Download or read book The Chicago NAACP and the Rise of Black Professional Leadership 1910 1966 written by Christopher Robert Reed and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1997-11-22 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chicago NAACP was one of the first branches created in an effort to attain first-class citizenship for African Americans. Through the first six decades of white resistance, black indifference, and internal group struggle, the branch endured the effects of two world wars, national depression, the Cold War, and growing class differentiation among blacks. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Jane Addams, Dr. Charles E. Bentley, and Earl B. Dickerson were some early reformers who influenced the development of the Chicago NAACP during these earliest days.

Download or read book The Rise of Chicago s Black Metropolis 1920 1929 written by Christopher Robert Reed and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Roaring '20s, African Americans rapidly transformed their Chicago into a "black metropolis." In this book, Christopher Robert Reed describes the rise of African Americans in Chicago's political economy, bringing to life the fleeting vibrancy of this dynamic period of racial consciousness and solidarity. Reed shows how African Americans rapidly transformed Chicago and achieved political and economic recognition by building on the massive population growth after the Great Migration from the South, the entry of a significant working class into the city's industrial work force, and the proliferation of black churches. Mapping out the labor issues and the struggle for control of black politics and black business, Reed offers an unromanticized view of the entrepreneurial efforts of black migrants, reassessing previous accounts such as St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton's 1945 study Black Metropolis. Utilizing a wide range of historical data, The Rise of Chicago's Black Metropolis, 1920–1929 delineates a web of dynamic social forces to shed light on black businesses and the establishment of a black professional class. The exquisitely researched volume draws on fictional and nonfictional accounts of the era, black community guides, mainstream and community newspapers, contemporary scholars and activists, and personal interviews.

Download or read book Black Chicago s First Century written by Christopher Robert Reed and published by University of Missouri. This book was released on 2005-07-25 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Black Chicago's First Century, Christopher Robert Reed provides the first comprehensive study of the first one hundred years of African American settlement and achievements in the Windy City.

Download or read book History of the Chicago Urban League written by Arvarh E. Strickland and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reed, author of The Chicago NAACP and the Rise of Black Professional Leadership, 1910-1966, cites Strickland's work as a landmark study of the earliest civil rights efforts in Chicago."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book The World of Jim Crow America 2 volumes written by Steven A. Reich and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-06-24 with total page 627 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two-volume set is a thematically-arranged encyclopedia covering the social, political, and material culture of America during the Jim Crow Era. What was daily life really like for ordinary African American people in Jim Crow America, the hundred-year period of enforced legal segregation that began immediately after the Civil War and continued until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965? What did they eat, wear, believe, and think? How did they raise their children? How did they interact with government? What did they value? What did they do for fun? This Daily Life encyclopedia explores the lives of average people through the examination of social, cultural, and material history. Supported by the most current research, the multivolume set examines social history topics—including family, political, religious, and economic life—as it illuminates elements of a society's emotional life, interactions, opinions, views, beliefs, intimate relationships, and connections between individuals and the greater world. It is broken up into topical sections, each dealing with a different aspect of cultural life. Each section opens with an introductory essay, followed by A–Z entries on various aspects of that topic.

Download or read book With All Deliberate Speed written by Brian J. Daugherity and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2011-05 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first effort to provide a broad assessment of how well the Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared an end to segregated schools in the United States was implemented. Written by a distinguished group of historians, the twelve essays in this collection examine how African Americans and their supporters in twelve states—Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, Delaware, Missouri, Indiana, Nevada, and Wisconsin—dealt with the Court’s mandate to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” The process followed many diverse paths. Some of the common themes in these efforts were the importance of black activism, especially the crucial role played by the NAACP; entrenched white opposition to school integration, which wasn’t just a southern state issue, as is shown in Delaware, Wisconsin, and Indiana; and the role of the federal government, a sometimes inconstant and sometimes reluctant source of support for implementing Brown.

Download or read book Chicago s New Negroes written by Davarian L. Baldwin and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-11-30 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As early-twentieth-century Chicago swelled with an influx of at least 250,000 new black urban migrants, the city became a center of consumer capitalism, flourishing with professional sports, beauty shops, film production companies, recording studios, and other black cultural and communal institutions. Davarian Baldwin argues that this mass consumer marketplace generated a vibrant intellectual life and planted seeds of political dissent against the dehumanizing effects of white capitalism. Pushing the traditional boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance to new frontiers, Baldwin identifies a fresh model of urban culture rich with politics, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship. Baldwin explores an abundant archive of cultural formations where an array of white observers, black cultural producers, critics, activists, reformers, and black migrant consumers converged in what he terms a "marketplace intellectual life." Here the thoughts and lives of Madam C. J. Walker, Oscar Micheaux, Andrew "Rube" Foster, Elder Lucy Smith, Jack Johnson, and Thomas Dorsey emerge as individual expressions of a much wider spectrum of black political and intellectual possibilities. By placing consumer-based amusements alongside the more formal arenas of church and academe, Baldwin suggests important new directions for both the historical study and the constructive future of ideas and politics in American life.

Download or read book Red Chicago written by Randi Storch and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Realities of the street-level American Communist experience during the worst years of the Depression "Red Chicago" is a social history of American Communism set within the context of Chicago's neighborhoods, industries, and radical traditions. Using local party records, oral histories, union records, party newspapers, and government documents, Randi Storch fills the gap between Leninist principles and the day-to-day activities of Chicago's rank-and-file Communists. Uncovering rich new evidence from Moscow's former party archive, Storch argues that although the American Communist Party was an international organization strongly influenced by the Soviet Union, at the city level it was a more vibrant and flexible organization responsible to local needs and concerns. Thus, while working for a better welfare system, fairer unions, and racial equality, Chicago's Communists created a movement that at times departed from international party leaders' intentions. By focusing on the experience of Chicago's Communists, who included a large working-class, African American, and ethnic population, this study reexamines party members' actions as an integral part of the communities in which they lived and the industries where they worked. "A volume in the series The Working Class in American History, edited by David Brody, Alice Kessler-Harris, David Montgomery, and Sean Wilentz"

Download or read book The Depression Comes to the South Side written by Christopher Robert Reed and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Incorporate[s] microhistories and multiple biographies into a broader understanding of a community as complex and iconic as black Chicago.” —Journal of American Studies In the 1920s, the South Side of Chicago was looked on as the new Black Metropolis, but by the turn of the decade that vision was already in decline—a victim of the Depression. In this timely book, Christopher Robert Reed explores early Depression-era politics on the city’s South Side. The economic crisis caused diverse responses from groups in the black community, distinguished by their political ideologies and stated goals. Some favored government intervention, others reform of social services. Some found expression in mass street demonstrations, militant advocacy of expanded civil rights, or revolutionary calls for a complete overhaul of the capitalist economic system. Reed examines the complex interactions among these various groups as they played out within the community as it sought to find common ground to address the economic stresses that threatened to tear the Black Metropolis apart.

Download or read book Jim Crow s Counterculture written by R. A. Lawson and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth century, black musicians in the lower Mississippi Valley, chafing under the social, legal, and economic restrictions of Jim Crow, responded with a new musical form -- the blues. In Jim Crow's Counterculture, R. A. Lawson offers a cultural history of blues musicians in the segregation era, explaining how by both accommodating and resisting Jim Crow life, blues musicians created a counterculture to incubate and nurture ideas of black individuality and citizenship. These individuals, Lawson shows, collectively demonstrate the African American struggle during the early twentieth century. Derived from the music of the black working class and popularized by commercially successful songwriter W. C. Handy, early blues provided a counterpoint to white supremacy by focusing on an anti-work ethic that promoted a culture of individual escapism -- even hedonism -- and by celebrating the very culture of sex, drugs, and violence that whites feared. According to Lawson, blues musicians such as Charley Patton and Muddy Waters drew on traditions of southern black music, including call and response forms, but they didn't merely sing of a folk past. Instead, musicians saw blues as a way out of economic subservience. Lawson chronicles the major historical developments that changed the Jim Crow South and thus the attitudes of the working-class blacks who labored in that society. The Great Migration, the Great Depression and New Deal, and two World Wars, he explains, shaped a new consciousness among southern blacks as they moved north, fought overseas, and gained better-paid employment. The "me"-centered mentality of the early blues musicians increasingly became "we"-centered as these musicians sought to enter mainstream American life by promoting hard work and patriotism. Originally drawing the attention of only a few folklorists and music promoters, popular black musicians in the 1940s such as Huddie Ledbetter and Big Bill Broonzy played music that increasingly reached across racial lines, and in the process gained what segregationists had attempted to deny them: the identity of American citizenship. By uncovering the stories of artists who expressed much in their music but left little record in traditional historical sources, Jim Crow's Counterculture offers a fresh perspective on the historical experiences of black Americans and provides a new understanding of the blues: a shared music that offered a message of personal freedom to repressed citizens.

Download or read book A House for the Struggle written by E. James West and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Multiple Award-Winner! Winner of the 2023 Michael Nelson Prize of International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST) Recipient of the 2022 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award Winner of the 2023 American Journalism Historians Association Book of the Year Winner of the 2023 ULCC’s (Union League Club of Chicago) Outstanding Book on the History of Chicago Award Recipient of a 2023 Best of Illinois History Superior Achievement award from the Illinois State Historical Society Winner of the 2023 BAAS Book Prize (British Association for American Studies) Honorable Mention for the 2021-22 RSAP Book Prize (Research Society for American Periodicals) Buildings once symbolized Chicago's place as the business capital of Black America and a thriving hub for Black media. In this groundbreaking work, E. James West examines the city's Black press through its relationship with the built environment. As a house for the struggle, the buildings of publications like Ebony and the Chicago Defender embodied narratives of racial uplift and community resistance. As political hubs, gallery spaces, and public squares, they served as key sites in the ongoing Black quest for self-respect, independence, and civic identity. At the same time, factors ranging from discriminatory business practices to editorial and corporate ideology prescribed their location, use, and appearance, positioning Black press buildings as sites of both Black possibility and racial constraint. Engaging and innovative, A House for the Struggle reconsiders the Black press's place at the crossroads where aspiration collided with life in one of America's most segregated cities.

Download or read book Democracy Rising written by Peter F. Lau and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considered by many historians to be the birthplace of the Confederacy, South Carolina experienced one of the longest and most turbulent Reconstruction periods of all the southern states. After the Civil War, white supremacist leadership in the state fiercely resisted the efforts of freed slaves to secure full citizenship rights and to remake society based upon an expansive vision of freedom forged in slavery and the crucible of war. Despite numerous obstacles, African Americans achieved remarkable social and political advances in the ten years following the war, including the establishment of the state's first publicly-funded school system and health care for the poor. Through their efforts, the state's political process and social fabric became more democratic. Peter F. Lau traces the civil rights movement in South Carolina from Reconstruction through the early twenty-first century. He stresses that the movement was shaped by local, national, and international circumstances in which individuals worked to redefine and expand the meaning and practice of democracy beyond the borders of their own state. Contrary to recent scholars who separate civil rights claims from general calls for economic justice, Lau asserts that African American demands for civil rights have been inseparable from broader demands for a redistribution of social and economic power. Using the tension between rights possession and rights application as his organizing theme, Lau fundamentally revises our understanding of the civil rights movement in America. In addition to considering South Carolina's pivotal role in the national civil rights movement, Lau offers a comprehensive analysis of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) during the height of its power and influence, from 1910 through the years following Brown v. Board of Education (1954). During this time, the NAACP worked to ensure the rights guaranteed to African Americans by the 14th and 15th amendments and facilitated the emergence of a broad-based movement that included many of the nation's rural and most marginalized people. By examining events that occurred in South Carolina and the impact of the activities of the NAACP, Democracy Rising upends traditional interpretations of the civil rights movement in America. In their place, Lau offers an innovative way to understand the struggle for black equality by tracing the movement of people, institutions, and ideas across boundaries of region, nation, and identity. Ultimately, the book illustrates how conflicts caused by the state's history of racial exclusion and discrimination continue to shape modern society.

Download or read book Art for Equality written by Jenny Woodley and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the NAACP’s activism in the cultural realm through creative projects from 1910 to the 1960s. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, having dedicated itself to the fight for racial equality since 1909. While the group helped achieve substantial victories in the courtroom, the struggle for civil rights extended beyond gaining political support. It also required changing social attitudes. The NAACP thus worked to alter existing prejudices through the production of art that countered racist depictions of African Americans, focusing its efforts not only on changing the attitudes of the White middle class but also on encouraging racial pride and a sense of identity in the Black community. Art for Equality explores an important and little-studied side of the NAACP’s activism in the cultural realm. In openly supporting African American artists, writers, and musicians in their creative endeavors, the organization aimed to change the way the public viewed the Black community. By overcoming stereotypes and the belief of the majority that African Americans were physically, intellectually, and morally inferior to Whites, the NAACP believed it could begin to defeat racism. Illuminating important protests, from the fight against the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation to the production of anti-lynching art during the Harlem Renaissance, this insightful volume examines the successes and failures of the NAACP’s cultural campaign from 1910 to the 1960s. Exploring the roles of gender and class in shaping the association's patronage of the arts, Art for Equality offers an in-depth analysis of the social and cultural climate during a time of radical change in America. Praise for Art for Equality “A well-conceived and well-executed study that will add significantly to the historiography of the NAACP, the long civil rights movement, and African American history.” —John Kirk, George W. Donaghey Professor and Chair of the History Department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock “In this insightful book, Woodley writes with great verve and confidence. As a result, Art for Equality will attract readers in a variety of fields from African American history to art history to American political history.” —Matthew Pratt Guterl, Brown University “A necessary contribution to African American social and cultural histories.” —Journal of Southern History

Download or read book Invisible Activists written by Lee Sartain and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Behind the historical accounts of the great men of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People lies the almost forgotten story of the black women who not only participated in the organization but actually helped it thrive in the early twentieth-century South. In Invisible Activists, Lee Sartain examines attitudes toward gender, class, and citizenship of African American activists in Louisiana and women's roles in the campaign for civil rights in the state. In the end, he argues, it was women working behind the scenes in Louisiana's branches of the NAACP who were the most crucial factor in the organization's efficiency and survival. During the first half of the twentieth century -- especially in the darkest days of the Great Depression, when membership waned and funds were scarce -- a core group of women maintained Louisiana's NAACP. Fighting on the front line, Sartain explains, women acted as grassroots organizers, running public relations campaigns and membership drives, mobilizing youth groups, and promoting general community involvement. Using case studies of several prominent female NAACP members in Louisiana, Sartain demonstrates how women combined their fundraising skills with an extensive network of community and family ties to fund the NAACP and, increasingly, to undertake the day-to-day operations of the local organizations themselves. Still, these women also struggled against the double obstacles of racism and sexism that prevented them from attaining the highest positions within NAACP branch leadership. Sartain illustrates how the differences between the sexes were ultimately woven into the political battle for racial justice, where women were viewed as having inherent moral superiority and, hence, the potential to lift the black population as a whole. Sartain concludes that despite the societal traditions that kept women out of leadership positions, in the early stages of the civil rights movement, their skills and their contributions as community matriarchs provided the keys to the organization's progress. Highly original and essential to a comprehensive study of the NAACP, Invisible Activists gives voice to the many individual women who sustained the influential civil rights organization during a time of severe racial oppression in Louisiana. Without such dedication, Sartain asserts, the organization would have had no substantial presence in the state.

Download or read book Reverend Addie Wyatt written by Marcia Walker-McWilliams and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-09-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Labor leader, civil rights activist, outspoken feminist, African American clergywoman--Reverend Addie Wyatt stood at the confluence of many rivers of change in twentieth century America. The first female president of a local chapter of the United Packinghouse Workers of America, Wyatt worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt and appeared as one of Time magazine's Women of the Year in 1975. Marcia Walker-McWilliams tells the incredible story of Addie Wyatt and her times. What began for Wyatt as a journey to overcome poverty became a lifetime commitment to social justice and the collective struggle against economic, racial, and gender inequalities. Walker-McWilliams illuminates how Wyatt's own experiences with hardship and many forms of discrimination drove her work as an activist and leader. A parallel journey led her to develop an abiding spiritual faith, one that denied defeatism by refusing to accept such circumstances as immutable social forces.

Download or read book Roy Wilkins written by Yvonne Ryan and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roy Wilkins (1901--1981) spent forty-six years of his life serving the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and led the organization for more than twenty years. Under his leadership, the NAACP spearheaded efforts that contributed to landmark civil rights legislation, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. In Roy Wilkins: The Quiet Revolutionary and the NAACP, Yvonne Ryan offers the first biography of this influential activist, as well as an analysis of his significant contributions to civil rights in America. While activists in Alabama were treading the highways between Selma and Montgomery, Wilkins was walking the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., working tirelessly in the background to ensure that the rights they fought for were protected through legislation and court rulings. With his command of congressional procedure and networking expertise, Wilkins was regarded as a strong and trusted presence on Capitol Hill, and received greater access to the Oval Office than any other civil rights leader during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. Roy Wilkins fills a significant gap in the history of the civil rights movement, objectively exploring the career and impact of one of its forgotten leaders. The quiet revolutionary, who spent his life navigating the Washington political system, affirmed the extraordinary and courageous efforts of the many men and women who braved the dangers of the southern streets and challenged injustice to achieve equal rights for all Americans.

Download or read book Black in the Middle written by Terrion L. Williamson and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious, honest portrait of the Black experience in flyover country. One of The St. Louis Post Dispatch's Best Books of 2020. Black Americans have been among the hardest hit by the rapid deindustrialization and