scholarly journals Familial Places in Jim Crow Spaces: Kinship, Demography, and the Color Line in William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Burgers
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Yoknapatawpha County

“These Women Really Did the Work”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lucander
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Food Service ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Color Line ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Access To Food

This chapter describes a series of sit-ins during 1944. Led by largely forgotten African American women, this interracial direct-action campaign sought to challenge the color line at department-store lunch counters. Integrating, or at least improving, access to food service at major downtown retailers was an important step in the process of breaking down elements of Jim Crow segregation in St. Louis. That same year, the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) shifted its attention toward obtaining and retaining jobs for black workers in publicly funded workplaces. Gaining access to jobs operating switchboards and in the local administration of Southwestern Bell Telephone offices was presented as a stride toward securing sustainable employment for a largely female contingent of working-class African Americans who wanted long-term white- and pink-collar employment. This sort of local women's activism, juxtaposed against national men's leadership, is consistent with a gendered pattern of activism in civil rights campaigns that persisted through the 1960s.

Braving Jim Crow to Save Willie McGee: Bella Abzug, the Legal Left, and Civil Rights Innovation, 1948–1951

2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (04) ◽  
pp. 1003-1041 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leandra Zarnow
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Legal Consciousness ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Legal Argument ◽  
Indelible Mark ◽  
Rape Case

This article considers the role of Bella Abzug, lead counsel for Willie McGee from 1948–1951, in shaping the defense of this Cold War era Mississippi rape case. Representing McGee left an indelible mark on Abzug: she made her first trip south, wrote her first Supreme Court petition, and faced her first death threat. Participation in the Left legal bar—especially the National Lawyers Guild and Left feminist circles—shaped Abzug's legal consciousness as she redirected the McGee defense significantly in 1950. By joining race and sex, Abzug's legal argument zeroed in on the taboo of interracial sexual relations at the heart of Southern rape cases, thereby exposing the innermost sexual color line. She urged the courts and cause lawyers—albeit unsuccessfully—to pursue a more radical civil rights agenda than outlawing public segregation, as ultimately achieved in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and typically recognized in Cold War civil rights scholarship.

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