Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction
Author: Kate Masur
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2021-03-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1324005947

Finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History Finalist for the 2022 Lincoln Prize Winner of the 2022 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History One of NPR's Best Books of 2021 and a New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 A groundbreaking history of the movement for equal rights that courageously battled racist laws and institutions, Northern and Southern, in the decades before the Civil War. The half-century before the Civil War was beset with conflict over equality as well as freedom. Beginning in 1803, many free states enacted laws that discouraged free African Americans from settling within their boundaries and restricted their rights to testify in court, move freely from place to place, work, vote, and attend public school. But over time, African American activists and their white allies, often facing mob violence, courageously built a movement to fight these racist laws. They countered the states’ insistences that states were merely trying to maintain the domestic peace with the equal-rights promises they found in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They were pastors, editors, lawyers, politicians, ship captains, and countless ordinary men and women, and they fought in the press, the courts, the state legislatures, and Congress, through petitioning, lobbying, party politics, and elections. Long stymied by hostile white majorities and unfavorable court decisions, the movement’s ideals became increasingly mainstream in the 1850s, particularly among supporters of the new Republican party. When Congress began rebuilding the nation after the Civil War, Republicans installed this vision of racial equality in the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. These were the landmark achievements of the first civil rights movement. Kate Masur’s magisterial history delivers this pathbreaking movement in vivid detail. Activists such as John Jones, a free Black tailor from North Carolina whose opposition to the Illinois “black laws” helped make the case for racial equality, demonstrate the indispensable role of African Americans in shaping the American ideal of equality before the law. Without enforcement, promises of legal equality were not enough. But the antebellum movement laid the foundation for a racial justice tradition that remains vital to this day.

Sharing the Prize

Sharing the Prize
Author: Gavin Wright
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2013-02-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0674076443

Southern bus boycotts and lunch counter sit-ins were famous acts of civil disobedience but were also demands for jobs in the very services being denied blacks. Gavin Wright shows that the civil rights struggle was of economic benefit to all parties: the wages of southern blacks increased dramatically but not at the expense of southern whites.

Speak Now Against The Day

Speak Now Against The Day
Author: John Egerton
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 1173
Release: 2013-08-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0307834573

Speak Now Against the Day is the astonishing, little-known story of the Southerners who, in the generation before the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation and before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery bus, challenged the validity of a white ruling class and a “separate but equal” division of the races. The voices of the dissenters, although present throughout the South’s troubled history, grew louder with Roosevelt’s election in 1932. An increasing number of men and women who grappled daily with the economic and social woes of the South began forcefully and courageously to speak and to work toward the day when the South—and the nation—would deliver on the historic promises in the country’s founding documents. This is the story of those brave prophets—thhe ministers, writers, educators, journalists, social activists, union members, and politicians, black and white, who pointed the way to higher ground. Published forty years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of the Supreme Court, this compelling book is not only a rich trove of forgotten history—it also speaks profoundly to us in the context of today’s continuing racial and social conflict.

Civil Rights Movement

Civil Rights Movement
Author: Michael Ezra
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2009-05-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Presents a collection of essays about the history of the civil rights movement, focusing on the efforts of clergy, student activists, black nationalists, and such organizations as the NCAAP and Core to bring about racial equality.

A More Beautiful and Terrible History

A More Beautiful and Terrible History
Author: Jeanne Theoharis
Publisher: Beacon Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2018-01-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0807075876

Praised by The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Bitch Magazine; Slate; Publishers Weekly; and more, this is “a bracing corrective to a national mythology” (New York Times) around the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. This fable, featuring dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, has shuttered the movement firmly in the past, whitewashed the forces that stood in its way, and diminished its scope. And it is used perniciously in our own times to chastise present-day movements and obscure contemporary injustice. In A More Beautiful and Terrible History award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis dissects this national myth-making, teasing apart the accepted stories to show them in a strikingly different light. We see Rosa Parks not simply as a bus lady but a lifelong criminal justice activist and radical; Martin Luther King, Jr. as not only challenging Southern sheriffs but Northern liberals, too; and Coretta Scott King not only as a “helpmate” but a lifelong economic justice and peace activist who pushed her husband’s activism in these directions. Moving from “the histories we get” to “the histories we need,” Theoharis challenges nine key aspects of the fable to reveal the diversity of people, especially women and young people, who led the movement; the work and disruption it took; the role of the media and “polite racism” in maintaining injustice; and the immense barriers and repression activists faced. Theoharis makes us reckon with the fact that far from being acceptable, passive or unified, the civil rights movement was unpopular, disruptive, and courageously persevering. Activists embraced an expansive vision of justice—which a majority of Americans opposed and which the federal government feared. By showing us the complex reality of the movement, the power of its organizing, and the beauty and scope of the vision, Theoharis proves that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the progress that occurred. A More Beautiful and Terrible History will change our historical frame, revealing the richness of our civil rights legacy, the uncomfortable mirror it holds to the nation, and the crucial work that remains to be done. Winner of the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize in Nonfiction

The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory

The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory
Author: Renee Christine Romano
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2006
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0820325384

The movement for civil rights in America peaked in the 1950s and1960s; however, a closely related struggle, this time over themovement's legacy, has been heatedly engaged over the past twodecades. How the civil rights movement is currently being rememberedin American politics and culture - and why it matters - is the commontheme of the thirteen essays in this unprecedented collection.Memories of the movement are being created and maintained - in waysand for purposes we sometimes only vaguely perceive - throughmemorials, art exhibits, community celebrations, and even streetnames.

Child of the Civil Rights Movement

Child of the Civil Rights Movement
Author: Paula Young Shelton
Publisher: Dragonfly Books
Total Pages: 49
Release: 2013-07-23
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0385376065

In this Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Book of the Year, Paula Young Shelton, daughter of Civil Rights activist Andrew Young, brings a child’s unique perspective to an important chapter in America’s history. Paula grew up in the deep south, in a world where whites had and blacks did not. With an activist father and a community of leaders surrounding her, including Uncle Martin (Martin Luther King), Paula watched and listened to the struggles, eventually joining with her family—and thousands of others—in the historic march from Selma to Montgomery. Poignant, moving, and hopeful, this is an intimate look at the birth of the Civil Rights Movement.

The Minority Rights Revolution

The Minority Rights Revolution
Author: John David Skrentny
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 490
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674043731

In the wake of the black civil rights movement, other disadvantaged groups of Americans began to make headway--Latinos, women, Asian Americans, and the disabled found themselves the beneficiaries of new laws and policies--and by the early 1970s a minority rights revolution was well underway. In the first book to take a broad perspective on this wide-ranging and far-reaching phenomenon, John D. Skrentny exposes the connections between the diverse actions and circumstances that contributed to this revolution--and that forever changed the face of American politics. Though protest and lobbying played a role in bringing about new laws and regulations--touching everything from wheelchair access to women's athletics to bilingual education--what Skrentny describes was not primarily a bottom-up story of radical confrontation. Rather, elites often led the way, and some of the most prominent advocates for expanding civil rights were the conservative Republicans who later emerged as these policies' most vociferous opponents. This book traces the minority rights revolution back to its roots not only in the black civil rights movement but in the aftermath of World War II, in which a world consensus on equal rights emerged from the Allies' triumph over the oppressive regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and then the Soviet Union. It also contrasts failed minority rights development for white ethnics and gays/lesbians with groups the government successfully categorized with African Americans. Investigating these links, Skrentny is able to present the world as America's leaders saw it; and so, to show how and why familiar figures--such as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and, remarkably enough, conservatives like Senator Barry Goldwater and Robert Bork--created and advanced policies that have made the country more egalitarian but left it perhaps as divided as ever.

Before the Civil Rights Revolution

Before the Civil Rights Revolution
Author: John Braeman
Publisher: Praeger
Total Pages: 240
Release: 1988-05-13
Genre: Law
ISBN:

There is a broad consensus that 1937 marked a turning point in the history of the Supreme Court. This is the first comprehensive treatment of the Court's decision-making in the civil liberties/civil rights sphere in the years preceding that watershed. Professor Braeman refutes the widely held assumption that the post-1937 justices were writing upon a largely blank slate in dealing with civil liberties/civil rights issues, arguing instead that much of what the Modern Court has done, when viewed in a long-term perspective, appears as incremental expansions of precedents laid down by the Old Court.

Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement, Second Edition

Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement, Second Edition
Author: Jack M. Bloom
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2019-07-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253042496

Race, Class, and the Civil Rights Movement is a unique sociohistorical analysis of the civil rights movement. In it, Jack M. Bloom analyzes the interaction between the economy and political systems in the South, which led to racial stratification. Praise for the first edition: "A unique sociohistorical analysis of the civil rights movement, analyzing the interaction between the economy and political systems in the South, which led to racial stratification. An intriguing look at the interplay of race and class, this work is both scholarly and jargon-free. A sophisticated study."–Library Journal "This is an exciting book combining dramatic episodes with an insightful analysis.The use of concepts of class is subtle and effective." –Peter N. Stearns "Ambitious and wide-ranging." –Georgia Historical Quarterly "Excellent historical analysis." –North Carolina Historical Review "Historians should welcome this book. A well-written, jargon-free interpretive synthesis, it relates impersonal political-economic forces to the human actors who were shaped by them and, in turn, helped shape them . . . . This refreshing study reminds us how much the American dilemma of race has been complicated by problems of class." –American Historical Review "A broad historical sweep . . . . Skillfully surveys key areas of historiographical debate and succinctly summarizes a good deal of recent secondary literature." –Journal of Southern History "Bloom does a masterful job of presenting the major structural and psychological interpretations associated with the Civil Rights Movement. . . . It will make an excellent general text to welcome undergraduates and reintroduce old-timers to the social ferment that surrounded the civil rights movement." –Contemporary Sociology