreaking and progressive changes in immigration policy, arguing instead that the liberal positions taken on key immigration and naturalisation matters by the Truman administration were mostly inherited from his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. Moreover, by examining the important issues of anti-Asian and anti-Mexican discrimination, this study reveals the limitations of Truman's liberalism in the areas of immigration and naturalisation policy. Mirroring recent interpretations of his contribution to the African-American struggle for racial equality, this article concludes that Truman's immigration initiatives largely originated in either Cold War expediency or maneuvering for political advantage, rather than a heartfelt commitment to reform.

Power, Protests, and the Public Schools: Jewish and African American Struggles in New York City by Melissa F. Weiner

306 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY The creation of the Hawaii Commission by the U.S. government led to a petition campaign to remove “male” from the qualifications for voting and public office and, if successful, Anthony hoped it would establish a precedent for expanding women’s rights in the continental United States. In 1899 Stanton wrote another activist that she had “outgrown the Suffrage association, as the ultimatum of human endeavor, and no longer belong[ed] in that fold, with its limitations” (296). This division in their perspectives on how best to fight for women’s rights was significant, but the strength of the fifty-plus year friendship meant that they were able to respect difference, even as frustration comes through in some of the letters. This six-volume collection is a valuable addition not only to our knowledge of Stanton and Anthony, but of nineteenth-century women’s activism as well. Power, Protests, and the Public Schools: Jewish and African American Struggles in New York City By Melissa F. Weiner. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012, 272 pages, $44.95 Cloth, $25.95 Paper. Reviewed by Jeffrey Wheatley, Northwestern University In archives around New York City rest the letters, petitions, and investigations of African Americans and Jews who critiqued the quality of the public schools in their communities. Melissa F. Weiner’s Power, Protest, and the Public Schools: Jewish and African American Struggles in New York City brings their submerged narratives to light and demonstrates how educational institutions help propagate racial inequalities, even in the face of persistent criticism. In different periods, state-sponsored schools have restricted socio-economic uplift for Jews and African Americans by imposing racist identities on children and by accepting the norms of white privilege. Weiner takes a comparative approach to demonstrate how this has occurred. In the 1910s, the Gary Plan became a popular pedagogy for Americanizing outsider groups. Gary Plan schools had longer hours, emphasized English education, and taught the skills of manual labor. Jews argued that these schools would erase Jewish culture and simply replicate the working class. Moreover, they contended that the schools were gener- Book Reviews 307 ally of inferior quality. African Americans made the same complaints about their schools in the 1950s and 1960s. At different times but under the same conditions, the two groups responded similarly. They organized boycotted schools, filed petitions, and argued that segregation and racist curricula violated their constitutional rights as tax-paying American citizens. Officials often ignored their appeals. When mayors and the Board of Education did respond, they did so with measures that actually exacerbated structural inequalities, albeit under the guise of accommodation. By and large the protests failed to ameliorate the schools’ problems. Whiteness was a prerequisite for public power. Jewish attempts to insert Hebrew language courses into the schools finally succeeded in the years following World War II. During these years Jews became increasingly marked as racially white, a privilege never afforded to African Americans. In the work’s last chapters, Weiner adopts a tragic tone. Alongside their whitening, Jews began to shun their collective and structurally cognizant activism of the early twentieth century for a “bootstrap liberalism” that placed the burden of socio-economic progress on the individual (172). This destroyed any possibility of co-operative action by Jews and African Americans. Weiner’s work fits comfortably within a new wave of scholarship that attempts to uncover the exclusionary and limited nature of institutions that are ostensibly marked as universal or “public.” Whose public were these children situated in? Certainly not a public created by their communities. New York’s history textbooks—the dry but influential arbiters that define who and what is an American—portrayed African Americans as a naturally subservient and lazy people who lacked a history. Gary Plan schools sought to Americanize Jews by eliminating Jewish history and language. For both groups, the schools were largely vocational and lacked the academic curricula that was an integral part of most white schools. Parents persistently protested these conditions. Associations like the group of mothers known as the Harlem 9 helped organize and solidify their communities as they sought to demonstrate their contributions to civilization and American history without diminishing...

Reflections on Conventional Portrayals of the African American Experience during the Progressive Era or “the Nadir”

This essay, a slightly revised version of the distinguished historian address presented to SHGAPE in April 2013, suggests that millennial learners are oftentimes inadequately introduced to the African American experience during the Progressive Era, a period that historians of the black past, sampling from Rayford W. Logan's 1954 opus, customarily call “the Nadir” or “the lowest point” in the African American struggle for social justice. When discussing the Progressive Era, normative U.S. history textbooks at high school and college and university levels tend to relegate blacks to the margins of cultural and historical change, minimize lynching and other forms of anti-black violence that characterized the period, and endorse the archaic W. E. B. Du Bois–Booker T. Washington dichotomy of black leadership at the expense of oversimplifying and even denigrating Washington's accomplishments and legacy. On the other hand, specialized African American history textbooks and monographs equip their readers with critical interpretations that challenge what historian Manning Marable called the “master narrative of American history.” In this essay, I offer my thoughts on these subjects and propose some basic suggestions for more effectively teaching, problematizing, and thinking about the African American experience during the complex Progressive Era.

Low-Wage Legacies, Race, and the Golden Chicken in Mississippi: Where Contemporary Immigration Meets African American Labor History

While the poultry processing industry in the southern United States has undergone a radical restructuring over the past few decades, its recruitment of immigrant workers has contributed to an unprecedented presence of Latin Americans. Running parallel to these changes is the ongoing struggle of African Americans for equal economic opportunity. This essay considers the implications of demographic and cultural shifts in central Mississippi, where poultry has become the dominant employer and where immigration helps shape rural life. Mississippi's history and demographic profile make it a significant site for investigation. Here, unlike in many other recent immigration destinations in the US South, Latin American migrants are joining workplaces and communities whose majority is often African American. Centered upon Scott County, home of Mississippi's poultry industry (where the "Hispanic" population increased by over 1,000 percent from 1990 to 2000), this essay situates the present moment within histories of industrial restructuring, political economies of race, and local labor movements.

Greater than equal: African American struggles for schools and citizenship in North Carolina, 1919-1965

During the half century preceding widespread school integration, black North Carolinians engaged in a dramatic struggle for equal educational opportunity as segregated schooling flourished. Drawing on archival records and oral histories, Sarah Thuesen gives voice to students, parents, teachers, school officials, and civic leaders to reconstruct this high-stakes drama. She explores how African Americans pressed for equality in curricula, higher education, teacher salaries, and school facilities; how white officials co-opted equalization as a means of forestalling integration; and, finally, how black activism for equality evolved into a fight for something greater than equal--integrated schools that served as models of civic inclusion. These battles persisted into the Brown era, mobilized black communities, narrowed material disparities, fostered black school pride, and profoundly shaped the eventual movement for desegregation. Thuesen emphasizes that the remarkable achievements of this activism should not obscure the inherent limitations of a fight for equality in a segregated society. In fact, these unresolved struggles are emblematic of fault lines that developed across the South, and serve as an urgent reminder of the inextricable connections between educational equality, racial diversity, and the achievement of first-class citizenship. |During the half century preceding widespread school integration, black North Carolinians engaged in a dramatic struggle for equal educational opportunity as segregated schooling flourished. Drawing on archival records and oral histories, Sarah Thuesen gives voice to students, parents, teachers, school officials, and civic leaders to reconstruct this high-stakes drama. She explores how African Americans pressed for equality in curricula, higher education, teacher salaries, and school facilities; how white officials co-opted equalization as a means of forestalling integration; and, finally, how black activism for equality evolved into a fight for something greater than equal--integrated schools that served as models of civic inclusion.

A ‘Lost Crowd’: Reconfiguring the Harlem Renaissance as a Post-War ‘Lost Generation’

Traditionally for black Americans, World War I did not signify the traumatic removal of traditional Victorian ideals, the end of any romantic notions of battle, or, as it would for white American literature, the disillusionment and alienation of a literary ‘Lost Generation’. Although experiencing continued racism upon their return, the recognition that black Americans had received in wartime France came to characterize a budding enthusiasm for the social prospects of the post-war era. Yet many novels of the Harlem Renaissance certainly resonate with the disillusionment of the Lost Generation and similarly grapple with notions of war trauma and traumatic post-war (re)integration into a chaotic American society. This article considers the endeavour to reconcile feelings of post-war national unity with the African-American struggle for racial equality in the early twentieth century. By evaluating the analogous themes of alienation, masculinity, and place represented by both the Lost Generation and Harlem Renaissance, this article seeks to highlight traumatic parallels between post-war literatures of two divergent ‘lost’ generations.

African American's Struggle for Equality and African American Literature

After the period of Reconstruction (1865-1877), the social position of Southern Negroes became worse. Negro leader Booker T. Washington, advocated gradual economic advancement of Negroes which was possible only if they relinquished their demand for political and civil rights. He believed that only self-reliant Negroes could more efficiently engage in the struggle for social equality. Other Negro leaders strongly opposed these tactics of gradual development.William E. B. Du Bois, historian and intellectual, was more radical in his ideas. He believed that Negroes must be united in their constant protest against discrimination in the white society and should insist on getting full political and civil rights immediately as well as the right to be educated according to economic circumstances and intellectual abilities. He highligted the advantage of higher education as only educated Negroes could set realistic goals for the Negro population and lead them in their struggle for social equality. Although Washington and his opponents had the same goal, their methods to achieve it differed. Washington strove to reach that goal indirectly, without creating white opposition. African-American literature depicts the reality discussed by politicians on the ideological level and transfers it into the spheres of intimate human drama giving it a moving quality and emotional recognizability. The principle of authenticity, one of the principles of poetic realism, requires an artistic and detailed analysis of reality which leads to the principle of criticism. The Negro author essentially becomes a critic of the reality he has used in his work. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n9p123

“We Will Be Satisfied with Nothing Less:” The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction by Hugh Davis (review)

“We Will Be Satisfied with Nothing Less:” The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North during Reconstruction by Hugh Davis (review)

JOHN L. RURY and SHIRLEY A. HILL. The African American Struggle for Secondary Schooling, 1940-1980: Closing the Graduation Gap.

JOHN L. RURY and SHIRLEY A. HILL. The African American Struggle for Secondary Schooling, 1940-1980: Closing the Graduation Gap.