Memories of the Movement

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Lewis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
Employment Opportunities ◽  
March On Washington ◽  
Reagan Era ◽  
African American Leaders

This chapter contrasts the 1963 March on Washington with its 1983 commemoration event held in the anti-statist Reagan era. In the former, a succession of civil rights activists decried the assumptions of the liberal consensus about the resolution of racial problems. By contrast, in the latter, African American leaders and their supporters called on government to reengage with the postwar commitment to expanding employment opportunities and improving living standards for all Americans.

Do Black Lives Really Matter—To Social Work? Introduction to the Special Edition

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 272-274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Holosko ◽  
Harold E. Briggs ◽  
Keva M. Miller
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Work ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Practice Research ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
African American Leaders

This article presents and summarizes the special issue entitled: Practice, Research, and Scholarship on African American. The authors examine the professions’ contradictory actions in partnering with African American scholars, communities, and people to achieve its social justice and civil rights mission. It reintroduces the reader of this collection to June Gary Hopps who originally rung the clarion call to action about the profession’s waffling nature regarding African Americans. The authors overview the collection, which depicts the professions’ lack of focus on issues of race, African American well-being, and oppression experiences. This issue unravels the role played by social work in its meager attention to the plight of African American leaders and faculty, their achievements, and challenges. It also conveys the realities of too few research studies on key issues impacting African Americans. This article concludes with a nudge to the reader to weigh the evidence contained in this serial.

Black Memphians and New Frontiers

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gritter
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Presidential Campaign ◽  
Shelby County ◽  
African American Leaders ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Rights Issues ◽  
Subsequent Administration

This essay explores the relationship between black Memphians and John F. Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency in 1960 and his subsequent administration. Drawing on archival research in Memphis and at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, as well as oral histories, this essay shows that blacks in Memphis played a crucial role in the presidential campaign, so much so that precinct leaders received invitations to the inauguration. (Unlike in most southern areas, African Americans could vote in Memphis.) Two key African American leaders in Memphis, Russell B. Sugarmon Jr. and A. W. Willis Jr., loom particularly large in this story because of their role in the development of the Shelby County Democratic Club and because they kept in touch with the Kennedy administration about civil rights issues in Memphis. Their local activism had national ramifications.

scholarly journals From Hackensack to the White House: The Triumph and Travail of E. Frederic Morrow

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Michael Birkner
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
House Staff ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
White House ◽  
American Black ◽  
African American Leaders

Four decades after arranging a historic meeting in the White House of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and African-American leaders on June 23, 1958 former Eisenhower assistant Rocco Siciliano recounted the back-story of the meeting, highlighting its inherent drama and significance. In the course of sharing his recollections Siciliano paid tribute to an African-American member of the White House staff, E. Frederic Morrow, calling him a “true pioneer in the American black civil rights movement.” Added Siciliano: “[Morrow’s] impact on civil rights progress has yet to be appreciated.” Judging “impact” by one individual on a large-scale movement is tricky business. But, as this article notes, there should be no doubt that in serving President Eisenhower New Jersey native Fred Morrow advanced the civil rights cause. The fact that his five-and-a-half-year tenure as a black man in the White House was not always happy or consistently productive of the kinds of initiatives on behalf of racial equality that he advocated should not obscure his contributions.

Transcending the Veil

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-228
Author(s):  
Natasha V. Christie ◽  
Shannon B. O’brien
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Color Blind ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Rights Issues ◽  
Selection Of

This work examines how Barack Obama’s speeches and remarks used various rhetorical techniques to strategically maneuver his rhetoric to address racial issues and represent African American concerns. The results of a content analysis of a selection of Obama’s speeches and remarks confirm that Obama and his speechwriters favored the use of statements of color-blind universalism. However, when making certain remarks regarding civil rights issues or perceived racial issues, the pattern shifted, presenting a rare glimpse of the unbalanced representation of African American concerns. These findings suggest that Barack Obama’s speeches and remarks performed double-consciousness; they used universal, balanced, and targeted universalism rhetorical techniques as a genuine, congruent political style for representing African American concerns as a “raced” politician.

Not as It Is Written

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-100
Author(s):  
Benjamin Houston
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
International Exhibition ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Made In

This article discusses an international exhibition that detailed the recent history of African Americans in Pittsburgh. Methodologically, the exhibition paired oral history excerpts with selected historic photographs to evoke a sense of Black life during the twentieth century. Thematically, showcasing the Black experience in Pittsburgh provided a chance to provoke among a wider public more nuanced understandings of the civil rights movement, an era particularly prone to problematic and superficial misreadings, but also to interject an African American perspective into the scholarship on deindustrializing cities, a literature which treats racism mostly in white-centric terms. This essay focuses on the choices made in reconciling these thematic and methodological dimensions when designing this exhibition.

scholarly journals “We Are Not Copyists”: Socialist Networks and Non-alignment from Below in A. Philip Randolph’s Asian Journey

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 402-428
Author(s):  
Su Lin Lewis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Trade Unionist ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cultural Freedom ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Abstract In 1952, A. Philip Randolph, the head of America’s largest black union and a prominent civil rights campaigner, traveled to Japan and Burma funded by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. In Asia, he encountered socialists and trade unionists struggling to negotiate the fractious divides between communism and capitalism within postwar states. In Burma, in particular, Western powers, the Soviet bloc, and powerful Asian neighbors used propaganda, aid missions, and subsidized travel to offer competing visions of development while accusing each other of new forms of imperialism and foreign interference. In such an environment, a battle for hearts and minds within Asian labor movements constituted the front lines of the early years of the Cold War. Randolph’s journey shows us how Asian socialists and trade unionists responded to powerful foreign interests by articulating an early sense of non-alignment, forged in part through emerging Asian socialist networks, well before this was an official strategy. The Asian actors with whom Randolph interacted in Japan and Burma mirrored his own struggles as a socialist, a trade unionist, and a “railway man” while furthering his campaign for civil rights at home. This article uses Randolph’s journey to examine parallels and divergences between African-American and Asian socialists and trade unionists during the early Cold War, an age characterized by deepening splits in the politics of the Left.

Claiming Martin Luther King, Jr. for the right: The Martin Luther King Day holiday in the Reagan era

2021 ◽  
pp. 175069802199593
Author(s):  
Francesca Polletta ◽  
Alex Maresca
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
General Abstract ◽  
The Right ◽  
Reagan Era ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
Roll Back

The article traces how American conservatives laid claim to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. We focus on a key moment in that process, when Republicans in the early 1980s battled other Republicans to establish King’s birthday as a federal holiday and thereby distinguish a conservative position on racial inequality from that associated with southern opposition to civil rights. The victory was consequential, aiding the New Right’s efforts to roll back gains on affirmative action and other race-conscious policies. We use the case to explore the conditions in which political actors are able to lay claim to venerated historical figures who actually had very different beliefs and commitments. The prior popularization of the figure makes it politically advantageous to identify with his or her legacy but also makes it possible to do so credibly. As they are popularized, the figure’s beliefs are made general, abstract, and often vague in a way that lends them to appropriation by those on the other side of partisan lines. Such appropriation is further aided by access to a communicative infrastructure of foundations, think tanks, and media outlets that allows political actors to secure an audience for their reinterpretation of the past.

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