Download or read book From Southern Wrongs to Civil Rights written by Sara Mitchell Parsons and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2009-02 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first-hand account tells the story of turbulent civil rights era Atlanta through the eyes of a white upper-class woman who became an outspoken advocate for integration and racial equality As a privileged white woman who grew up in segregated Atlanta, Sara Mitchell Parsons was an unlikely candidate to become a civil rights agitator. After all, her only contacts with blacks were with those who helped raise her and those who later helped raise her children. As a young woman, she followed the conventional path expected of her, becoming the dutiful wife of a conservative husband, going to the country club, and playing bridge. But unlike many of her peers, Parsons harbored an increasing uneasiness about racial segregation. In a memoir that includes candid diary excerpts, Parsons chronicles her moral awakening. With little support from her husband, she runs for the Atlanta Board of Education on a quietly integrationist platform and, once elected, becomes increasingly outspoken about inequitable school conditions and the slow pace of integration. Her activities bring her into contact with such civil rights leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., and his wife, Coretta Scott King. For a time, she leads a dual existence, sometimes traveling the great psychic distance from an NAACP meeting on Auburn Avenue to an all-white party in upscale Buckhead. She eventually drops her ladies' clubs, and her deepening involvement in the civil rights movement costs Parsons many friends as well as her first marriage.
Download or read book REPORTER written by Alvin Benn and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2006-01-24 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a United Press International executive asked Al Benn where he wanted to begin his journalism career, he unhesitatingly replied: “Where the action is.” Little did he know at the time that he’d wind up reporting on America’s civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama which was known as BOMBingham in the 1960s. Benn had no experience as a reporter in 1964, but he quickly learned by following and watching those who did. One night, he might be in a pasture covering a Ku Klux Klan rally where grand dragons and imperial wizards in white sheets delivered hate-filled speeches under the glow of burning crosses. The next night, he might be inside a black church where civil rights leaders called for peace and racial harmony. It was an exciting, often harrowing time for the rookie reporter—filled with deadline pressures, danger and the knowledge that he had become personally involved in covering developments of historic proportions. When he wasn’t chronicling civil rights events, Benn wrote about scientists and astronauts involved in the space race as well as reaction on the home front to the war that raged in Vietnam. His favorite assignment was covering football at the University of Alabama where he got to know the Crimson Tide’s head coach, Paul “Bear” Bryant, and reported the exploits of star quarterbacks such as Joe Namath and Ken Stabler. He also found time to write several exclusive stories. One involved secret payments to the widows of Alabama pilots killed during the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. Another centered on the national boycott of Beatles records--launched by two Birmingham radio personalities upset over a comment by John Lennon that his group was more popular than Jesus. Benn left UPI in 1967 to begin the newspaper phase of his journalism career. He worked in three states, becoming an editor and publisher, before landing his best job of all —covering rural Alabama for the Montgomery Advertiser in 1980. Benn has written about heroes and heels, legends and losers, captains of industry and disgraced CEOs. Most of all, he’s focused on the people who work hard to support their families and improve the quality of life in their cities. They’re his heroes. This book explores Benn’s four decades as a journalist. It recounts the hectic pace at UPI where he faced deadlines every minute as well as newspaper work that afforded him a chance to write columns, do investigative reporting and, as he did at UPI, drop everything and race to the next big story. It’s also about growing up in the slums of a small Pennsylvania town and then enlisting in the Marine Corps where he gained his first journalism experience. So, come along on a 40-year ride through an important period in American history. It’s a career as seen through the eyes of a reporter who admits he got just what he asked for in 1964—plenty of action.
Download or read book Rights Gone Wrong written by Richard Thompson Ford and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 Since the 1960s, ideas developed during the civil rights movement have been astonishingly successful in fighting overt discrimination and prejudice. But how successful are they at combating the whole spectrum of social injustice-including conditions that aren't directly caused by bigotry? How do they stand up to segregation, for instance-a legacy of racism, but not the direct result of ongoing discrimination? It's tempting to believe that civil rights litigation can combat these social ills as efficiently as it has fought blatant discrimination. In Rights Gone Wrong, Richard Thompson Ford, author of the New York Times Notable Book The Race Card, argues that this is seldom the case. Civil rights do too much and not enough: opportunists use them to get a competitive edge in schools and job markets, while special-interest groups use them to demand special privileges. Extremists on both the left and the right have hijacked civil rights for personal advantage. Worst of all, their theatrics have drawn attention away from more serious social injustices. Ford, a professor of law at Stanford University, shows us the many ways in which civil rights can go terribly wrong. He examines newsworthy lawsuits with shrewdness and humor, proving that the distinction between civil rights and personal entitlements is often anything but clear. Finally, he reveals how many of today's social injustices actually can't be remedied by civil rights law, and demands more creative and nuanced solutions. In order to live up to the legacy of the civil rights movement, we must renew our commitment to civil rights, and move beyond them.
Download or read book To Right These Wrongs written by Robert R. Korstad and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Governor Terry Sanford established the North Carolina Fund in 1963, he saw it as a way to provide a better life for the "tens of thousands whose family income is so low that daily subsistence is always in doubt." Illustrated with evocative photographs by Billy Barnes, To Right These Wrongs offers a lively account of this pioneering effort in America's War on Poverty. Robert Korstad and James Leloudis describe how the Fund's initial successes grew out of its reliance on private philanthropy and federal dollars and its commitment to the democratic mobilization of the poor. Both were calculated tactics designed to outflank conservative state lawmakers and entrenched local interests that nourished Jim Crow, perpetuated one-party politics, and protected an economy built on cheap labor. By late 1968, when the Fund closed its doors, a resurgent politics of race had gained the advantage, led by a Republican Party that had reorganized itself around opposition to civil rights and aid to the poor. The North Carolina Fund came up short in its battle against poverty, but its story continues to be a source of inspiration and instruction for new generations of Americans.
Download or read book Civil Rights and Wrongs written by Harry S. Ashmore and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 1994 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Cornelia & Michael Bessie Book - Pantheon Books". Index.
Download or read book Rights After Wrongs written by Shannon Morreira and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-25 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The international legal framework of human rights presents itself as universal. But rights do not exist as a mere framework; they are enacted, practiced, and debated in local contexts. Rights After Wrongs ethnographically explores the chasm between the ideals and the practice of human rights. Specifically, it shows where the sweeping colonial logics of Western law meets the lived experiences, accumulated histories, and humanitarian debts present in post-colonial Zimbabwe. Through a comprehensive survey of human rights scholarship, Shannon Morreira explores the ways in which the global framework of human rights is locally interpreted, constituted, and contested in Harare, Zimbabwe, and Musina and Cape Town, South Africa. Presenting the stories of those who lived through the violent struggles of the past decades, Morreira shows how supposedly universal ideals become localized in the context of post-colonial Southern Africa. Rights After Wrongs uncovers the disconnect between the ways human rights appear on paper and the ways in which it is possible for people to use and understand them in everyday life.
Download or read book Voting Rights and Wrongs written by Abigail M. Thernstrom and published by A E I Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: n this provocative book, Abigail Thernstrom argues that southern resistance to black political power began a process by which the act was radically revised both for good and ill. Congress, the courts, and the Justice Department altered the statute to ensure the election of blacks and Hispanics to legislative bodies ranging from school boards and county councils to the U.S. Congress.
Download or read book The Age of Entitlement written by Christopher Caldwell and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major American intellectual and “one of the right’s most gifted and astute journalists” (The New York Times Book Review) makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled—and ready to put an adventurer in the White House. Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences and his conclusion is this: even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high—in wealth, freedom, and social stability—and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations. Caldwell reveals the real political turning points of the past half-century, taking you on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycotin, Black Lives Matter, and internet cookies. In doing so, he shows that attempts to redress the injustices of the past have left Americans living under two different ideas of what it means to play by the rules. Essential, timely, hard to put down, The Age of Entitlement “is an eloquent and bracing book, full of insight” (New York magazine) about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systems—and drove it toward conflict.
Download or read book Civil Rights and Wrongs written by Harry S. Ashmore and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 1997 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Civil Rights and Wrongs is a powerful and important reappraisal of the American racial dilemma by a uniquely qualified observer and sometime participant who viewed it from the eye of the political storm that it spawned. In this revised edition, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and editor Harry S. Ashmore assesses the ideological impasses that limited Bill Clinton's effort to reinstate activist government in Washington and offers a penetrating analysis of the 1996 election.
Download or read book Race Wrongs and Remedies written by Amy L. Wax and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2009-07-16 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Americans continue to lag behind on many measures of social and economic well-being. Conventional wisdom holds that these inequalities can only be eliminated by eradicating racism and providing well-funded social programs. In Race, Wrongs, and Remedies, Amy L. Wax applies concepts from the law of remedies to show that the conventional wisdom is mistaken. She argues that effectively addressing today's persistent racial disparities requires dispelling the confusion surrounding blacks' own role in achieving equality. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that discrimination against blacks has dramatically abated. The most important factors now impeding black progress are behavioral: low educational attainment, poor socialization and work habits, drug use, criminality, paternal abandonment, and non-marital childbearing. Although these maladaptive patterns are largely the outgrowth of past discrimination and oppression, they now largely resist correction by government programs or outside interventions. Wax asserts that the black community must solve these problems from within. Self-help, changed habits, and a new cultural outlook are, in fact, the only effective tactics for eliminating the present vestiges of our nation's racist past. Published in cooperation with the Hoover Institution
Download or read book Deep South Dispatch written by John N. Herbers and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Former New York Times correspondent John N. Herbers (1923-2017), who covered the civil rights movement for more than a decade, has produced Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist, a compelling story of national and historical significance. Born in the South during a time of entrenched racial segregation, Herbers witnessed a succession of landmark civil rights uprisings that rocked the country, the world, and his own conscience. Herbers's retrospective is a timely and critical illumination on America's current racial dilemmas and ongoing quest for justice. Herbers's reporting began in 1951, when he covered the brutal execution of Willie McGee, a black man convicted for the rape of a white housewife, and the 1955 trial for the murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. With immediacy and first-hand detail, Herbers describes the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the death of four black girls in the Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing; extensive travels and interviews with Martin Luther King Jr.; Ku Klux Klan cross-burning rallies and private meetings; the Freedom Summer murders in Philadelphia, Mississippi; and marches and riots in St. Augustine, Florida, and Selma, Alabama, that led to passage of national civil rights legislation. This account is also a personal journey as Herbers witnessed the movement with the conflicted eyes of a man dedicated to his southern heritage but who also rejected the prescribed laws and mores of a prejudiced society. His story provides a complex understanding of how the southern status quo, in which the white establishment benefited at the expense of African Americans, was transformed by a national outcry for justice.
Download or read book Civil Rights and Social Wrongs written by John Higham and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book There Goes My Everything written by Jason Sokol and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-12-10 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the civil rights movement, epic battles for justice were fought in the streets, at lunch counters, and in the classrooms of the American South. Just as many battles were waged, however, in the hearts and minds of ordinary white southerners whose world became unrecognizable to them. Jason Sokol’s vivid and unprecedented account of white southerners’ attitudes and actions, related in their own words, reveals in a new light the contradictory mixture of stubborn resistance and pragmatic acceptance–as well as the startling and unexpected personal transformations–with which they greeted the enforcement of legal equality.
Download or read book The Class of 65 written by Jim Auchmutey and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the midst of racial strife, one young man showed courage and empathy. It took forty years for the others to join him Being a student at Americus High School was the worst experience of Greg Wittkamper's life. Greg came from a nearby Christian commune, Koinonia, whose members devoutly and publicly supported racial equality. When he refused to insult and attack his school's first black students in 1964, Greg was mistreated as badly as they were: harassed and bullied and beaten. In the summer after his senior year, as racial strife in Americus -- and the nation -- reached its peak, Greg left Georgia. Forty-one years later, a dozen former classmates wrote letters to Greg, asking his forgiveness and inviting him to return for a class reunion. Their words opened a vein of painful memory and unresolved emotion, and set him on a journey that would prove healing and saddening. The Class of '65 is more than a heartbreaking story from the segregated South. It is also about four of Greg's classmates -- David Morgan, Joseph Logan, Deanie Dudley, and Celia Harvey -- who came to reconsider the attitudes they grew up with. How did they change? Why, half a lifetime later, did reaching out to the most despised boy in school matter to them? This noble book reminds us that while ordinary people may acquiesce to oppression, we all have the capacity to alter our outlook and redeem ourselves.
Download or read book Crossing Border Street written by Peter Jan Honigsberg and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Honigsberg considers the impact of the change that occurred in the fall of 1967, when Martin Luther King's dream of blacks and whites working together in a cooperative partnership gave way to the new cry of "Black Power." His memoir provides a glimpse into the civil rights movement and those who were forever changed by its struggle for human dignity and vision of racial justice and equality."--Jacket.
Download or read book Sharing the Prize written by Gavin Wright and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-25 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Southern bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins were famous acts of civil disobedience but were also demands for jobs in the very services being denied blacks. Gavin Wright shows that the civil rights struggle was of economic benefit to all parties: the wages of southern blacks increased dramatically but not at the expense of southern whites.
Download or read book Civil Rights in America written by Christopher W. Schmidt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of how Americans, from the Civil War through today, have fought over the meaning of civil rights.
