scholarly journals Grassroots Impacts on the Civil Rights Movement: Christian Women Leaders’ Contributions to the Paradigm Shift in the Tactics of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Its Affiliates

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wook LeeFollow
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Women Leaders ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Christian Leadership ◽  
Christian Women ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Breaking White Supremacy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Dorrien
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Social Gospel ◽  
Christian Leadership ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
Martin Luther King

Breaking White Supremacy analyzes the twentieth-century heyday of the black social gospel and its influence on the Civil Rights Movement. Asserting that Martin Luther King Jr. did not come from nowhere, it describes major figures who influenced King, offers a detailed analysis of King’s leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and his catalyzing and unifying role in the southern and northern Civil Rights Movements, and interprets the legacy of King and the black social gospel tradition.

The Fraternal Council of Negro Churches, 1934–1964

1990 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary R. Sawyer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Black Churches ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Religious Organizations ◽  
Christian Leadership ◽  
National Conference ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
Religious Landscape

In the years since the civil rights and black power movements cooperative black religious organizations have become a familiar feature of the religious landscape in America. Among these interdenominational bodies, in addition to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, may be noted the now defunct National Conference of Black Churchmen, the Black Theology Project, Partners in Ecumenism, and the Congress of National Black Churches. Little noted, however, is a precursor of these organizations which functioned for two decades prior to the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.

Dreams and Shadows

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvester A. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Christian Leadership ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
Politics Of Race ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
Radical Activism ◽  
Martin Luther King

This chapter explains how the FBI targeted Martin Luther King, Jr. as an exceptional and uniquely dangerous threat to the nation’s internal security. The author demonstrates the numerous efforts by the bureau to oppose the influential activism of King and the organization he led, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The chapter explains the important shifts in American culture that pitted the more radical activism of civil rights leaders against an increasingly strident FBI that was determined to thwart law abiding activists who challenged the nation’s mainstream racial politics. The author argues that the pivotal issue behind the FBI’s repression of King was not personal antagonism between King and Hoover but the politics of race and repression.

Another Freedom Summer

2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin D.G. Kelley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Public ◽  
Freedom Summer ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
The U.S

During the summer of 2014, the U.S. government once again offered the State of Israel unwavering support for its aggression against the Palestinian people. Among the U.S. public, however, there was growing disenchantment with Israel. The information explosion on social media has provided the public globally with much greater access to the Palestinian narrative unfiltered by the Israeli lens. In the United States, this has translated into a growing political split on the question of Palestine between a more diverse and engaged younger population and an older generation reared on the long-standing tropes of Israel's discourse. Drawing analogies between this paradigm shift and the turning point in the civil rights movement enshrined in Mississippi's 1964 Freedom Summer, author and scholar Robin Kelley goes on to ask whether the outrage of the summer of 2014 can be galvanized to transform official U.S. policy.

The Birth of the Citizenship Schools: Entwining the Struggles for Literacy and Freedom

2004 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 388-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
David P. Levine
Keyword(s):  
Adult Education ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Education Program ◽  
Christian Leadership ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The People ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
Citizenship Schools

In a 1981 interview, civil rights leader Andrew Young commented, “If you look at the black elected officials and the people who are political leaders across the South now, it's full of people who had their first involvement in civil rights in the Citizenship Training Program.” Informally known as Citizenship Schools, this adult education program began in 1958 under the sponsorship of Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, which handed it over to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1961. By the time the project ended in 1970, approximately 2500 African Americans had taught these basic literacy and political education classes for tens of thousands of their neighbors. The program never had a high profile, but civil rights leaders and scholars assert that it helped to bring many people into the movement, cultivated grassroots leaders, and increased black participation in voting and other civic activities.

Remembering Dorothy Cotton, 1930–2018

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Siegel
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Christian Leadership ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Effect Change ◽  
National Leaders ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
The 1960S

Civil rights pioneer Dorothy Foreman Cotton passed away on June 10, 2018, in Ithaca, New York, at the age of eighty-eight. On August 11, 2018, a Saturday afternoon, around seven hundred community members, friends, and local and national leaders gathered at Cornell University’s Bailey Hall to celebrate her life. Cotton was the highest-ranking woman in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) throughout the 1960s. She devoted her life to liberation and social justice. Remembered by many as an iconic feminist and grassroots innovator, she led an extraordinary life that undoubtedly transformed the lives of African Americans fighting for full citizenship and justice. Cotton was critical in opposing economic and social regimes of power, but she also ushered in a new sense of individual and collective subjectivity through political participation and mobilization in southern Black communities. Throughout her life, she reminded ordinary people of their vast power to effect change and transform society.

scholarly journals Martin Luther King, Jr.

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN A. KIRK
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
50Th Anniversary ◽  
The United States ◽  
Montgomery Bus Boycott ◽  
Bus Boycott ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Martin Luther King

Early histories of the civil rights movement that appeared prior to the 1980s were primarily biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr. Collectively, these works helped to create the familiar “Montgomery to Memphis” narrative framework for understanding the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. This narrative begins with King's rise to leadership during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, and ends with his 1968 assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. Since the 1980s, a number of studies examining the civil rights movement at local and state levels have questioned the usefulness and accuracy of the King-centric Montgomery to Memphis narrative as the sole way of understanding the civil rights movement. These studies have made it clear that civil rights struggles already existed in many of the communities where King and the organization of which he was president, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), ran civil rights campaigns in the 1960s. Moreover, those struggles continued long after King and the SCLC had left those communities. Civil rights activism also thrived in many places that King and the SCLC never visited. As a result of these local and state studies, historians have increasingly framed the civil rights movement within the context of a much longer, ongoing struggle for black freedom and equality, unfolding throughout the twentieth century at local, state and national levels. More recently, a number of books have sought to place the civil rights movement within the larger context of international relations. As we approach the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott next year, the event that launched King's movement leadership, it seems an appropriate point to return to the existing literature on King and to assess what has already been done, as well as to point to the gaps that still need to be filled, in what remains important field of study.

FRAMING THE FIELD: THE CASE OF THE 1969 CHARLESTON HOSPITAL WORKERS' STRIKE*

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 417-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
William F. Danaher ◽  
Marc Dixon
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Social Conflict ◽  
Christian Leadership ◽  
Hospital Workers ◽  
Medical College ◽  
Southern Christian Leadership Conference ◽  
Multiple Actors

We investigate how union, employer and allied actors engage in framing contests and seek to gain the upper hand in a strike event by analyzing a historically significant labor and civil-rights struggle in the 1969 hospital workers' strike in Charleston, South Carolina against the Medical College of South Carolina (MCSC). Through an analysis of newspapers, interviews, and archival materials, we show how discursive tactics by multiple actors superseded worker messages over the 100-day event. Worker messages, dignity and union recognition, competed with their ally's, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), messages of poverty and civil rights as well as claims from MCSC. The workers' weakened position within this multi-actor field and limited salience of union claims served to gradually silence worker voices, shaping the protest campaign in important ways. Our findings underscore the importance of power and inequality in the framing of social conflict.

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