scholarly journals Immigration, Civil Rights & the Evolution of the People

Daedalus ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 142 (3) ◽  
pp. 228-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina M. Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
The Body ◽  
Immigrant Incorporation ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Full Membership ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
The People

In considering what it means to treat immigration as a “civil rights” matter, I identify two frameworks for analysis. The first, universalistic in nature, emanates from personhood and promises non-citizens the protection of generally applicable laws and an important set of constitutional rights. The second seeks full incorporation for non-citizens into “the people,” a composite that evolves over time through social contestation – a process that can entail enforcement of legal norms but that revolves primarily around political argument. This pursuit of full membership for non-citizens implicates a reciprocal relationship between them and the body politic, and the interests of the polity help determine the contours of non-citizens' membership. Each of these frameworks has been shaped by the legal and political legacies of the civil rights movement itself, but the second formulation reveals how the pursuit of immigrant incorporation cannot be fully explained as a modern-day version of the civil rights struggle.

American While Black

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niambi Michele Carter
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
European Immigrants ◽  
National Attachment ◽  
Black Public Opinion ◽  
First Time

While the Civil Rights Movement brought increasing opportunities for blacks, this period also saw the liberalization of American immigration policy. The same agitation that allowed blacks to vote also made it possible for increasing numbers of non-European immigrants to enter America for the first time. What has an expanded immigration regime meant for how blacks express national attachment? Using quantitative and qualitative data, this book helps us understand the context and constraint of white supremacy on the formation of black public opinion and national attachment. Recent waves of immigration have presented a dilemma for blacks, causing them to reflect yet again on the meaning and depth of their own citizenship, national identity, and sense of belonging in the United States. It is the author’s contention that immigration, both historically and in the contemporary moment, has served as a reminder of the limited inclusion of African Americans in the body politic.

From Property Rights to Liberty Rights: We the Corporations, A Review Essay

2021 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-340
Author(s):  
Laura Phillips Sawyer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
State Action ◽  
Unequal Treatment ◽  
The People ◽  
The Right ◽  
We The People

A long-standing, and deeply controversial, question in constitutional law is whether or not the Constitution's protections for “persons” and “people” extend to corporations. Law professor Adam Winkler's We the Corporations chronicles the most important legal battles launched by corporations to “win their constitutional rights,” by which he means both civil rights against discriminatory state action and civil liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution (p. xvii). Today, we think of the former as the right to be free from unequal treatment, often protected by statutory laws, and the latter as liberties that affect the ability to live one's life fully, such as the freedom of religion, speech, or association. The vim in Winkler's argument is that the court blurred this distinction when it applied liberty rights to nonprofit corporations and then, through a series of twentieth-century rulings, corporations were able to advance greater claims to liberty rights. Ultimately, those liberty rights have been employed to strike down significant bipartisan regulations, such as campaign finance laws, which were intended to advance democratic participation in the political process. At its core, this book asks, to what extent do “we the people” rule corporations and to what extent do they rule us?

A Sermon on the National Fast-Day

2012 ◽  
pp. 165-177
Author(s):  
Sabato Morais
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
Book Of Isaiah ◽  
Introductory Section ◽  
The People ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Made In

This chapter takes a look at a sermon by Sabato Morais. Its structure is fairly straightforward. An introductory section focuses on what may appear to be a relatively minor issue but was apparently one that Morais considered to be of symbolic significance: the wording of the presidential proclamation of the national fast-day (made in response to a request by the Senate, possibly in response to the Southern day of prayer on 27 March). The body of the sermon presents two major themes. The first is introduced by the celebrated verses from the fifty-eighth chapter of the Book of Isaiah in which the prophet, speaking in God's behalf, castigates the people for the insincerity of their observance of a day of fasting and prayer. The chapter then turns to the second major theme: the repudiation of a dishonourable, ignominious peace that would come at the cost of dissolution of the American body politic.

Binding consumption

2015 ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Alexander Joel Eastman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
Black Press ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
History Of

Dozens of newspapers written and edited by people of color flourished in the last decades of the nineteenth century in Cuba. Through an analysis of black press periodicals representative of the main political tendencies between 1879 and 1886 this article examines the economic and socio-political contexts in which the black press operated and demonstrates how Cubans of color successfully carved out a space in the market of newspaper consumption. By examining the economic forces determining circulation and readership of these periodicals, it argues that black Cubans actively negotiated the public spheres of journalism and the marketplace, becoming empowered consumers and creators of information and economic value. This article foreground debates within the black press in order to analyze the history of the Cuban civil rights movement through the perspectives of people of color and to destabilize the notion of black political homogeneity. Black journalists and leaders with national and royalist affiliations vied for political positioning and debated over how to represent the people and the struggles of the raza de color.

George Washington vs. The Phantom

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Sizemore
Keyword(s):  
Federal Republic ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
George Washington ◽  
The People ◽  
Whiskey Rebellion

This chapter examines two competing forms of sovereign representation against the backdrop of the Whiskey Rebellion. In the new federal republic, George Washington served as a unifying symbol of the people in the centuries-long tradition of the monarch, but the very rituals of Washington’s office and also those of the rebels, such as tar-and-feathering, call attention to the first president’s limitations as symbol of the body politic. Rather than a static substance, the people are a protean force, a circumstance that prompts new forms of representation in Mason Locke Weems’s Life of Washington (1800), Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (1797), and other works.

"I train the people to do their own talking": Septima Clark and Women in the Civil Rights Movement

2010 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall ◽  
Eugene P. Walker ◽  
Katherine Mellen Charron ◽  
David P. Cline
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The People

Coming of Age with Anne Moody

Meridians ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-64
Author(s):  
Tracey Jean Boisseau
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Structural Explanation ◽  
Historical Writings ◽  
Anne Moody

Abstract This essay offers a close reading of Anne Moody’s widely read but under-theorized memoir of the civil rights movement, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968). This essay’s focus mirrors a main focus in Moody’s narrative: her relationship with her mother. Much of the body of literary criticism, as well as historical writings dealing with African American mother-daughter conflict, centers on the observation that Black mothers have often found themselves in conflict with daughters whom they seek to protect by schooling them in accommodationist behavior to better survive in the face of white racism and violence. To strand the analysis there, however, leaves one unable to understand the historically specific nature of the acute generational conflict between Moody and her mother and leaves one without structural explanation for young people’s unprecedented involvement in the 1950s–1960s civil rights movement. This article explores Anne Moody’s daughterly point of view as expressed in her writing to understand why and how Anne was able to develop a distinct sense of self and consciousness, one that alienated her from her mother and laid the groundwork for her activist leadership as well as that of her generational cohort.

A Nonnegotiable Right

2018 ◽  
pp. 118-144
Author(s):  
Joseph R. Fitzgerald
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black And White ◽  
White Majority ◽  
March On Washington ◽  
Black Voters

This chapter discusses Richardson’s decision to boycott a referendum vote initiated by white Cambridge residents to maintain segregated public accommodations. She argued that the referendum was a tyrannical action by the white majority over the black minority and that it undermined the latter’s constitutional rights. She advocated a boycott of the vote, and most black voters agreed with her. Black and white critics of the boycott alleged that Richardson behaved irresponsibly by encouraging voters to stay away from the polls, a stance they considered unnecessarily radical and ultimately counterproductive to the national civil rights movement. The chapter also covers Richardson’s participation in the March on Washington and one of the speeches she gave a few weeks before the march in which she outlined in detail her social, economic, and political philosophies concerning black liberation.

Racialized Representations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Sarzynski
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Northeastern Brazil ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Transnational Connections ◽  
The Third World

While race was not used as an organizing tool in the Northeast, it was also not entirely absent. The Ligas drew transnational connections between the Northeast and the US Civil Rights movement and African independence movements, positioning the white ruling majority or European colonists as the enemy of the people. Slavery was a common metaphor used to debate the possibilities of Brazil forming a coalition with the Soviet Union or the United States. The historical legacy of slavery in Northeastern Brazil also factored into debates over competing projects for development in the Northeast. Filmmakers focused on rural afro-descendent populations and stories of quilombos (maroon societies), using realism to portray the Nordestino as African, savage, impoverished and determined to survive. These racialized narratives shaped the cultural and political struggles for change in the Northeast while also redefining what it meant to be Nordestino and a part of the Third World.

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