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This dissertation explores the racial and religious history of black Catholics in the United States through a focus on the critical intersection of the Civil Rights Movement and the Second Vatican Council as it was experienced at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, uniquely situated in the heart of Atlanta, a city that was a cradle for the Civil Rights Movement and the home of influential churches like Ebenezer Baptist. Tracing the early history of the parish, I outline the role of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament (SBS) in establishing the Our Lady of Lourdes School and Parish. The SBS were a missionary women’s religious order that was founded by St. Katherine Drexel in 1891 with the charism to evangelize “the Indian and the colored” through the Catholic education. The willingness of Atlanta’s black Protestants to support the work of the SBS attached to Our Lady of Lourdes, despite their general misgivings towards what they perceived to be a “white church,” is a testament to the order’s unusually progressive commitment to interracial action. During its existence from 1912 to 2001, the Our Lady of Lourdes School was regarded as a cost-effective alternative to segregated public schools for blacks regardless of religious affiliation. Like many Catholic schools in minority areas Our Lady of Lourdes faced many challenges during its existence, including persistent financial problems, the withdrawal of the SBS in 1974, and the proliferation of new educational opportunities for blacks after desegregation. The ability of the Our Lady of Lourdes community to keep the school operational until 2001 illustrates the importance of inner city Catholic schools to minority populations. The convergence of the Civil Rights Movement and Vatican II in the 1960s affected how the parishioners of Our Lady of Lourdes defined themselves as blacks and Catholics within a segregated society. School desegregation and white flight fundamentally changed the place of the parish in the urban Catholic landscape. Nevertheless, these religious and racial reevaluations enabled the Our Lady of Lourdes community to revitalize itself through liturgical inculturation and the embrace of its heritage as an Auburn Avenue religious institution. / 2027-07-31T00:00:00Z

This paper examines the way that history and the archive interact with an examination of the civil rights movement in Philadelphia in the 1960s. Lack of accessibility may detrimentally affect historians' analyses. This paper is an assessment of what both writers and archivists can do to help diminish oversights. Included is an investigation of the short-lived Black Coalition and the way the organization is represented in scholarship. How do the representations differ from the story the primary sources tell? Also examined is the relationship between Cecil B. Moore and Martin Luther King, Jr. What primary sources exist that illuminate their friendship? How has their friendship been portrayed in secondary works? The paper outlines the discovery of video footage of the two men and how this footage complicates widely-held perceptions of their association. Lastly, this thesis offers remedies to allow for greater accessibility of primary source documents, most notably the role of digitization within the archive. Included in these suggestions are analyses of existing digital initiatives and suggestions for future projects. Digitization initiatives may be the means by which to bridge the gap currently facing archivists and historians today. / History

The school district of Philadelphia built up its security program along a very distinct pathway that was largely unrelated to any real needs protection. This program played out in two distinct phases. In the late 1950s, black and white students clashed in the neighborhoods surrounding schools over integration. Black parents called upon the city to provide community policing to protect their children in the communities surrounding schools. As the 1960s progressed and the promised civil rights gains from city liberals failed to materialize, students turned increasingly to Black Nationalist and black power ideology. When this protest activity moved inside their schoolhouses as blacks simultaneously began moving into white neighborhoods, white Philadelphians began to feel threatened in their homes and schools. As black student activism became louder and more militant, white parents called upon the police to protect their children inside the school house, as opposed to the earlier calls for community policing by black parents. White parents, the PPD, and conservative city politicians pushed the district to adopt tougher disciplinary policies to ham string this activism, to which black parents vehemently objected. The district resisted demands to police the schools through the 1960s until finally caving to political pressure in the 1970s. / History

This thesis examines the controversy surrounding the renaming of a street for Martin Luther King, Jr. in the city of Zephyrhills, Florida in 2003-2004. By paying close attention to the language deployed during a series of contentious city council meetings, the thesis traces how Zephyrhills' divisive history and neoliberal spatial order kept white residents from grappling with the city's legacy of racism, inequality, residential segregation, and the memory of the Civil Rights movement. Ultimately, it reveals Americans' limited capacity to recognize and discuss race in the post-Civil Rights era. / History

In the wake of Emancipation, African Americans viewed land and home ownership as an essential element of their "citizenship rights." However, efforts to achieve such ownership in the postbellum era were often stymied by credit discrimination as many blacks were ensnared in a system of debt peonage. Despite such obstacles, African Americans achieved land ownership in surprising numbers in rural and urban areas in the South. At the beginning of the twentieth century, millions of African Americans began leaving the South for the North with continued aspirations of homeownership. As blacks sought to fulfill the American Dream, many financial institutions refused to provide loans to them or provided loans with onerous terms and conditions. In response, a small group of African American leaders, working in conjunction with a number of the major black churches in Philadelphia, built the largest network of race financial institutions in the United States to provide credit to black home buyers. The leaders recognized economic development through homeownership as an integral piece of the larger civil rights movement dedicated to challenging white supremacy. The race financial institutions successfully provided hundreds of mortgage loans to African Americans and were a key reason for the tripling of the black homeownership rate in Philadelphia from 1910 to 1930. During the Great Depression, the federal government revolutionized home financing with a series of programs that greatly expanded homeownership. However, the programs, such as those of the Federal Housing Administration, resulted in blacks being subjected to redlining and denied access to credit. In response, blacks were often forced to turn to alternative sources of high cost credit to finance the purchase of homes. Nevertheless, as a new wave of African American migrants arrived to Philadelphia during post-World War II era, blacks fought to purchase homes and two major race financial institutions continued to provide mortgage loans to African Americans in Philadelphia. The resolve of blacks to overcome credit discrimination to purchase homes through the creation of race financial institutions was a key part of the broader struggle for civil rights in the United States. / History

This thesis is an ethnographically-informed case study that uncovers the history of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements in the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s in Dallas, Texas and surrounding cities. These movements were said to have been nonexistent. This study utilizes the methods of conducting interviews conducted with integral participants of both movements and the researching of archived newspaper articles, court records, and cultural media (flyers, posters, leaflets, etc) to provide a concise, critical view of this period in Dallas. / African American Studies

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When the most powerful man in the march to freedom fails to break segregation codes in 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, the last person anyone would expect to make Dr. King’s dream a reality is a 10-year-old girl known as the "Civil Rights Queen."