This dissertation is a historical investigation into the relationship between the North and South during the civil rights movement and into the struggle for racial equality and justice between 1940 and 1965. It challenges the notion that the CIvil rights movement was a southern phenomenon that moved North during the 1960s. Too often, civil rights literature has considered the southern movement, while excluding northern struggles. The dominance of the southern narrative is reinforced by a frequently articulated assertion that African-Americans in the urban North found non-violent direction irrelevant. The latter's turn to the North results in analysis that posit a passive, disorganised inarticulate northern AfricanAmerican population that became impulsive when the southern civil rights movement failed to change black lives. What my study hopes to do is quite simply to place the southern movement in a comparative context by examining the civil rights movement outside the South. Unlike much of the historiography of the civil rights movement, the experiences of northern activists, in addition to activists in the South, are of importance in my narrative. Employing organisational documents, letters, newspapers, private collections, and over thirty personal interviews, this work demonstrates that, well before the urban rebellions, northern activists employed research, rallies, and sit-ins to forward integration. It moves between the civil rights movement in one city in the South, Binningham, and the civil rights movement in one city in the North, Detroit, demonstrating the continual connections and mutual reinforcement that occurred between northern and southern movements throughout the twenty five-year struggle

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This thesis set out to determine the interaction between gender and social movement participation. In other words, it is answering the questions: how are women able to interact social movements and how do social movements enable women to be full participants in their struggle? It uses an intersectional framework to examine two social movements: the Black Civil Rights Movements that took place in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Zapatista National Liberation Front (EZLN) that began in Chiapas, Mexico in the 1980s and works to this day. For the Civil Rights Movement, it finds that the major organizations did not enact any policies or make any structural changes to incorporate women more fully into the Movement. Furthermore, women that wanted leadership roles in the Movement often had to forge their own by means of grassroots organizing and local women-led political action groups. For the EZLN, it finds that the organization gave women both leadership positions and military titles, passed the Women's Revolutionary Law that codified women's rights within the organization and the community, and lastly created autonomous municipal governance structures to enforce women's rights.

In September 1957, Little Rock, Arkansas was the scene of a dramatic confrontation between federal and state government that brought to a head the southern movement of massive resistance against the United States Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation ruling. Although numerous studies have analysed the Little Rock crisis from a variety of perspectives, one striking omission in the existing historiography is the role played by the local black community who were at the very centre of events. Building upon recent local and state studies conducted by scholars of the civil rights movement, this thesis locates the events in Little Rock of September 1957 within an unfolding struggle for black rights at a local, state, regional and national level between 1940 and 1970. In so doing, the thesis seeks to revise the time-frame for black activism imposed by a first wave of civil rights scholarship, which focused almost exclusively on the role played by national civil rights organisations between 1955 and 1%5. It argues that only by comprehending the groundwork laid in the 1940s and 1950s, through litigation and voter registration drives at a grassroots level, can the significance of later black protests be fully understood. In line with the findings of other state studies, it highlights the pivotal role played by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) which, assisted by a nexus of local organisations, formed the backbone of early civil rights struggles at a local level. Thus, the thesis aims not only to provide a corrective for the existing gap in the historiography of the Little Rock school crisis, but also seeks to broaden and deepen our understanding of the ways in which indigenous black movements developed and sustained protest strategies at state and local levels across the South.

Teaching the civil rights movement can be challenging. Many history textbooks contain the national story of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, the march to Selma, Alabama, and not much more. Classrooms across the United States follow this path of nationalizing the civil rights movement. This interpretation is only a small part of the civil rights crusade that existed throughout the United States, including in the state of Florida. Teaching only the national story, especially when the local exists, can ignore the human, ordinary element of this movement. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe the lived experience of central Florida teachers when teaching the civil rights movement. It is based on the theoretical assumptions that the national story is the only narrative being taught regarding the civil rights movement, and it sought to determine whether this is the case in the state of Florida, which incorporates the use of local history in its state standards. Data were collected through the use of surveys along with follow up qualitative interviews. The sample size was 319 teachers of whom 65 responded, and eight personal interviews were conducted. Findings show that more than just Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks are being taught, but it is still mostly the national story and not local, community history. Nine themes were identified, ranging from the impact of teachers, which builds upon previous research, to the negative opinion that teachers have for the texts being used, to the different content and timelines being used in social studies classrooms when teaching the civil rights movement. These data are important to educators, historians, administrators, and teachers iv because this is one of the first empirical studies on the subject of teaching the civil rights movement.

Walter White worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for thirty-seven years, 25 of which he served as executive secretary of the Association. Through his work in this office and through his writings he played an important part in preparing teh way for the civil rights revolution of the 1960's. This thesis in not a biography but an attempt to deal with certain aspects of White's career as they related to his fight for racial justice and equality.

Focusing on the city of Atlanta from 1972 to 2012, Halting White Flight explores the neighborhood-based movement to halt white flight from the city’s public schools. While the current historiography traces the origins of modern conservatism to white families’ abandonment of the public schools and the city following court-ordered desegregation, this dissertation presents a different narrative of white flight. As thousands of white families fled the city for the suburbs and private schools, a small, core group of white mothers, who were southerners returning from college or more often migrants to the South, founded three organizations in the late seventies: the Northside Atlanta Parents for Public Schools, the Council of Intown Neighborhoods and Schools, and Atlanta Parents and Public Linked for Education. By linking their commitment to integration and vision of public education to the future economic growth and revitalization of the city’s neighborhoods, these mothers organized campaigns that transformed three generations’ understanding of race and community and developed an entirely new type of community activism.

Focusing on the city of Atlanta from 1972 to 2012, Halting White Flight explores the neighborhood-based movement to halt white flight from the city’s public schools. While the current historiography traces the origins of modern conservatism to white families’ abandonment of the public schools and the city following court-ordered desegregation, this dissertation presents a different narrative of white flight. As thousands of white families fled the city for the suburbs and private schools, a small, core group of white mothers, who were southerners returning from college or more often migrants to the South, founded three organizations in the late seventies: the Northside Atlanta Parents for Public Schools, the Council of Intown Neighborhoods and Schools, and Atlanta Parents and Public Linked for Education. By linking their commitment to integration and vision of public education to the future economic growth and revitalization of the city’s neighborhoods, these mothers organized campaigns that transformed three generations’ understanding of race and community and developed an entirely new type of community activism.

abstract: ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the literate practices of women reading and writing in the press during the civil rights movement in the 1950s/60s. Through a textual analysis of literacy events (Heath) in the memoirs of Sarah Patton Boyle (The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in Time of Transition), Anne Braden (The Wall Between), Daisy Bates (The Long Shadow of Little Rock) and Melba Pattillo Beals (Warriors Don't Cry), this dissertation highlights the participatory roles women played in the movement, including their ability to act publicly in a movement remembered mostly for its male leaders. Contributing to scholarship focused on the literate lives of women, this study focuses on the uses of literacy in the lives of four women with particular emphasis on the women's experiences with the literacy they practice. Drawing on ideological views of literacy (Gee, Street) and research focused on the social, cultural and economic influences of such practices (Brandt), the women's memoirs served as the site for collecting and analyzing the women's responses and reactions to literacy events with the press. Through an application of Deborah Brandt's notion of sponsor, literacy events between the women and the press were recorded and the data analyzed to understand the relationship the women had with the literacy available and the role the sponsor (the press) played in shaping the practice and the literate identities of the women. Situated in the racist climate of the Jim Crow South in the 1950s/60s and the secondary role women played in the movement, the women's memoirs and the data analyzed revealed the role the women's perception of the practice, shaped by personal history and lived experiences, played in how the women experienced and used their literacy. This dissertation argues that their responses to literacy events and their perceptions of the power of their reading and writing highlight the significant public role women played in the movement and argues that, although the women remain relatively unremembered participants of the movement, their memoirs act as artifacts of that time and proof of the meaningful public contributions women made to the movement. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2012

This project traces the development of Christian nonviolence in the United States from the outbreak of World War I until just after World War II by focusing on one Christian pacifist organization. The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), organized in 1915 in opposition to World War I, embraced the left wing of the prewar social gospel and fused its radical vision for social reconstruction with their opposition to war. Over the next thirty years, Christian pacifists associated with the Fellowship applied their energies not only to ending international war but also to promoting reconciliation between employers and workers in the struggle for labor justice and ending racial discrimination. During this period, advocates of nonviolence struggled to define a practical means for applying the principles of Christian pacifism. In contrast to older histories of the interwar period, this study shows that pacifism, a central concern for liberal Protestants during that period, shaped the broader American tradition of dissent. It also rejects the notion that the Christian "realists," led by Reinhold Niebuhr, offered the only comprehensive Christian social ethic between the wars. Finally, this dissertation shows how Christian pacifists in the interwar period embraced and adapted the principles Gandhian nonviolence to the American scene. Members of the Fellowship founded the Congress of Racial Equality in Chicago in 1942 and developed methods of nonviolent direct action that were adopted by advocates for racial equality during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.