Download or read book The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights written by Paul T. Miller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The war industries associated with World War II brought unparalleled employment opportunities for African Americans in San Francisco, a city whose African American population grew by over 650% between 1940 and 1945. With this population increase came an increase in racial discrimination directed at African Americans, primarily in the employment and housing sectors. In San Francisco, most African Americans were effectively barred from renting or buying homes in all but a few neighborhoods and, except for the well-educated and lucky, employment opportunities were open in near-entry levels for white-collar positions or in unskilled and semi-skilled blue-collar positions. As San Francisco's African American population expanded, civil rights groups formed coalitions to picket and protest, thereby effectively expanding job opportunities and opening the housing market for African American San Franciscans. This book describes and explains some of the obstacles and triumphs faced and achieved in areas such as housing, employment, education and civil rights. It reaches across disciplines from African American studies and history into urban studies and sociology.

Download or read book To Stand and Fight written by Martha BIONDI and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the civil rights movement typically begins with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and culminates with the 1965 voting rights struggle in Selma. But as Martha Biondi shows, a grassroots struggle for racial equality in the urban North began a full ten years before the rise of the movement in the South. This story is an essential first chapter, not only to the southern movement that followed, but to the riots that erupted in northern and western cities just as the civil rights movement was achieving major victories. Biondi tells the story of African Americans who mobilized to make the war against fascism a launching pad for a postwar struggle against white supremacy at home. Rather than seeking integration in the abstract, black New Yorkers demanded first-class citizenship--jobs for all, affordable housing, protection from police violence, access to higher education, and political representation. This powerful local push for economic and political equality met broad resistance, yet managed to win several landmark laws barring discrimination and segregation. To Stand and Fight demonstrates how black New Yorkers launched the modern civil rights struggle and left a rich legacy. Table of Contents: Prologue: The Rise of the Struggle for Negro Rights 1 Jobs for All 2 Black Mobilization and Civil Rights Politics 3 Lynching, Northern style 4 Desegregating the metropolis 5 Dead Letter Legislation 6 An Unnatural Division of People 7 Anticommunism and Civil Rights 8 The Paradoxical Effects of the Cold War 9 Racial Violence in the Free World 10 Lift Every Voice and Vote 11 Resisting Resegregation 12 To Stand and Fight Epilogue: Another Kind of America Notes Acknowledgments Illustration Credits Index Reviews of this book: Historians have thoroughly documented the experiences of those African Americans who lived in the South and worked to repeal Jim Crow laws. However, in this work, Biondi explores what she calls 'the struggle for Negro rights' in New York City, an exploration resulting in a stark reminder of the daily challenges facing blacks who lived in northern cities...With its detailed discussions of the American Labor Party, the Communist Party, Black Nationalism, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., W. E. B. Dubois, Roy Wilkins, and, especially, Paul Robeson, this work should be required reading for all historians interested in the post-WW II experience of African Americans in the urban North. --T. D. Beal, Choice Reviews of this book: In this meticulously researched monograph, Biondi reminds the reader that the struggle for black civil rights was waged in the North before it was joined in the South. She documents the fight against racial discrimination in hiring, police brutality, housing segregation, lack of political representation, and inadequate schools in New York City between 1946 and 1954...Biondi's writing is crisp and direct. She introduces the reader to a host of activists whose efforts deserve to be remembered. Unfortunately, most of the causes they championed remain with us today. --Paul T. Murray, MultiCultural Review With stunning research and powerful arguments, Martha Biondi charts a new direction in civil rights history - the northern side of the black freedom struggle. Biondi presents postwar New York as a battleground, no less than the Jim Crow South, for the fight against police brutality and discrimination in employment, housing, retail stores, and places of amusement. Men and women, trade unionists and religious leaders, integrationists and separatists, liberals and the Left come together in this pathbreaking study of America's largest and most cosmopolitan city. --Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham,, editor-in-chief of The Harvard Guide to African-American History To Stand and Fight brilliantly re-writes the history of postwar social movements in New York City. Martha Biondi has not only extended our view of the civil rights movement to the urban North, but she places the movement squarely within an international framework. She redefines the movement, focusing on the specific struggles that mattered: jobs, welfare, housing, police misconduct, political representation, and black people's ongoing battle for independence in the colonies. To Stand and Fight will stand out as a major contribution to an already burgeoning field of civil rights studies. --Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination To Stand and Fight establishes that New York was as important a battleground for racial equality as Montgomery or Birmingham. Martha Biondi has done a great service by uncovering the rich and largely forgotten history of New York's role in the African American freedom struggle. --Thomas J. Sugrue, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit

Download or read book To Stand and Fight written by Martha Biondi and published by Harvard Business School Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The story of the modern civil rights movement typically begins in the South with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. But as Martha Biondi shows, a grassroots struggle against racial segregation and discrimination began over a decade earlier in New York City. This story is an essential first chapter in the history of the American civil rights movement. It also fills a critical gap in our understanding of the causes of the urban rebellions that erupted in the mid-1960s, just as the southern civil rights movement was achieving major victories." "Rather than integration, Black New Yorkers sought justice. Biondi reveals how movement leaders mobilized to make the war against fascism a launching pad for a postwar struggle against white supremacy, and organized to gain the fruits of first-class citizenship - good jobs, modern housing, higher education, Black representation in government, due process of law, and equal access to all places of public accomodation. This powerful push for social, economic, and political equality met fierce resistance from a range of people and institutions with deep investments in white privilege, from unions to realtors to politicians. Despite these obstacles, Black activists won the first law since Reconstruction barring discrimination in private employment, and several other landmark laws barring discrimination and segregation in education, housing, and public accomodations." "This burgeoning northern civil rights movement was dramatically disrupted by the anticommunist crusade, which silenced its more radical leaders and their demands. Nevertheless, as this book reveals, in the decade after World War II Black New Yorkers launched the modern civil rights struggle, and bequeathed a robust and expansive agenda that promoted the rights and dignity of the poor and disfranchised across the city, the nation, and the world."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Fog of War written by Kevin M. Kruse and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-02 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection is a timely reconsideration of the intersection between two of the dominant events of twentieth-century American history, the upheaval wrought by the Second World War and the social revolution brought about by the African American struggle for equality. Scholars from a wide range of fields explore the impact of war on the longer history of African American protest from many angles: from black veterans to white segregationists, from the rural South to northern cities, from popular culture to federal politics, and from the American confrontations to international connections. It is well known that World War II gave rise to human rights rhetoric, discredited a racist regime abroad, and provided new opportunities for African Americans to fight, work, and demand equality at home. It would be all too easy to assume that the war was a key stepping stone to the modern civil rights movement. But the authors show that in reality the momentum for civil rights was not so clear cut, with activists facing setbacks as well as successes and their opponents finding ways to establish more rigid defenses for segregation. While the war set the scene for a mass movement, it also narrowed some of the options for black activists.

Download or read book Fighting for Democracy written by Christopher S. Parker and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How military service led black veterans to join the civil rights struggle Fighting for Democracy shows how the experiences of African American soldiers during World War II and the Korean War influenced many of them to challenge white supremacy in the South when they returned home. Focusing on the motivations of individual black veterans, this groundbreaking book explores the relationship between military service and political activism. Christopher Parker draws on unique sources of evidence, including interviews and survey data, to illustrate how and why black servicemen who fought for their country in wartime returned to America prepared to fight for their own equality. Parker discusses the history of African American military service and how the wartime experiences of black veterans inspired them to contest Jim Crow. Black veterans gained courage and confidence by fighting their nation's enemies on the battlefield and racism in the ranks. Viewing their military service as patriotic sacrifice in the defense of democracy, these veterans returned home with the determination and commitment to pursue equality and social reform in the South. Just as they had risked their lives to protect democratic rights while abroad, they risked their lives to demand those same rights on the domestic front. Providing a sophisticated understanding of how war abroad impacts efforts for social change at home, Fighting for Democracy recovers a vital story about black veterans and demonstrates their distinct contributions to the American political landscape.

Download or read book American Babylon written by Robert O. Self and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2005-08-28 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping portrait of black power politics and the struggle for civil rights in postwar Oakland As the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined. American Babylon tells this story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights and black power politics as well as the history of suburbanization and home-owner politics. Robert Self shows that racial inequities in both New Deal and Great Society liberalism precipitated local struggles over land, jobs, taxes, and race within postwar metropolitan development. Black power and the tax revolt evolved together, in tension. American Babylon demonstrates that the history of civil rights and black liberation politics in California did not follow a southern model, but represented a long-term struggle for economic rights that began during the World War II years and continued through the rise of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. This struggle yielded a wide-ranging and profound critique of postwar metropolitan development and its foundation of class and racial segregation. Self traces the roots of the 1978 tax revolt to the 1940s, when home owners, real estate brokers, and the federal government used racial segregation and industrial property taxes to forge a middle-class lifestyle centered on property ownership. Using the East Bay as a starting point, Robert Self gives us a richly detailed, engaging narrative that uniquely integrates the most important racial liberation struggles and class politics of postwar America.

Download or read book Black Arts West written by Daniel Widener and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-08 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From postwar efforts to end discrimination in the motion-picture industry, recording studios, and musicians’ unions, through the development of community-based arts organizations, to the creation of searing films critiquing conditions in the black working class neighborhoods of a city touting its multiculturalism—Black Arts West documents the social and political significance of African American arts activity in Los Angeles between the Second World War and the riots of 1992. Focusing on the lives and work of black writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers, Daniel Widener tells how black cultural politics changed over time, and how altered political realities generated new forms of artistic and cultural expression. His narrative is filled with figures invested in the politics of black art and culture in postwar Los Angeles, including not only African American artists but also black nationalists, affluent liberal whites, elected officials, and federal bureaucrats. Along with the politicization of black culture, Widener explores the rise of a distinctive regional Black Arts Movement. Originating in the efforts of wartime cultural activists, the movement was rooted in the black working class and characterized by struggles for artistic autonomy and improved living and working conditions for local black artists. As new ideas concerning art, racial identity, and the institutional position of African American artists emerged, dozens of new collectives appeared, from the Watts Writers Workshop, to the Inner City Cultural Center, to the New Art Jazz Ensemble. Spread across generations of artists, the Black Arts Movement in Southern California was more than the artistic affiliate of the local civil-rights or black-power efforts: it was a social movement itself. Illuminating the fundamental connections between expressive culture and political struggle, Black Arts West is a major contribution to the histories of Los Angeles, black radicalism, and avant-garde art.

Download or read book The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights written by Paul T. Miller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-10 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul T. Miller tells the story of African Americans in San Francisco, tracing the obstacles faced and triumphs achieved in areas as housing, employment and education, and adding to our understandings of civil rights and the intersection of race and geography within the postwar period of American history.

Download or read book Never Together written by Peter Temin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-24 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inclusive economic history of America describing two centuries of American racial conflicts since the Constitution was written.

Download or read book Lift Every Voice written by Patricia Sullivan and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2009-07-29 with total page 724 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “civil rights Hall of Fame” (Kirkus) that was published to remarkable praise in conjunction with the NAACP's Centennial Celebration, Lift Every Voice is a momentous history of the struggle for civil rights told through the stories of men and women who fought inescapable racial barriers in the North as well as the South—keeping the promise of democracy alive from the earliest days of the twentieth century to the triumphs of the 1950s and 1960s. Historian Patricia Sullivan unearths the little-known early decades of the NAACP's activism, telling startling stories of personal bravery, legal brilliance, and political maneuvering by the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Walter White, Charles Houston, Ella Baker, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins. In the critical post-war era, following a string of legal victories culminating in Brown v. Board, the NAACP knocked out the legal underpinnings of the segregation system and set the stage for the final assault on Jim Crow. A sweeping and dramatic story woven deep into the fabric of American history—”history that helped shape America's consciousness, if not its soul” (Booklist) — Lift Every Voice offers a timeless lesson on how people, without access to the traditional levers of power, can create change under seemingly impossible odds.

Download or read book Civil Rights in New York City written by Clarence Taylor and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clarence Taylor is Professor of History and Black and Hispanic Studies at Baruch College and Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. --Book Jacket.

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 Gender in the Civil Rights Movement written by Peter J. Ling and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-05 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a new anthology of essays, an international group of scholars examines the powerful interaction between gender and race within the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy.

Download or read book The Struggle for Black Equality written by Harvard Sitkoff and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Struggle for Black Equality is a dramatic, memorable history of the civil rights movement. Harvard Sitkoff offers both a brilliant interpretation of the personalities and dynamics of civil rights organizations and a compelling analysis of the continuing problems plaguing many African Americans. With a new foreword and afterword, and an up-to-date bibliography, this anniversary edition highlights the continuing significance of the movement for black equality and justice.

Download or read book No Coward Soldiers written by Waldo E. Martin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exploration of the 20th-century civil rights and black power eras, Martin uses cultural politics as a lens through which to understand the African-American freedom struggle. In freedom songs, in the exuberance of an Aretha Franklin concert, in Faith Ringgold's exploration of race and sexuality, the personal and social became the political.

Download or read book Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement written by Sonia Song-Ha Lee and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014-05-26 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first book-length history of Puerto Rican civil rights in New York City, Sonia Lee traces the rise and fall of an uneasy coalition between Puerto Rican and African American activists from the 1950s through the 1970s. Previous work has tended to see blacks and Latinos as either naturally unified as "people of color" or irreconcilably at odds as two competing minorities. Lee demonstrates instead that Puerto Ricans and African Americans in New York City shaped the complex and shifting meanings of "Puerto Rican-ness" and "blackness" through political activism. African American and Puerto Rican New Yorkers came to see themselves as minorities joined in the civil rights struggle, the War on Poverty, and the Black Power movement--until white backlash and internal class divisions helped break the coalition, remaking "Hispanicity" as an ethnic identity that was mutually exclusive from "blackness." Drawing on extensive archival research and oral history interviews, Lee vividly portrays this crucial chapter in postwar New York, revealing the permeability of boundaries between African American and Puerto Rican communities.

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.