Much of the history of the civil rights era rests on the myth of nonviolence: the notion that the civil rights movement achieved its goals through nonviolent direct action. This dissertation argues that, on the contrary, black violence and threat of civil disorder played an indispensable role in forcing the federal government to enforce the newly enacted civil rights laws Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, many communities in the Deep South refused to desegregate. The Klan and other segregationist groups took the lead in using terror to discourage implementation of the new law. In response to this violence and intimidation, a group of black men from Jonesboro, Louisiana founded the Deacons for Defense and Justice, a black paramilitary organization formed to defend the black community and civil rights workers. Formed in 1964, the Deacons quickly grew to twenty-one chapters concentrated in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. With a total membership of several hundred--and thousands of ready supporters--the Deacons soon became a popular symbol of the growing frustration with Martin Luther King's nonviolent strategy The organization's activities reached their apex in 1965 in Bogalusa, Louisiana, when the Deacons' threats to launch a bloody civil war with the local Klan eventually forced the federal government to destroy the Klan and restore order / acase@tulane.edu

The story of 'Bleeding Kansas' and its aftermath, spanning the years 1854-1860, may have represented, in microcosm, the larger history of sectional conflict and reunion. My dissertation records that story through the lens of the free state constituency in the territory. The major protagonists of the study include the New England Emigrant Aid Company, incorporated after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 with the purpose of securing Kansas to freedom and earning dividends for its bondholders through the organized emigration of free labor; the New York based American Missionary Association, which sent a contingent of clergymen to advance the cause of Christian abolitionism and racial justice in the territory, and the antislavery American Home Mission Society which added a more conservative dimension to the evangelical assault upon slavery in Kansas. These organizations represented, between them, the two major strains in American antislavery thought, namely a religious-humanitarian tradition relatively free of explicit racism and a second overlapping tradition of concern for the economic welfare of white America based on the ideology of free labor. Both factions, however, shared a common tendency toward cultural imperialism which was manifested in the New Englander's desire to mold the motley crew of deviant elements whom he encountered in the West including western frontiersmen, European immigrants and all elements of southern slave society into model specimens of New England society by setting a good example. Refracted through the lens of the free state press, the conjunction of the evangelical and economic assaults on black bondage in Kansas, representing different degrees of radicalism on the antislavery spectrum but couched in the common language of the middle-class North, broadened the popular appeal of abolitionism in the free states and facilitated the emergence of antislavery politics The true significance of 'Bleeding Kansas,' however, perhaps lay in its aftermath. Ideological volte-faces among members of camps on both sides of the slavery issue suggest that northerner and southerner may not have been reverse mirror images of each other after all. Instances of interparty cooperation reveal the existence of underlying commercial interests that eventually facilitated a harmonious sectional reconciliation at the expense of the Negro, and anticipated the fate of free labor experiments below the Potomac after the Civil War. One of the concerns of this dissertation is to prepare the ground for determining the extent to which the sequel to the Kansas wars was a 'rehearsal for redemption,' as the northern planter movement was / acase@tulane.edu

The search for the Great Society helped to make a new Louisiana by reconstructing public life in its largest and most important city. It proved pivotal to the complicated process of integration in New Orleans. Forces from the bottom-up fundamentally transformed those from the top-down. Local leaders and activists structured the impact of the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Economic Opportunity Act (1964), the Food Stamp Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965), the Demonstration Cities Act (1966), and Urban Renewal. Those locals recast the fragmented and often experimental Great Society into their own image and used it to bargain for greater public influence and to expand the local welfare state. Invoking arguments rooted in inclusion, individualism, liberation, and growth, they translated American liberalism into the region's political vernacular. Programs involving community action, social services, job training, early childhood education, remedial education, legal services for the poor, Food Stamps, Model Cities, and Urban Renewal became tools of a much broader movement to open access to the city's racially divided political economy The complicated result suggests that 1960s era American liberalism was in no way a centralized phenomenon, but grew from enormously variant regional and local influences. In the South, the Great Society played a vital role in confronting the region's racial and economic inequality and its economic limitations. It produced the first politically legitimate, biracial southern liberalism, and it empowered a formidable new set of interest groups in the post-Jim Crow world An important part of that search for the Great Society was its forcing Americans to grapple with the public implications of their stands on race, inequality, and economic opportunity. By encouraging a state-based reconsideration of the African-American individual's role in society, it engendered a deep dialogue about civic belonging and the dilemmas of American individualism. Locally, its programs evolved into political expressions of psychoanalytical technique, cultural discomfort about equal opportunity, and racial uncertainties in defining full citizenship. The history of the search serves as a primer for understanding why Americans have seemingly deemed some citizens more deserving of America's abundance / acase@tulane.edu

In nineteenth century New Orleans Afro-Creole leaders, like their free black counterparts in other regions of the Americas, emerged from the age of democratic revolution with mounting expectations of social and political equality. Given the democratic ideals embodied in the founding principles of the new American republic, they anticipated the extinction of racial oppression after the Louisiana Purchase Contrary to their expectations, however, the process of Americanization negated the ideals of the revolutionary era. Instead of moving toward freedom and racial equality, the new government promoted the evolution of an increasingly harsh slave regime which, in the end, prohibited emancipation and threatened free blacks with enslavement. During the repression of the antebellum decades, a government policy of relegating all blacks to a single and subservient caste counteracted class divisions within the Afro-Creole community. Sustained by a keen sense of ethnic solidarity, slaveholding as well as nonslaveholding Creoles developed an intense antagonism toward the new regime Joined by disaffected whites who resented the increasing dominance of Louisiana's planter oligarchy, the highly politicized black Creole intelligentsia nurtured the idealism of the revolutionary age. They tapped the ongoing current of political radicalism in nineteenth century Europe and the Americas After federal troops occupied the city in 1862, they demanded the abolition of slavery and equal rights. With the war's end, they proposed to transform state government. Together with their white allies, they devised a blueprint for the reorganization of the state. The plan, drawn up by the biracial, radical Republican platform committee during the summer of 1867, assured black Louisianians, whether born slave or free, of an equal share of elective and appointive political offices as well as equal access to public accommodations Before their political enemies derailed their attempts to revolutionize their society and government, black Creole radicals succeeded in transforming the symbolic ideals of Liberte, Eqalite, Fraternite into an aggressive campaign for meaningful change. Though their dream of a utopian millennia of racial justice and harmony far exceeded what their state and their nation were willing to concede, they assured, by their actions, the survival of their protest tradition / acase@tulane.edu

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 34-04, Section: A, page: 1887. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1973.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Communication and Culture, 2005. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-02, Section: A, page: 0545. Adviser: Carolyn Calloway-Thomas. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed March 13, 2007)."

This dissertation explores the interplay between industrial racial hiring practices and the following institutions and transitions characterizing the inter-war period: unionization, institutional change among unions, business cycle activity, government anti-discrimination policy, and high-wage policies. The degree to which industrial racial hiring practices differed across manufacturing and mining industries and the impact that this industrial segregation had on black workers is explored. During World War I, when many northern employers first hired black workers, there was a significant difference in how black and white workers were distributed across industry. However, the segregation decreased significantly over time and it was not a contributor to the black-white income differential among industrial workers. Black workers were not employed disproportionately by industries with low wages, with low capital-to-labor ratios, or that were disproportionately dangerous. However, industrial segregation exposed them to greater unemployment risk, explaining a portion of their disproportionately high unemployment rates. The third chapter identifies some of the forces that shaped and mitigated industrial segregation. The way that black workers were distributed across industries was a function of union density, union affiliation, and tight wartime labor markets. The craft based unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor were notorious for discriminating against black labor. The industrial unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) actively promoted the organization of black labor. Consequently, the mean probability that a randomly selected employee in an industry was black was negatively associated with general unionization and positively associated with CIO affiliated unionization. A government agency explicitly created to aid black workers in obtaining employment in defense industries during World War II, the Fair Employment Practice Committee, did not have a significant impact on industrial segregation. The fourth chapter of the dissertation assesses the impact that the high-wage policies of the Great Depression had on black unemployment. During the inter-war period, increases in workers' share of company revenues and unionization increased black workers' share of cyclical employment. By successfully increasing these factors, the Great Depression high-wage policies caused a disproportionate share of the employment downturn to be allocated to black workers.

<p> The thesis explores the ways in which residents of West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana experienced and altered race and class boundaries during the process of emancipation. Planters, laborers, and yeoman farmers all viewed emancipation as a jarring series of events and wondered how they would impact prevailing definitions of labor and property that were heavily influenced by slavery. These changes, eagerly anticipated and otherwise, shaped the experience of freedom and established its parameters, both for former slaves and their masters. Using the records of the Freedmen's Bureau and local planters, this paper focuses on three common responses to emancipation in West Feliciana: <i> flight, alliance,</i> and <i>violence,</i> suggesting ways in which those responses complicate traditional views of Reconstruction. </p>

In this work, I make three very important assertions. First, whites were fanatical about keeping black men and white women sexually separated. In the white mind, no contamination of the Caucasian race could result unless white women came into sexual contact with black men. As a result, whites used both lawful and extra-legal methods to keep black men from their white women, despite taking sexual licenses with black women. Second, whites assumed that black men desired white women sexually. This assumption increased white hysteria and strengthened the resolve of whites to keep blacks segregated and subjugated. Finally, although whites assumed that blacks wanted to sexually intermingle, black leaders repeatedly disavowed any desire to do so. Blacks were content with being black and had no aspirations of losing their color or their culture.

Between 1907 and 1910, Progressive reformers' attacks on the convict lease system of the Texas Penitentiary brought sexual misconduct of guards with female prisoners into public view and prompted officials to transfer women convicts from farm to farm in an attempt to contain both the abuse and the publicity it generated. In spite of the moves, the efforts of reformers, and the hiring of the first penitentiary matron, little of substance changed for women prisoners. They remained on a penal farm, guarded and supervised by men, their work and housing strictly divided by race. Persistent patterns of labor assignment, punishment, and sexual abuse inherited from slavery, and the continuation of political patronage and widespread administrative perquisites undermined attempts to improve the women's care. Ironically, the testimony of women prisoners to a legislative investigating committee about sexual activity contributed to their continued isolation on a penal farm.