Black Political ParticipationPolitical Process and the Development of Black Insurgency 1930-1970. By Doug McAdam The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Communities Organizing for Change. By Aldon D. Morris Minority Vote Dilution. By Chandler Davidson The Voting Rights Act, Consequences and Implications. By Lorn S. Foster The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon, the Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics. By Adolph L. Reed, Jr.

Polity ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 552-562 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dianne M. Pinderhughes
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Voting Rights Act

The Dream Is Lost

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Maxwell Hayter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
City Council ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Electoral Reforms ◽  
White Resistance

The Dream Is Lost describes more than three decades of national/local racial politics and the unintended consequences of the civil rights movement. It uses the mid-twentieth-century urban history of Richmond, Virginia, to explain the political abuses that often accompanied American electoral reforms. The rights embodied in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 cannot be explained by separating the mobilization of black voters, on one hand, and federal policy directed toward race, on the other. The story first examines the suffrage crusades that predated the Voting Rights Act and how an organization called the Richmond Crusade for Voters mobilized African Americans a decade prior to 1965. As the Crusade mobilized voters, its members met firm resistance from their white counterparts. Local people and federal officials beat back the forces of white resistance by implementing majority–minority district systems. Although the reapportionment revolution led directly to the election of a black-majority city council in Richmond in 1977, it, too, had unintended consequences. The very forces that made Richmond’s majority–minority district system possible—an increase in African American populations in densely packed enclaves, unremitting residential segregation, white flight, and urban retrenchment—were the same that brought about intensifying marginalization in black communities during the twilight of the twentieth century. This story follows black voter mobilization to its logical conclusion: black empowerment and governance. It demonstrates that mid-twentieth-century urban redevelopment left a lasting impression on America’s cities. Richmond’s black-majority council struggled to negotiate the tension between rising expectations in black communities, sustained white resistance, and structural forces beyond the realm of politics.

Selma and the Place of Fiction in Historical Films

2018 ◽  
Vol 142 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-123
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Knapp
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Hybrid Nature ◽  
Historical Film ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Historical Films ◽  
Moral Certainty ◽  
Historical Reenactments

Every historical film must contend with the possibility that its viewers will be scandalized by its mixture of fact and fiction, but no recent historical film has faced such pressure to justify its hybrid nature as Selma has, in large part because no recent film has taken on so momentous and controversial a historical subject: the civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The renewed urgency of the issues Selma dramatizes, along with the film’s own commitment to the “moral certainty” of the civil rights movement, helps explain why Selma wavers in a self-defense that links the fictionality of its historical reenactments to the purposely theatrical element of the marches themselves. But politics are not the only problem for fiction in Selma, and to show why, this essay compares Selma to an earlier historical film, The Westerner (1940), that openly flaunts the commercial nature of its fictionality.

Selma in the “Glaring Light of Television”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Television News ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
News Story ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
News Reporting ◽  
News Program ◽  
American Press ◽  
Television Coverage

This chapter examines television news' reporting of the Selma campaign for voting rights that led directly to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Television cameras present on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday March 7, 1965, were able to capture the beating, gassing, and brutalizing suffered by voting rights demonstrators as they attempted to march to Montgomery. The uproar generated by that footage generated more support, volunteers, and moral clout for the civil rights movement. This chapter considers how one news program, The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, presented the Selma campaign as an ongoing nightly news story, with particular emphasis on its coverage of the campaign's three martyrs: Jimmie Lee Jackson, Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo. It also discusses the response of white Selmians in the “glaring light of television” and the commentary in the African American press regarding the television coverage of the campaign.

scholarly journals Preparing for 2007: Legal and Legislative Issues Surrounding the Reauthorization of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Benson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Political Empowerment

Forty years ago, civil rights activists across the country rejoiced in the passing of the Voting Rights Act1 (“VRA” or “the Act”). The Act was a crowning achievement of the classical civil rights movement and the culmination of a bloody series of events seeking political empowerment for African-Americans in the United States.

The Voter Education Project, 1962–1964

Poll Power ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 57-89
Author(s):  
Evan Faulkenbury
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American South ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Voting Power ◽  
Education Project ◽  
Grassroots Movements ◽  
The American South

This chapter explores how the VEP empowered 129 separate African American voter campaigns during this period, spending over a million dollars, and registering 688,000 black southerners. This chapter argues that this surge of black voting power paved the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Wiley Branton led the VEP during this period, and their support, with philanthropic backing, energized thousands of black civil rights activists across the American South. This chapter chronicles how VEP money and support empowered grassroots movements across the South, and how the civil rights movement relied on the VEP.

Federal Policy and the Racial Integration of Southern Industry, 1961–1980

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Federal Intervention

In the last two decades, one of the central debates of civil rights historiography has concerned the role that the federal government played in securing the gains of the civil rights era. Historians have often been critical of the federal government's inaction, pointing out that it was only pressure from the civil rights movement itself that prompted federal action against Jim Crow. Other scholars have studied the civil rights record of the federal government by analyzing a single issue during several administrations. In this vein, there have been studies of the federal government's involvement in areas as diverse as black voting rights and racial violence against civil rights workers. These studies have both recognized the importance of federal intervention and have also been critical of the federal government's belated and half-hearted endorsement of civil rights.

Civil Rights and the Private School Movement in Mississippi, 1964–1971

2002 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Fuquay
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Private School ◽  
Black Children ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Massive Resistance ◽  
Housing Discrimination ◽  
Civil Rights Act

The signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was heralded as a tremendous victory for the civil rights movement, the fulfillment of a decade-long struggle to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Along with measures against job and housing discrimination, the Civil Rights Act included provisions specifically designed to overcome the white South's massive resistance campaign and enforce school desegregation. Despite the continued intransigence of segregationists, these measures proved successful and white public schools across the South opened their doors to black children. With segregationists in retreat and the Voting Rights Act on the horizon, this was a time of celebration for civil rights activists. But this was not the end of the story.

1968: End of The Civil Rights Movement?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Tuck
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
New Phase

1968 is commonly seen as the end of the classic era of modern civil rights protest: a year when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, when violence seemed endemic in urban black communities, when Black Power groups fractured and when candidates opposed to further civil rights legislation made giant strides at the ballot box. 1968 seemed to usher in a decade bereft of major civil rights activity, ahead of a resurgence of conservative politics. And yet a look behind the headlines tells a different story in the post-1968 years at the local level: of increasing civil rights protest, of major gains in the courts and politics and the workplace, of substantial victories by Black Power activists, and calls for new rights by African American groups hitherto unrecognised by civil rights leaders. This chapter argues that in many ways 1968 marked the beginning of a vibrant new phase of race-centred activism, rather than the end, of the modern civil rights movement.

The Gospel of the Sit-In

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Gershenhorn
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

During the 1960s, Austin lent his talents and his newspaper in support of the direct action movement in Durham and throughout the state. Unlike many other black leaders in the city, he immediately and enthusiastically embraced an early sit-in in Durham that began in 1957, three years before the more celebrated Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins. He also aided a boycott of white retail businesses that refused to hire black workers by publishing the names of those businesses in the Carolina Times. This strategy was quite effective in forcing white businesses to hire African Americans. Austin’s efforts and those of countless civil rights activists led to major freedom struggle successes with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Politics as Victimhood, Victimhood as Politics

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 552-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Horwitz
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Women's Movements ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The 1960S

Abstract:The victim has become among the most important identity positions in American politics. Victimhood is now a pivotal means by which individuals and groups see themselves and constitute themselves as political actors. Indeed, victimhood seems to have become a status that must be established before political claims can be advanced. Victimhood embodies the assertion that an individual or group has suffered wrongs that must be requited. What seems new is that wounded groups assert a self-righteous claim that they stand for something larger than their particular injury. The article explores how and why victimhood has become such a powerful theme in American politics. It suggests that victimhood as politics emerged from the contentious politics of the 1960s, specifically the civil rights movement and its aftermath. Key factors include the reaction to the minority rights and women’s movements, as well as internal dynamicswithinthe rights movements.

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