No description available.

This study was designed to determine whether black journalists who work at black newspapers in Texas felt the Civil Rights movement had affected their industry. Although black newspapers lost an exclusive market for talent that now must be shared with majority-owned newspapers, this report concludes that the operation of black newspapers virtually was unaffected by the Civil Rights movement. It is recommended that this research serve as a starting point for a continuing examination of black newspapers. It would be particularly beneficial if more information could be gathered from people who have worked at now-defunct black newspapers.

Comment comprendre la volonté d'appartenir à la nation américaine des Afro-Américains en dépit d'une mémoire faite d'humiliation et d'une accumulation de revers? À plusieurs reprises durant l'histoire américaine, des élites ont proposé à la communauté noire des solutions dites « radicales » qui remettent en question le paradigme dominant de l'intégration à la nation américaine. Ce mémoire tente d'identifier les raisons qui expliquent pourquoi, au cours du mouvement pour les droits civiques, les Noirs font le choix de l'intégration défendu par Martin Luther King et rejettent le séparatisme défendu par Malcolm X. La spécificité du mémoire réside dans l'utilisation de la littérature sur la formation des nations qui me permet d'étudier le choix des Afro-Américains. La nation est vue comme le produit d'une construction qui fait interagir les élites et les masses. J'étudie « par le haut » la façon dont les entrepreneurs ethniques, King et Malcolm X, redéfinissent l'américanité. J'étudie également « par le bas » comment les masses reçoivent les discours de ces élites. Ma première hypothèse se consacre à la formation de l'alliance stratégique entre King et l'exécutif américain qui permet à King de définir l'agenda législatif et d'appuyer son discours sur les gains qu'il réalise. La deuxième hypothèse se penche sur la structure des opportunités s'offrant aux Afro-Américains qui orientent le choix qu'ils font. / How can one understand the African American community's will to belong to the American nation despite a past made of humiliation and an accumulation of setbacks? At several times during American history, elites have proposed so-called « radical » solutions that challenged the dominant paradigm of integration to the American nation. This thesis attempts to identify the reasons why, during the civil rights movement, the black community chose integrationnism championed by Martin Luther King, and rejected separatism advocated by Malcolm X. The specificity of this thesis lies in the use of the literature on the formation of nations, which allowed me to better understand the African American community's choice. The nation is seen as the product of a construction where elites and masses interact. « From the top », I analyzed how ethnic entrepreneurs King and Malcolm X redefined Americanness. « From the bottom », I analyzed how masses received the elites' discourse. My first assumption focuses on the strategic alliance between King and the American executive, which allowed King to define the legislative agenda and base his speech on actual gains he obtained. The second assumption focuses on the structure of the opportunities for African Americans that oriented the choices they made.

La Seconde Guerre mondiale était riche en possibilités d’avancement pour la population noire. Les leaders afro-américains, conscients du caractère favorable du contexte, mirent sur pied de nouvelles stratégies afin d’optimiser les gains afro-américains. L’économie de guerre favorisa les migrations internes vers les centres industriels du Nord et de l’Ouest. Les migrants noirs s’extirpaient donc du carcan contraignant du Sud où ils étaient régulièrement privés de leur droit de vote. Les leaders noirs brandirent alors un nouvel outil pour faire pression sur les deux principaux partis politiques fédéraux : le nouveau poids électoral afro-américain. La période fut aussi marquée par une hausse de l’activisme noir. Celui-ci se voyait légitimé par les idéaux de liberté et de démocratie prétendument défendus par les États-Unis. Finalement, le plein-emploi permit l’essor du statut économique noir et les leaders afro-américains tentèrent d’exploiter cette conjoncture particulière afin d’en faire bénéficier leur communauté à long terme. / The Second World War was a period of opportunities for African-Americans. The Black leadership, aware of the favorable context, tried to exploit it to the fullest. Internal migrations from the South to the industrial centers of the North and West were facilitated by the war economy. Participating in this exodus, Blacks extirpated themselves from the politically constrictive region that often deprived them of their voting rights. By the end of the war, African-American leaders were able to wield a new weapon to pressure political parties and the government: the electoral weight of Blacks in northern States. The war was also characterized by heightened black activism. The ideals of democracy and liberty defended by the U.S. provided a new legitimacy to African-American yearnings. Ultimately, the full-employment that resulted from the war allowed Blacks to improve their economic status while their leaders were actively working to secure these gains in the long term.

The Desire Housing Project opened in 1956 as a segregated public housing development in New Orleans‟ Upper Ninth Ward. The Desire neighborhood, one of the few neighborhoods in the city where black homeownership had been encouraged, was transformed by the project. Hundreds of former Desire residents were displaced by the mammoth project, which became home to more than 13,000 residents by 1958. Built on what had once been a landfill, the Desire Housing Project came to epitomize the worst in public housing, before it was torn down by 2001. Although the project was isolated from the rest of the city and lacked basic services, residents worked to create a viable community, in spite of the pitfalls of segregation. Within the context of the civil rights movement, Desire residents fought to bring in basic services, pushing local government to more fully develop their neighborhood.

This paper examines the experiences of rural black women in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement by examining correspondence of the grassroots anti-poverty organization the Box Project. The Box Project, founded in 1962 by white Vermont resident and radical activist Virginia Naeve, provided direct relief to black families living in Mississippi but also opened positive and clandestine lines of communication between southern black women and outsiders, most often white women. The efforts of the Box Project have been largely left out of the dialogue surrounding Civil Rights, which has often been dominated by leading figures, major events and national organizations. This paper seeks to understand the discreet but effective ways in which some black women, though constrained by motherhood, abject poverty, and rural isolation participated in the Civil Rights Movement, and how black and white women worked together to chip away at the foundations of inequality that Jim Crow produced.

This thesis examines the first Citizenship School, its location, participants, and success. Johns Islanders, Esau Jenkins, Septima Clark, Myles Horton, Bernice Robinson, and the Highlander Folk School all collaborated to create this school. Why and how this success was reached is the main scope of this manuscript. Emphasis is also placed on the school's impact upon the modern Civil Rights Movement. Primary sources such as personal accounts, manuscripts, and archive collections were examined. Secondary sources were also researched for this manuscript. The conclusion reached from these sources is that faith was the driving force behind the success of the Citizenship School. The schools unlocked the chains of political, social, and economic disenfranchisement for Gullah Islanders and African Americans all over the South, greatly affecting the outcome of the Civil Rights Movement. African Americans, who had once been forced into second-class citizenship, now through faith and the vote, obtained first-class citizenship.

Envisioned by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967, the Poor People's Campaign (PPC) represented a bold attempt to revitalize the black freedom struggle as a movement explicitly based on class, not race. Incorporating African Americans, ethnic Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, American Indians, and poor whites, the PPC sought a broad coalition to travel to Washington, D.C., and pressure the government to fulfill the promise of the War on Poverty. Because of King's death and the campaign's subsequent premature end amid rain-driven, ankle-deep mud and just a few, isolated policy achievements, observers then and scholars since have dismissed the campaign as not only a colossal failure, but also the death knell of the modern freedom struggle. Using a wide range of sources - from little-used archives and Federal Bureau of Investigation files to periodicals and oral histories - this project recovers the broader significance of the campaign. Rejecting the paradigm of success and failure and placing the PPC in the broader context of the era's other social movements, my analysis opens the door to the larger complexity of this pivotal moment of the 1960s. By highlighting the often daunting obstacles to building an alliance of the poor, particularly among blacks and ethnic Mexicans, this study prompts new questions. How do poor people emancipate themselves? And why do we as scholars routinely expect poor people to have solidarity across racial and ethnic lines? In fact, the campaign did spark a tentative but serious conversation on how to organize effectively across these barriers. But the PPC also assisted other burgeoning social movements, such as the Chicano movement, find their own voices on the national scene, build activist networks, and deepen the sophistication of their own power analyses, especially after returning home. Not only does this project challenge the continued dominance of a black-white racial framework in historical scholarship, it also undermines the civil rights master narrative by exploring activism after 1968. In addition, it recognizes the often-competing, ethnic-driven social constructions of poverty, and situates this discussion at the intersection of the local and the national. / Dissertation

Not available / text

This qualitative study is a narrative investigation that analyzes the educational experiences of the segregated Turkish people of Sumter County, South Carolina during the integration movement. Four participants share their stories of how attending an elementary school for Turkish students affected their integration into White high schools. Oral history is the specific research methodology that is used. The theoretical framework that guides this study is critical-narrative theory. Through critical research, the researcher analyzes how “the social institution of school is structured such that the interests of some members and classes of society are preserved and perpetuated at the expense of others” (Merriam, 2001, p. 5). Narrative theory also informs this study. Connelly and Clandinin (1990) explain that the heart of narrative analysis is “the ways humans experience the world” (p. 2). The research questions that guide this study are the following: (1) How do the Turkish people of Sumter County, South Carolina, who attended public school during the early part of the 20th century, describe their educational experiences?, and (2) What are the perceptions of the Turkish people regarding the integration movement, educational power struggles and oppression? Through in-depth interviews, participants discuss (a) thoughts on being Turkish, (b) feelings of isolation, (c) experiences at the Dalzell School, (d) experiences at the high schools (Edmunds and Hillcrest), (e) attitudes toward other ethnic groups, and (f) perceptions of the integration movement. The overwhelming evidence from interviews supports Freire’s (2006) two stages of the pedagogy of the oppressed. Freire states, In the first, the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through the praxis commit themselves to its transformation. In the second stage, in which the reality of oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation (p. 54). The educational implications of this study offer insight into how today’s educators are called to “renew our minds so that the way we live, teach, and work can reflect our joy in cultural diversity, our passion for justice, and our love of freedom” (bell hooks, 1994, p.34).