Download or read book The Economic Civil Rights Movement written by Michael Ezra and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic inequalities have been perhaps the most enduring problem facing African Americans since the civil rights movement, despite the attention they have received from activists. Although the civil rights movement dealt successfully with injustices like disenfranchisement and segregated public accommodations, economic disparities between blacks and whites remain sharp, and the wealth gap between the two groups has widened in the twenty-first century. The Economic Civil Rights Movement is a collection of thirteen original essays that analyze the significance of economic power to the black freedom struggle by exploring how African Americans fought for increased economic autonomy in an attempt to improve the quality of their lives. It covers a wide range of campaigns ranging from the World War II era through the civil rights and black power movements and beyond. The unfinished business of the civil rights movement primarily is economic. This book turns backward toward history to examine the ways African Americans have engaged this continuing challenge.

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 John Hervey Wheeler Black Banking and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights written by Brandon K. Winford and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2019-12-09 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE LILLIAN SMITH BOOK AWARD John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) was one of the civil rights movement's most influential leaders. In articulating a bold vision of regional prosperity grounded in full citizenship and economic power for African Americans, this banker, lawyer, and visionary would play a key role in the fight for racial and economic equality throughout North Carolina. Utilizing previously unexamined sources from the John Hervey Wheeler Collection at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, this biography explores the black freedom struggle through the life of North Carolina's most influential black power broker. After graduating from Morehouse College, Wheeler returned to Durham and began a decades-long career at Mechanics and Farmers (M&F) Bank. He started as a teller and rose to become bank president in 1952. In 1961, President Kennedy appointed Wheeler to the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, a position in which he championed equal rights for African Americans and worked with Vice President Johnson to draft civil rights legislation. One of the first blacks to attain a high position in the state's Democratic Party, Wheeler became the state party's treasurer in 1968, and then its financial director. Wheeler urged North Carolina's white financial advisors to steer the region toward the end of Jim Crow segregation for economic reasons. Straddling the line between confrontation and negotiation, Wheeler pushed for increased economic opportunity for African Americans while reminding the white South that its future was linked to the plight of black southerners.

Download or read book From Civil Rights to Human Rights written by Thomas F. Jackson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-07-17 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martin Luther King, Jr., is widely celebrated as an American civil rights hero. Yet King's nonviolent opposition to racism, militarism, and economic injustice had deeper roots and more radical implications than is commonly appreciated, Thomas F. Jackson argues in this searching reinterpretation of King's public ministry. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, King was influenced by and in turn reshaped the political cultures of the black freedom movement and democratic left. His vision of unfettered human rights drew on the diverse tenets of the African American social gospel, socialism, left-New Deal liberalism, Gandhian philosophy, and Popular Front internationalism. King's early leadership reached beyond southern desegregation and voting rights. As the freedom movement of the 1950s and early 1960s confronted poverty and economic reprisals, King championed trade union rights, equal job opportunities, metropolitan integration, and full employment. When the civil rights and antipoverty policies of the Johnson administration failed to deliver on the movement's goals of economic freedom for all, King demanded that the federal government guarantee jobs, income, and local power for poor people. When the Vietnam war stalled domestic liberalism, King called on the nation to abandon imperialism and become a global force for multiracial democracy and economic justice. Drawing widely on published and unpublished archival sources, Jackson explains the contexts and meanings of King's increasingly open call for "a radical redistribution of political and economic power" in American cities, the nation, and the world. The mid-1960s ghetto uprisings were in fact revolts against unemployment, powerlessness, police violence, and institutionalized racism, King argued. His final dream, a Poor People's March on Washington, aimed to mobilize Americans across racial and class lines to reverse a national cycle of urban conflict, political backlash, and policy retrenchment. King's vision of economic democracy and international human rights remains a powerful inspiration for those committed to ending racism and poverty in our time.

Download or read book A Freedom Budget for All Americans written by Paul Le Blanc and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-08 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the Civil Rights Movement is remembered for efforts to end segregation and secure the rights of African Americans, the larger economic vision that animated much of the movement is often overlooked today. That vision sought economic justice for every person in the United States, regardless of race. It favored production for social use instead of profit; social ownership; and democratic control over major economic decisions. The document that best captured this vision was the Freedom Budget for All Americans: Budgeting Our Resources, 1966-1975, To Achieve Freedom from Want published by the A. Philip Randolph Institute and endorsed by a virtual ‘who’s who’ of U.S. left liberalism and radicalism. Now, two of today’s leading socialist thinkers return to the Freedom Budget and its program for economic justice. Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates explain the origins of the Freedom Budget, how it sought to achieve “freedom from want” for all people, and how it might be reimagined for our current moment. Combining historical perspective with clear-sighted economic proposals, the authors make a concrete case for reviving the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement and building the society of economic security and democratic control envisioned by the movement’s leaders—a struggle that continues to this day.

Download or read book The Economic Civil Rights Movement written by Michael Ezra and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic inequalities have been perhaps the most enduring problem facing African Americans since the civil rights movement, despite the attention they have received from activists. Although the civil rights movement dealt successfully with injustices like disenfranchisement and segregated public accommodations, economic disparities between blacks and whites remain sharp, and the wealth gap between the two groups has widened in the twenty-first century. The Economic Civil Rights Movement is a collection of thirteen original essays that analyze the significance of economic power to the black freedom struggle by exploring how African Americans fought for increased economic autonomy in an attempt to improve the quality of their lives. It covers a wide range of campaigns ranging from the World War II era through the civil rights and black power movements and beyond. The unfinished business of the civil rights movement primarily is economic. This book turns backward toward history to examine the ways African Americans have engaged this continuing challenge.

Download or read book Class Race and the Civil Rights Movement Second Edition written by Jack M. Bloom and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Race, Class, and the Civil Rights Movement is a unique sociohistorical analysis of the civil rights movement. In it, Jack M. Bloom analyzes the interaction between the economy and political systems in the South, which led to racial stratification. Praise for the first edition: "A unique sociohistorical analysis of the civil rights movement, analyzing the interaction between the economy and political systems in the South, which led to racial stratification. An intriguing look at the interplay of race and class, this work is both scholarly and jargon-free. A sophisticated study."–Library Journal "This is an exciting book combining dramatic episodes with an insightful analysis.The use of concepts of class is subtle and effective." –Peter N. Stearns "Ambitious and wide-ranging." –Georgia Historical Quarterly "Excellent historical analysis." –North Carolina Historical Review "Historians should welcome this book. A well-written, jargon-free interpretive synthesis, it relates impersonal political-economic forces to the human actors who were shaped by them and, in turn, helped shape them . . . . This refreshing study reminds us how much the American dilemma of race has been complicated by problems of class." –American Historical Review "A broad historical sweep . . . . Skillfully surveys key areas of historiographical debate and succinctly summarizes a good deal of recent secondary literature." –Journal of Southern History "Bloom does a masterful job of presenting the major structural and psychological interpretations associated with the Civil Rights Movement. . . . It will make an excellent general text to welcome undergraduates and reintroduce old-timers to the social ferment that surrounded the civil rights movement." –Contemporary Sociology

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 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book You Can t Eat Freedom written by Greta de Jong and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two revolutions roiled the rural South after the mid-1960s: the political revolution wrought by the passage of civil rights legislation, and the ongoing economic revolution brought about by increasing agricultural mechanization. Political empowerment for black southerners coincided with the transformation of southern agriculture and the displacement of thousands of former sharecroppers from the land. Focusing on the plantation regions of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, Greta de Jong analyzes how social justice activists responded to mass unemployment by lobbying political leaders, initiating antipoverty projects, and forming cooperative enterprises that fostered economic and political autonomy, efforts that encountered strong opposition from free market proponents who opposed government action to solve the crisis. Making clear the relationship between the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty, this history of rural organizing shows how responses to labor displacement in the South shaped the experiences of other Americans who were affected by mass layoffs in the late twentieth century, shedding light on a debate that continues to reverberate today.

Download or read book Collective Courage written by Jessica Gordon Nembhard and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-13 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Collective Courage, Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1907 Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans has there been a full-length, nationwide study of African American cooperatives. Collective Courage extends that story into the twenty-first century. Many of the players are well known in the history of the African American experience: Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Jo Baker, George Schuyler and the Young Negroes’ Co-operative League, the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party. Adding the cooperative movement to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. To tell the story, Gordon Nembhard uses a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history.

Download or read book Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement written by Daniel Levine and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best known as the man who organized the Great March on Washington in 1963, Bayard Rustin was a vital force in the civil rights movement from the 1940s through the 1980s. Rustins's activism embraced the wide range of crucial issues of his time: communism, international pacifism, and race relations. Rustin's long activist career began with his association with A. Phillip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Then, as a member of A. J. Muste's Fellowship of Reconciliation, he participated in the "Journey of Reconciliation" (an early version of the "Freedom Rides" of 1961). He was a close associate of Martin Luther King in Montgomery and Atlanta and rose to prominence as organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. Rustin played a key role in applying nonviolent direct action to American race relations while rejecting the separatism of movements like Black Power in the 1960s, even at the risk of his being marginalized by the younger generation of civil rights activists. In his later years he tried to hold the civil rights coalition together and to fight for the economic changes he thought were necessary to decrease racism. Daniel Levine has written the first scholarly biography that examines Rustin's public as well as private persona in light of his struggles as a gay black man and as an activist who followed his own principles and convictions. The result is a rich portrait of a complex, indomitable advocate for justice in American society.

Download or read book The Civil Rights Movement written by Tamra B. Orr and published by Greenhaven Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2018-07-15 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The civil rights movement was one of the most important social justice movements in American history, and readers are sure to be captivated by this in-depth look at the leaders and moments that defined this period. Enlightening main text and detailed sidebars feature quotes from the men and women who lived through this time of trial and triumph, and the facts readers discover on each page complement current social studies curriculum topics. Additional insight is provided through primary sources, a comprehensive timeline, and historical and contemporary images.

Download or read book Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement written by Traci Parker and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Traci Parker examines the movement to racially integrate white-collar work and consumption in American department stores, and broadens our understanding of historical transformations in African American class and labor formation. Built on the goals, organization, and momentum of earlier struggles for justice, the department store movement channeled the power of store workers and consumers to promote black freedom in the mid-twentieth century. Sponsoring lunch counter sit-ins and protests in the 1950s and 1960s, and challenging discrimination in the courts in the 1970s, this movement ended in the early 1980s with the conclusion of the Sears, Roebuck, and Co. affirmative action cases and the transformation and consolidation of American department stores. In documenting the experiences of African American workers and consumers during this era, Parker highlights the department store as a key site for the inception of a modern black middle class, and demonstrates the ways that both work and consumption were battlegrounds for civil rights.

Download or read book Black Maverick written by David T. Beito and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-awaited biography of a colorful and enterprising civil rights leader

Download or read book Speak Now Against The Day written by John Egerton and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-08-28 with total page 1173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speak Now Against the Day is the astonishing, little-known story of the Southerners who, in the generation before the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation and before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery bus, challenged the validity of a white ruling class and a “separate but equal” division of the races. The voices of the dissenters, although present throughout the South’s troubled history, grew louder with Roosevelt’s election in 1932. An increasing number of men and women who grappled daily with the economic and social woes of the South began forcefully and courageously to speak and to work toward the day when the South—and the nation—would deliver on the historic promises in the country’s founding documents. This is the story of those brave prophets—thhe ministers, writers, educators, journalists, social activists, union members, and politicians, black and white, who pointed the way to higher ground. Published forty years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of the Supreme Court, this compelling book is not only a rich trove of forgotten history—it also speaks profoundly to us in the context of today’s continuing racial and social conflict.

Download or read book The 1970s written by Thomas Borstelmann and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling framework for understanding the importance of the 1970s for America and the world The 1970s looks at an iconic decade when the cultural left and economic right came to the fore in American society and the world at large. While many have seen the 1970s as simply a period of failures epitomized by Watergate, inflation, the oil crisis, global unrest, and disillusionment with military efforts in Vietnam, Thomas Borstelmann creates a new framework for understanding the period and its legacy. He demonstrates how the 1970s increased social inclusiveness and, at the same time, encouraged commitments to the free market and wariness of government. As a result, American culture and much of the rest of the world became more—and less—equal. Borstelmann explores how the 1970s forged the contours of contemporary America. Military, political, and economic crises undercut citizens' confidence in government. Free market enthusiasm led to lower taxes, a volunteer army, individual 401(k) retirement plans, free agency in sports, deregulated airlines, and expansions in gambling and pornography. At the same time, the movement for civil rights grew, promoting changes for women, gays, immigrants, and the disabled. And developments were not limited to the United States. Many countries gave up colonial and racial hierarchies to develop a new formal commitment to human rights, while economic deregulation spread to other parts of the world, from Chile and the United Kingdom to China. Placing a tempestuous political culture within a global perspective, The 1970s shows that the decade wrought irrevocable transformations upon American society and the broader world that continue to resonate today.

Download or read book An Unseen Light written by Aram Goudsouzian and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2018-04-13 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars examine the activist efforts of Black Americans in Memphis in a series of essays ranging from the Reconstruction era to the twenty-first century. In An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee, eminent and rising scholars present a multidisciplinary examination of African American activism in Memphis from the dawn of emancipation to the twenty-first century. Together, they investigate episodes such as the 1940 “Reign of Terror” when Black Memphians experienced a prolonged campaign of harassment, mass arrests, and violence at the hands of police. They also examine topics including the relationship between the labor and civil rights movements, the fight for economic advancement in Black communities, and the impact of music on the city’s culture. Covering subjects as diverse as politics, sports, music, activism, and religion, An Unseen Light illuminates Memphis’s place in the long history of the struggle for African American freedom and human dignity. Praise for Unseen Light “From the aftermath of the post-Civil War race massacre to continuous violence, murder, and bitter confrontations into the twenty-first century, contributors illuminate An Unseen Light on those Black Memphians forging lives nonetheless, through negotiation, protest, music, accommodation, prayer, faith and sometimes sheer stubbornness . . . . Scholars intellectually and personally invested in the city as a site of family and community, and career, bring an unequivocal depth of understanding and richness about place and belonging that textures the pages with life, from the church pews, the music studios, or the myriad of social or political organizations, to the land itself, adding more layers to underscore how black lives have mattered in the historical grassroots building of the nation. This is thoughtful and beautiful work.” —Françoise Hamlin, author of Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle After World War II “This rich collection covers a broad range of topics pertaining to the African American freedom struggle in Memphis, Tennessee. One of its greatest strengths is the breadth of the essays, which span a long period from the end of the Civil War to the twenty-first century. An Unseen Light is a valuable addition to civil rights scholarship.” —Cynthia Griggs Fleming, author of Yes We Did?: From King's Dream to Obama's Promise “The collection did an excellent job in explaining the inner workings of Memphis . . . . The works highlighted the past actions, organizing and insurgency which created the dynamics of racism, classism, social, and political power seen in modern Memphis. I recommend this collection to those interested in the shaping of a large southern city. I also recommend to new and lifelong Memphians to provide a blueprint of the historical legacy of Memphis and how this legacy continues to impact the lives of African Americans.” —Tennessee Libraries