Charleston in black and white: race and power in the South after the civil rights movement

The introduction explores why the South became known as America’s “most documented” region beginning in the 1940s and into the twenty-first century. It argues that documentarians saw the region as a fertile place to do fieldwork for two main reasons. First, the region possessed unique and seemingly fragile folk cultures in need of preservation before modern influences erased them. Second, the region possessed seemingly endemic problems associated with its racial caste system and agricultural economies that needed documentation, study, and reform. The introduction also provides an overview of how historians and theorists defined “documentary” throughout the twentieth century and how and why some black and white southerners resisted the intrusion of documentarians into their lives. Additionally, it traces the history of documentary fieldwork in the South from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century and demonstrates how the tradition’s dominant themes developed during this time, particularly in the travel writings and sketches of Basil Hall, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jonathan Baxter Harrison and others. Finally, it highlights the distinguishing features of twentieth-century documentary by emphasizing the role of Progressive and New Deal reform impulses, the Folk Revival and Civil Rights Movement, and the development of portable recording technologies.

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Creating a Ministry of Presence

Strategic Sisterhood ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469638904.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 37-55

Author(s):

Rebecca Tuuri

Keyword(s):

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

White Women ◽

Team Member ◽

Upper Class ◽

National Council ◽

The South ◽

Black And White ◽

Freedom Summer ◽

Ministry Of Presence

In the fall of 1963, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) took steps to become more directly involved in the civil rights movement when Dorothy Height travelled with a small interracial team of elite clubwomen to investigate the abuse of activist children imprisoned in Selma. The team moved behind the scenes and tried to establish ties with local black and white women to better support the movement. After the Selma trip, white team member Polly Cowan developed plans to bring additional teams of interracial middle and upper class women down to the South. At a March 1964 Atlanta meeting of black and white southern clubwomen, Clarie Collins Harvey, a black businesswoman and clubwoman from Jackson, Mississippi, invited Cowan and the NCNW to provide support to civil rights efforts in Jackson. Her invitation led Cowan and Height to develop plans for Wednesdays in Mississippi to help with Freedom Summer.

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Desegregating Dixie

10.14325/mississippi/9781496818867.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Mark Newman

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Catholic Church ◽

Secular Change ◽

The South ◽

Black Schools ◽

Black Catholics ◽

Black And White ◽

The Church

This book draws on a vast range of archives and many interviews to uncover for the first time the multifaceted and complex response of African American and white Catholics across the South to desegregation. In the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the southern Catholic Church contributed to segregation by confining Africans Americans to the back of white churches and black schools and churches. However, papal adoption and dissemination of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ in the mid-1940s, pressure from some black and white Catholics and secular change brought by the civil rights movement, sometimes with federal support, increasingly led the Church to address racial discrimination behind and outside its walls. Far from monolithic, white Catholics in the South divided between a moderate segregationist majority and minorities of hard-line segregationists and progressive racial egalitarians. While some bishops felt no discomfort with segregation, prelates appointed from the late 1940s tended to be more supportive of religious and secular change. Some bishops in the peripheral South began segregation before or in anticipation of secular change, while elsewhere, and especially in the Deep South, they often tied Catholic to secular desegregation. African American Catholics were diverse and more active in the civil rights movement than often assumed. While some black Catholics challenged racism in the Church, many were conflicted about the manner of Catholic desegregation generally imposed by closing black institutions. Tracing its impact through the early 1990s, Newman reveals how desegregation seldom brought integration.

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