Beneath the Image of the Civil Rights Movement and Race Relations

Beneath the Image of the Civil Rights Movement and Race Relations
Author: David A. Harmon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2019-05-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317731263

This study is the story of the local Civil Rights Movement and race relations in Atlanta, Georgia from 1946 to 1981. Most examinations of the Civil Rights Movement have been written from a national perspective. These studies have presented local African American protest movements as part of a national campaign for civil rights that lasted approximately from 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to 1968, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In this context, demonstrations in Montgomery, Greensboro, Albany, Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis have been viewed as prototypical African American protest, movements and milestones in this national campaign for civil rights. First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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: 410
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820328146

The movement for civil rights in America peaked in the 1950s and 1960s; however, a closely related struggle, this time over the movement's legacy, has been heatedly engaged over the past two decades. How the civil rights movement is currently being remembered in American politics and culture--and why it matters--is the common theme of the thirteen essays in this unprecedented collection. Memories of the movement are being created and maintained--in ways and for purposes we sometimes only vaguely perceive--through memorials, art exhibits, community celebrations, and even street names. At least fifteen civil rights movement museums have opened since 1990; Mississippi Burning, Four Little Girls, and The Long Walk Home only begin to suggest the range of film and television dramatizations of pivotal events; corporations increasingly employ movement images to sell fast food, telephones, and more; and groups from Christian conservatives to gay rights activists have claimed the civil rights mantle. Contests over the movement's meaning are a crucial part of the continuing fight against racism and inequality. These writings look at how civil rights memories become established as fact through museum exhibits, street naming, and courtroom decisions; how our visual culture transmits the memory of the movement; how certain aspects of the movement have come to be ignored in its "official" narrative; and how other political struggles have appropriated the memory of the movement. Here is a book for anyone interested in how we collectively recall, claim, understand, and represent the past.

From Southern Wrongs to Civil Rights

From Southern Wrongs to Civil Rights
Author: Sara Mitchell Parsons
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2009-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0817355588

This first-hand account tells the story of turbulent civil rights era Atlanta through the eyes of a white upper-class woman who became an outspoken advocate for integration and racial equality As a privileged white woman who grew up in segregated Atlanta, Sara Mitchell Parsons was an unlikely candidate to become a civil rights agitator. After all, her only contacts with blacks were with those who helped raise her and those who later helped raise her children. As a young woman, she followed the conventional path expected of her, becoming the dutiful wife of a conservative husband, going to the country club, and playing bridge. But unlike many of her peers, Parsons harbored an increasing uneasiness about racial segregation. In a memoir that includes candid diary excerpts, Parsons chronicles her moral awakening. With little support from her husband, she runs for the Atlanta Board of Education on a quietly integrationist platform and, once elected, becomes increasingly outspoken about inequitable school conditions and the slow pace of integration. Her activities bring her into contact with such civil rights leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., and his wife, Coretta Scott King. For a time, she leads a dual existence, sometimes traveling the great psychic distance from an NAACP meeting on Auburn Avenue to an all-white party in upscale Buckhead. She eventually drops her ladies' clubs, and her deepening involvement in the civil rights movement costs Parsons many friends as well as her first marriage.

Civil Rights Crossroads

Civil Rights Crossroads
Author: Steven F. Lawson
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2014-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813157129

Over the past thirty years, Steven F. Lawson has established himself as one of the nation's leading historians of the black struggle for equality. Civil Rights Crossroads is an important collection of Lawson's writings about the civil rights movement that is essential reading for anyone concerned about the past, present, and future of race relations in America. Lawson examines the movement from a variety of perspectives -- local and national, political and social -- to offer penetrating insights into the civil rights movement and its influence on contemporary society. Civil Rights Crossroads also illuminates the role of a broad array of civil rights activists, familiar and unfamiliar. Lawson describes the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson to shape the direction of the struggle, as well as the extraordinary contributions of ordinary people like Fannie Lou Hamer, Harry T. Moore, Ruth Perry, Theodore Gibson, and many other unsung heroes of the most important social movement of the twentieth century. Lawson also examines the decades-long battle to achieve and expand the right of African Americans to vote and to implement the ballot as the cornerstone of attempts at political liberation.

Race and the Greening of Atlanta

Race and the Greening of Atlanta
Author: Christopher C. Sellers
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2023-08-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820364207

Race and the Greening of Atlanta turns an environmental lens on Atlanta's ascent to thriving capital of the Sunbelt over the twentieth century. Uniquely wide ranging in scale, from the city's variegated neighborhoods up to its place in regional and national political economies, this book reinterprets the fall of Jim Crow as a democratization born of two metropolitan movements: a well-known one for civil rights and a lesser known one on behalf of "the environment." Arising out of Atlanta's Black and white middle classes respectively, both movements owed much to New Deal capitalism's undermining of concentrated wealth and power, if not racial segregation, in the Jim Crow South. Placing these two movements on the same historical page, Christopher C. Sellers spotlights those environmental inequities, ideals, and provocations that catalyzed their divergent political projects. He then follows the intermittent, sometimes vital alliances they struck as civil rights activists tackled poverty, as a new environmental state arose, and as Black politicians began winning elections. Into the 1980s, as a wealth-concentrating style of capitalism returned to the city and Atlanta became a national "poster child" for sprawl, the seedbeds spread both for a national environmental justice movement and for an influential new style of antistatism. Sellers contends that this new conservativism, sweeping the South with an antienvironmentalism and budding white nationalism that echoed the region's Jim Crow past, once again challenged the democracy Atlantans had achieved.

Undaunted by the Fight

Undaunted by the Fight
Author: Harry G. Lefever
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2005
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780865549760

Undaunted by the Fight is a study of small but dedicated, group of Spelman College students and faculty who, between 1957 and 1967 risked their lives, compromised their grades, and jeopardized their careers to make Atlanta and the South a more just and open society. Lefever argues that the participation of Spelman's students and faculty in the Civil Rights Movement represented both a continuity and a break with the institution's earlier history. On the one hand their actions were consistent with Spelman's long history of liberal arts and community service; yet, on the other hand; as his research documents; their actions represented a break with Spelman's traditional non-political stance and challenged the assumption that social changes should occur only gradually and within established legal institutions. For the first time in the eighty-plus years of Spelman's existence, the students and faculty who participated in the Movement took actions that directly challenged the injustices of the social and political status quo. Too often in the past the Movement literature, including the literature on the Atlanta Movement focused disproportionately on the males involved to the exclusion of the women who were equally involved, and; who, in many instances, initiated actions and provided leadership for the Movement. Lefever concludes his study by saying that Spelman's activist students and faculty succeeded to the extent they did because they kept their eyes on the prize. They endured the struggle; he says; and, in so doing; eventually won many prizes -- some personal, others social. Undaunted; they liberated themselves, but at the same time they liberated their school, their city and the larger society.

Sacred Places

Sacred Places
Author: Harry G. Lefever
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780881461213

A guide to the civil rights movement in Atlanta. It is organized around four walking and driving tours of the important civil rights sites in Atlanta since 1940s. It provides a brief history of the civil rights movement in Atlanta in the 1950s and 1960s and a chronology of the important civil rights events in Atlanta from 1957 to 1968.

As Long as They Don't Move Next Door

As Long as They Don't Move Next Door
Author: Stephen Grant Meyer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780847697014

"The first full-length national history of American race relations examined through the lens of housing discrimination."--Jacket.

Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South

Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South
Author: Tracy E. K'Meyer
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2009-05-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813139201

A noted civil rights historian examines Louisville as a cultural border city where the black freedom struggle combined northern and southern tactics. Situated on the banks of the Ohio River, Louisville, Kentucky, represents a cultural and geographical intersection of North and South. This border identity has shaped the city’s race relations throughout its history. Louisville's black citizens did not face entrenched restrictions against voting and civic engagement, yet the city still bore the marks of Jim Crow segregation in public accommodations. In response to Louisville's unique blend of racial problems, activists employed northern models of voter mobilization and lobbying, as well as methods of civil disobedience usually seen in the South. They also crossed traditional barriers between the movements for racial and economic justice to unite in common action. In Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South, Tracy E. K'Meyer provides a groundbreaking analysis of Louisville's uniquely hybrid approach to the civil rights movement. Defining a border as a space where historical patterns and social concerns overlap, K'Meyer argues that broad coalitions of Louisvillians waged long-term, interconnected battles for social justice. “The definitive book on the city’s civil rights history.” —Louisville Courier-Journal