Author : Jenny Irons
Publisher : Vanderbilt University Press
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 40,20 MB
Release : 2010-05-14
Category : History
ISBN : 0826516874
How the government of Mississippi defended segregation and white privilege.
Author : John T. Warren
Publisher : Critical Intercultural Communication Studies
Page : 194 pages
File Size : 50,96 MB
Release : 2003
Category : Education
ISBN :
Based on a two-year critical ethnography, Performing Purity: Whiteness, Pedagogy, and the Reconstitution of Power demonstrates the potential of a performative conceptualization of whiteness - a way of seeing whiteness in production, in the process of reiteration. This book builds on prior studies by searching for the repetitions of whiteness in our daily communication. The move to the performative is an explicit detailing of whiteness in and through the repetitious acts that work to reconstitute whiteness as a communicative ideal. Performing Purity creates a critical space of dialogue, shifting the conversation to how we make race, as a construct, matter.
Author : Gavin Wright
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 26,44 MB
Release : 2013-02-25
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0674076494
Winner of the Alice Hanson Jones Prize, Economic History Association A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year The civil rights movement was also a struggle for economic justice, one that until now has not had its own history. Sharing the Prize demonstrates the significant material gains black southerners made—in improved job opportunities, quality of education, and health care—from the 1960s to the 1970s and beyond. Because black advances did not come at the expense of southern whites, Gavin Wright argues, the civil rights struggle was that rarest of social revolutions: one that benefits both sides. “Wright argues that government action spurred by the civil-rights movement corrected a misfiring market, generating large economic gains that private companies had been unable to seize on their own.” —The Economist “Written...with the care and imagination [Wright] displayed in his superb work on slavery and the southern economy since the Civil War, this excellent economic history offers the best empirical account to date of the effects the civil rights revolution had on southern labor markets, schools, and other important institutions...With much of the nation persuaded that a post-racial age has begun, Wright’s analytical history...takes on fresh urgency.” —Ira Katznelson, New York Review of Books
Author : Devery S. Anderson
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 17,14 MB
Release : 2023-03-08
Category : Law
ISBN : 1496844440
In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, countless Black citizens endured violent resistance and even death while fighting for their constitutional rights. One of those citizens, Clyde Kennard (1927–1963), a Korean War veteran and civil rights leader from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, attempted repeatedly to enroll at the all-white Mississippi Southern College—now the University of Southern Mississippi—in the late 1950s. In A Slow, Calculated Lynching: The Story of Clyde Kennard, Devery S. Anderson tells the story of a man who paid the ultimate price for trying to attend a white college during Jim Crow. Rather than facing conventional vigilantes, he stood opposed to the governor, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, and other high-ranking entities willing to stop at nothing to deny his dreams. In this comprehensive and extensively researched biography, Anderson examines the relentless subterfuge against Kennard, including the cruelly successful attempts to frame him—once for a misdemeanor and then for a felony. This second conviction resulted in a sentence of seven years hard labor at Mississippi State Penitentiary, forever disqualifying him from attending a state-sponsored school. While imprisoned, he developed cancer, was denied care, then sadly died six months after the governor commuted his sentence. In this prolonged lynching, Clyde Kennard was robbed of his ambitions and ultimately his life, but his final days and legacy reject the notion that he was powerless. Anderson highlights the resolve of friends and fellow activists to posthumously restore his name. Those who fought against him, and later for him, link a story of betrayal and redemption, chronicling the worst and best in southern race relations. The redemption was not only a symbolic one for Kennard but proved healing for the entire state. He was gone, but countless others still benefit from Kennard’s legacy and the biracial, bipartisan effort he inspired.
Author : Gregg L. Michel
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 30,74 MB
Release : 2024-09-04
Category : History
ISBN : 0807182877
Gregg L. Michel’s Spying on Students focuses on the law enforcement campaign against New Left and progressive student activists in the South during the 1960s. Often overlooked by scholars, white southern students worked alongside their Black peers in the civil rights struggle, drove opposition to the Vietnam War, and embraced the counterculture’s rejection of conventions and norms. While African Americans bore the brunt of police surveillance and harassment, federal agencies such as the FBI and local police intelligence units known as Red Squads subjected white student activists to wide-ranging, intrusive, and illegal monitoring. By examining the experiences of white students in the South, Michel provides fresh insights into the destructive, weaponized spying tactics deployed by state actors in their attempts to quash dissent in the region. Drawing on previously secret FBI files and records of other investigative agencies, Michel demonstrates that authorities at all levels of government turned the full power of their offices against white activists—listening to their conversations, infiltrating their meetings, and sowing discord within their families and schools. Efforts to surveil and repress social activism reflected officials’ fear of growing unrest on the part of white students who questioned the southern racial status quo and recoiled as the horrors of Vietnam laid bare the shibboleth of American exceptionalism. As white students revolted on campuses elsewhere, most notably at Berkeley and Columbia, law enforcement sought to curtail such disruptions in the South. In their view, white students threatened domestic tranquility and therefore warranted close monitoring. Spying on Students presents a unique perspective on state actors’ war on dissent, exposing their suspicion of opposing political beliefs and revealing their paranoia as they sought to preserve the existing racial order. The work complicates further the dominant narrative of the era that casts white southern students as opponents of social change. The counterintelligence operations employed against them show not only that white students valued political engagement and social activism but also that authorities considered them a menace to the country as a whole.
Author : Christi M. Smith
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 335 pages
File Size : 11,11 MB
Release : 2016-10-18
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1469630702
Reparation and Reconciliation is the first book to reveal the nineteenth-century struggle for racial integration on U.S. college campuses. As the Civil War ended, the need to heal the scars of slavery, expand the middle class, and reunite the nation engendered a dramatic interest in higher education by policy makers, voluntary associations, and African Americans more broadly. Formed in 1846 by Protestant abolitionists, the American Missionary Association united a network of colleges open to all, designed especially to educate African American and white students together, both male and female. The AMA and its affiliates envisioned integrated campuses as a training ground to produce a new leadership class for a racially integrated democracy. Case studies at three colleges--Berea College, Oberlin College, and Howard University--reveal the strategies administrators used and the challenges they faced as higher education quickly developed as a competitive social field. Through a detailed analysis of archival and press data, Christi M. Smith demonstrates that pressures between organizations--including charities and foundations--and the emergent field of competitive higher education led to the differentiation and exclusion of African Americans, Appalachian whites, and white women from coeducational higher education and illuminates the actors and the strategies that led to the persistent salience of race over other social boundaries.
Author : William P. Hustwit
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 42,30 MB
Release : 2019-02-05
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1469648563
Recovering the history of an often-ignored landmark Supreme Court case, William P. Hustwit assesses the significant role that Alexander v. Holmes (1969) played in integrating the South's public schools. Although Brown v. Board of Education has rightly received the lion's share of historical analysis, its ambiguous language for implementation led to more than a decade of delays and resistance by local and state governments. Alexander v. Holmes required "integration now," and less than a year later, thousands of children were attending integrated schools. Hustwit traces the progression of the Alexander case to show how grassroots activists in Mississippi operated hand in glove with lawyers and judges involved in the litigation. By combining a narrative of the larger legal battle surrounding the case and the story of the local activists who pressed for change, Hustwit offers an innovative, well-researched account of a definitive legal decision that reaches from the cotton fields of Holmes County to the chambers of the Supreme Court in Washington.
Author : Ed King
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 315 pages
File Size : 45,17 MB
Release : 2014-10-07
Category : History
ISBN : 1626743304
Ed King's Mississippi: Behind the Scenes of Freedom Summer features more than forty unpublished black-and-white photographs and substantial writings by the prominent civil rights activist Reverend Ed King. The images and text provide a unique perspective on Mississippi during the summer of 1964. Taken in Jackson, Greenwood, and Philadelphia, the photographs showcase informal images of Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young, Mississippi civil rights workers, and college student volunteers in the movement. Ed King's writings offer background and insights on the motivations and work of Freedom Summer volunteers, on the racial climate of Mississippi during the late 1950s and 1960s, and the grassroots effort by black Mississippians to enter the political arena and exercise their fundamental civil rights. Ed King, a native of Vicksburg and a Methodist minister, was a founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and a key figure in the civil rights movement in the state in the 1960s. As one of the few white Mississippians with a leadership position in the movement, his words and photographs offer a rare behind-the-scenes chronicle of events in the state during Freedom Summer. Ed King is a retired faculty member of the School of Health Related Professions, University of Mississippi Medical Center. Historian Trent Watts furnishes a substantial introduction to the volume and offers background on the Freedom Summer campaign as well as a description of Ed King's civil rights activism from the late 1950s to the present day.
Author : Professor Nancy K. Bristow
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 29,43 MB
Release : 2020-04-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0190092092
Minutes after midnight on May 15, 1970, white members of the Jackson city police and the Mississippi Highway Patrol opened fire on young people in front of a women's dormitory at Jackson State College, a historically black college in Jackson, Mississippi, discharging "buckshot, rifle slugs, a submachine gun, carbines with military ammunition, and two 30.06 rifles loaded with armor-piercing bullets." Twenty-eight seconds later two young people lay dead, another 12 injured. Taking place just ten days after the killings at Kent State, the attack at Jackson State never garnered the same level of national attention and was chronically misunderstood as similar in cause. This book reclaims this story and situates it in the broader history of the struggle for African American freedom in the civil rights and black power eras. The book explores the essential role of white supremacy in causing the shootings and shaping the aftermath. By 1970, even historically conservative campuses such as Jackson State, where an all-white Board of Trustees of Institutions of Higher Learning had long exercised its power to control student behavior, were beginning to feel the impact of the movements for African American freedom. Though most of the students at Jackson State remained focused not on activism but their educations, racial consciousness was taking hold. It was this campus police attacked. Acting on racial animus and with impunity, the shootings reflected both traditional patterns of repression and the new logic and rhetoric of "law and order," with its thinly veiled racial coding. In the aftermath, the victims and their survivors struggled unsuccessfully to find justice. Despite multiple investigative commissions, two grand juries and a civil suit brought by students and the families of the dead, the law and order narrative proved too powerful. No officers were charged, no restitution was paid, and no apologies were offered. The shootings were soon largely forgotten except among the local African American community, the injured victimized once more by historical amnesia born of the unwillingness to acknowledge the essential role of race in causing the violence.
Author : Stephanie R. Rolph
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 42,26 MB
Release : 2018-06-04
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 080716917X
In Resisting Equality Stephanie R. Rolph examines the history of the Citizens’ Council, an organization committed to coordinating opposition to desegregation and black voting rights. In the first comprehensive study of this racist group, Rolph follows the Citizens’ Council from its establishment in the Mississippi Delta, through its expansion into other areas of the country and its success in incorporating elements of its agenda into national politics, to its formal dissolution in 1989. Founded in 1954, two months after the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Council spread rapidly in its home state of Mississippi. Initially, the organization relied on local chapters to monitor signs of black activism and take action to suppress that activism through economic and sometimes violent means. As the decade came to a close, however, the Council’s influence expanded into Mississippi’s political institutions, silencing white moderates and facilitating a wave of terror that severely obstructed black Mississippians’ participation in the civil rights movement. As the Citizens’ Council reached the peak of its power in Mississippi, its ambitions extended beyond the South. Alliances with like-minded organizations across the country supplemented waning influence at home, and the Council movement found itself in league with the earliest sparks of conservative ascension, cultivating consistent messages of grievance against minority groups and urging the necessity of white unity. Much more than a local arm of white terror, the Council’s work intersected with anticommunism, conservative ideology, grassroots activism, and Radical Right organizations that facilitated its journey from the margins into mainstream politics. Perhaps most crucially, Rolph examines the extent to which the organization survived the successes of the civil rights movement and found continued relevance even after the Council’s campaign to preserve state-sanctioned forms of white supremacy ended in defeat. Using the Council’s own materials, papers from its political allies, oral histories, and newspaper accounts, Resisting Equality illuminates the motives and mechanisms of this destructive group.
