Southern Dissent – serie

Using unusual and revealing primary materials from the careers of two remarkable Jewish women, Raymond Mohl offers an original interpretation of the role of Jewish civil rights activists in promoting racial change in post-World War II Miami. He describes the city's political climate after the war as characterized by segregation, aggressive anti-Semitism, and a powerful strain of cold war McCarthyism. In this hostile environment the dynamic leadership of two northern newcomers, Matilda "Bobbi" Graff and Shirley M. Zoloth, played a critical role in the city's campaign for racial reform. This analysis of the movement between 1945 and 1960 substantiates a new but now dominant interpretation of civil rights history that sees grassroots action as the powerful engine that drove racial change. It emphasizes the major role played by women in the cause and documents the variety of civil rights experiences of Jews who migrated to Miami in large numbers during the mid-century decades. Committed to social justice, they built activist organizations, challenged segregationists and anti-Semites, and worked with black activists to break down Jim Crow barriers.

This volume closely examines the movement to resettle black Americans in Africa, an effort led by the American Colonization Society during the nineteenth century and a heavily debated part of American history. Some believe it was inspired by antislavery principles, but others think it was a proslavery reaction against the presence of free blacks in society.Moving beyond this simplistic debate, contributors link the movement to other historical developments of the time, revealing a complex web of different schemes, ideologies, and activities behind the relocation of African Americans to Liberia. They explain what colonization, emigration, immigration, abolition, and emancipation meant within nuanced nineteenth-century contexts, looking through many lenses to more accurately reflect the past.

While many scholars have argued that confrontation and protest were the most effective ways for the poor to empower themselves during the social change of the 1960s, Karen Hawkins demonstrates that moderate, local leadership and biracial cooperation were sometimes just as forceful. Everybody’s Problem shows these values at play in the nation’s first rural Community Action Agency to receive federal funding as a part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty.Karen Hawkins describes the founding of Craven Operation Progress in North Carolina, discusses the philosophies and tactics of its directors, and outlines the tensions that arose between local leadership and federal control. Using previously untapped primary sources including oral interviews with antipoverty workers and local citizens, records from the U.S. Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, and documents from the North Carolina Fund, Hawkins adds to the story of the factors that helped lower poverty rates and advance economic development during the 1960s and beyond.

This volume introduces a new way to study the experiences of runaway slaves by defining different “spaces of freedom” that fugitive slaves inhabited. It also provides a groundbreaking continental view of fugitive slave migration, moving beyond the usual regional or national approaches to explore locations in Canada, the U.S. South, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Contributors use three main categories of freedom to compare and contrast various aspects of slave escape in the period between the revolutionary era and the U.S. Civil War. They investigate sites of formal freedom, regions in which slavery was abolished and refugees were legally free; sites of semiformal freedom, areas in which abolition laws conflicted with federal fugitive slave laws; and sites of informal freedom, places within the slaveholding South where runaways formed maroon communities or attempted to blend in with free black populations. The essays discuss slaves' motivations for choosing these destinations, the social networks that supported their plans, what it was like to settle in their new societies, and how slave flight impacted broader debates about slavery. This volume redraws the map of escape and emancipation during this period, emphasizing the importance of place in defining the meaning and extent of freedom.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, German and Irish immigrants were as central to the development of the political economy of Charleston, South Carolina, as white southerners and African Americans. As artisans and entrepreneurs, foreigners occupied a middle tier in the racial and ethnic hierarchy of the South’s most economically and politically important city. As agents of change, they provided a buffer, alleviating tensions between the castes until assimilating after emancipation and, in many instances, effectively embracing white supremacy.In Unequal Freedoms, Jeff Strickland examines the complex interplay of race, ethnicity, and class to reveal the pivotal ways in which European immigrants influenced the social, economic, and political development of the South.

From Reconstruction to recent times, the middle-class black leadership in Atlanta, while often subordinating class and gender differences to forge a continuous campaign for equality, successfully maintained its mantle of racial leadership for more than a century through a deft combination of racial advocacy and collaboration with local white business and political elites.Alton Hornsby provides an analysis of how one of the most important southern cities managed, adapted, and coped with the struggle for racial justice, examining both traditional electoral politics as well as the roles of non-elected individuals influential in the community. Highlighting the terms of Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young, the city's first two black mayors, Hornsby concludes by raising important questions about the success of black political power and whether it has translated into measurable economic power for the African American community.

In 1822, thirty-four slaves and their leader, a free black man named Denmark Vesey, were tried and executed for their alleged plot to murder the white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina. Presenting a vast collection of contemporary documents that support or contradict the “official” story, the editors of this volume annotate the texts and interpret the evidence. This is the definitive account of a landmark event that spurred the South to secession and holds symbolic meaning today—as evidenced by the 2015 shooting that took place in Emanuel AME Church, a church Vesey had attended. This volume argues that the Vesey plot was one of the most sophisticated acts of collective slave resistance in the history of the United States.

This volume's contributors expand the chronology and geography of the black freedom struggle beyond the traditional emphasis on the Jim Crow South and the years between 1954 and 1968. Beginning as far back as the nineteenth century, and analyzing case studies from southern, northern, and border states, the essays in The Seedtime, the Work, and the Harvest incorporate communities and topics not usually linked to the African American civil rights movement. The collection opens with a biographical sketch of Thomas DeSaille Tucker, an educational pioneer who served as the first president of Florida State Normal and Industrial School for Colored Students. It then highlights the work of black women, including Bostonian publisher Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who defied local governments during the Progressive Era by disseminating medical information and providing access to medical professionals. Next, the collection explores the life and work of Norfolk civil rights attorney James F. Gay, who helped to democratize the political establishment in Virginia's largest city but became a victim of his own success. The collection then moves to York, Pennsylvania, to examine a 1969 riot that went mostly unnoticed until the town's mayor was charged—more than thirty years later—with the riot-related murder of Lillie Belle Allen. Also featured is an essay examining the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's "Food for Freedom" campaign that aimed to complement voter registration work in Mississippi by providing everyday sustenance to African Americans. Addressing more recent issues, this volume considers the politics of public memory in Baltimore, Maryland, a city divided by racial "riots" in 1968 and in 2015. It then examines the Black Lives Matter movement that gained international attention for its response to Michael Brown's death at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri, as well as the Sandra Bland Movement inspired by the arrest of Bland and her subsequent death in the Waller County jail in rural Texas. These chapters connect the activism of today—shaped in so many ways by social media, student activism, and grassroots organization—to a deeply historical, wide-ranging fight for equality.A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller

While playing the southern lady for the white political establishment, thousands of mostly middle-class, middle-aged, married white women become grassroots activists in America's civil rights movement, sometimes at the cost of friendships, status, economic security, and family support. The original essays in this collection tell who these women were, why they became committed to racial justice and equal opportunity, and how they organized to change southern society.The women worked within a range of national and local institutions, both segregated and biracial. Their stories, largely unknown, span half  of the 20th century from the New Deal to the early 1970s and took place across the South from Louisville to New Orleans. Some of them brought years of experience in church groups or welfare organizations to the movement; others became converts only when local crises forced them to examine the hypocrisy and privilege of their lives. Some couched their civil rights arguments in terms of their maternal identity and a belief that racial discrimination defiled the world in which they reared their children. Many shared a basic optimism about the willingness of white southerners to change. And many were well aware that their leisure to pursue reform activities often was made possible by the black women who managed their households, cooked their food, and tended their children.Four essays profile specific women and their personal strategies for attacking prejudice and discrimination. The remaining essays focus on particular organizations, such as the YWCA, United Church Women, the Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, and the Saturday Luncheon Club, a group whose name belied its subversive intentions. Using autobiography, oral history, news accounts, organization papers, and personal letters, the contributors show the importance of female support networks, the influence of African American mentors, and the social ostracism that resulted from defying white supremacy. In the ongoing struggle for human dignity and a voice in American life, this book adds a new and necessary dimension to our understanding of both biracial activism and white anti-racism.

Latino Orlando portrays the experiences of first- and second-generation immigrants who have come to the Orlando metropolitan area from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and other Latin American countries. While much research on immigration focuses on urban destinations, Simone Delerme delves into a middle- and upper-class suburban context, highlighting the profound demographic and cultural transformation of an overlooked immigrant hub.

This book examines the complexities of life for African Americans in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. Although the Valley was a site of fierce conflicts during the Civil War and its military activity has been extensively studied, scholars have largely ignored the Black experience in the region until now.Correcting previous assumptions that slavery was not important to the Valley, and that enslaved people were treated better here than in other parts of the South, Jonathan Noyalas demonstrates the strong hold of slavery in the region. He explains that during the war, enslaved and free African Americans navigated a borderland that changed hands frequently-where it was possible to be in Union territory one day, Confederate territory the next, and no-man's land another. He shows that the region's enslaved population resisted slavery and supported the Union war effort by serving as scouts, spies, and laborers, or by fleeing to enlist in regiments of the United States Colored Troops.Noyalas draws on untapped primary resources, including thousands of records from the Freedmen's Bureau and newspapers, to continue the story and reveal the challenges African Americans faced from former Confederates after the war. He traces their actions, which were shaped uniquely by the volatility of the struggle in this region, to ensure that the war's emancipationist legacy would survive.

This book details how African American women used lessons in basic literacy to crack the foundation of white supremacy and sow seeds for collective action during the civil rights movement. Deanna Gillespie traces the history of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP), a grassroots initiative that taught people to read and write in preparation for literacy tests required for voter registration—a profoundly powerful objective in the Jim Crow South.Born in 1957 as a result of discussions between community activist Esau Jenkins, schoolteacher Septima Clark, and Highlander Folk School director Myles Horton, the CEP became a part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1961. The teachers, mostly Black women, gathered friends and neighbors in living rooms, churches, beauty salons, and community centers. Through the work of the CEP, literate black men and women were able to gather their own information, determine fair compensation for a day's work, and register formal complaints.Drawing on teachers' reports and correspondence, oral history interviews, and papers from a variety of civil rights organizations, Gillespie follows the growth of the CEP from its beginnings in the South Carolina Sea Islands to southeastern Georgia, the Mississippi Delta, and Alabama's Black Belt. This book retells the story of the civil rights movement from the vantage point of activists who have often been overlooked and makeshift classrooms where local people discussed, organized, and demanded change.A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller

The Changing South of Gene Patterson celebrates the work of one of America's most influential journalists who wrote in a time and place of dramatic social and political upheaval. The editor of the Atlanta Constitution from 1960 through 1968, Patterson wrote directly to his fellow white southerners every day, working to persuade them to change their ways. His words were so inspirational that he was asked by Walter Cronkite to read his most famous column, about the Birmingham church bombing, live on the CBS Evening News.This volume includes over 120 of Patterson's best pieces, selected from some 3,200 columns. These columns offer probing commentary on the crucial issues of race, civil rights, social justice, and desegregation; some reveal examples of political and moral leadership, drawn from every corner of southern culture. Introductory essays, framing Patterson's work as journalism and literature, place it in the context of southern history and the evolution of white southern liberalism. Patterson himself contributes a new essay, reflecting on his life, work, and times. At a time when protest, violence, and confrontation defined race relations and even the South itself, Patterson's wise, sane, humorous, passionate column appeared daily on the Constitution's editorial page, urging white southerners to become "better than we are." Speaking as one who "grew up hard" in small-town Georgia, Patterson could urge change with a conviction and credibility matched by few others. With enlightened leadership and adherence to the rule of law, the sky would not fall, Patterson assured his readers. While black leaders led America toward civil rights and social justice, writers such as Patterson had the courage to appeal to the white southern conscience. Unmistakably engaged with his time and place, Patterson's columns provide a compelling day-to-day look at the civil rights era as it unfolded.

In the 1990s, churches across the southeastern United States were targeted and set ablaze. These arsonists predominately targeted African American congregations and captured the attention of the media nationwide. Using oral histories, newspaper accounts, and governmental reports, Christopher Strain gives a chronological account of the series of church fires. Burning Faith considers the various forces at work, including government responses, civil rights groups, religious forces, and media coverage, in providing a thorough, comprehensive analysis of the events and their fallout. Arguing that these church fires symbolize the breakdown of communal bonds in the nation, Strain appeals for the revitalization of united Americans and the return to a sense of community. Combining scholarly sophistication with popular readability, Strain has produced one of the first histories of the last decade and demonstrates that the increasing fragmentation of community in America runs deeper than race relations or prejudice.A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller

This volume introduces a new way to study the experiences of runaway slaves by defining different "spaces of freedom" they inhabited. It also provides a groundbreaking continental view of fugitive slave migration, moving beyond the usual regional or national approaches to explore locations in Canada, the U.S. North and South, Mexico, and the Caribbean.Using newspapers, advertisements, and new demographic data, contributors show how events like the Revolutionary War and westward expansion shaped the slave experience. Contributors investigate sites of formal freedom, where slavery was abolished and refugees were legally free, to determine the extent to which fugitive slaves experienced freedom in places like Canada while still being subject to racism. In sites of semiformal freedom, as in the northern United States, fugitives' claims to freedom were precarious because state abolition laws conflicted with federal fugitive slave laws. Contributors show how local committees strategized to interfere with the work of slave catchers to protect refugees. Sites of informal freedom were created within the slaveholding South, where runaways who felt relocating to distant destinations was too risky formed maroon communities or attempted to blend in with free black populations. These individuals procured false documents or changed their names to avoid detection and pass as free.The essays discuss slaves' motivations for choosing these destinations, the social networks that supported their plans, what it was like to settle in their new societies, and how slave flight impacted broader debates about slavery. This volume redraws the map of escape and emancipation during this period, emphasizing the importance of place in defining the meaning and extent of freedom. Contributors: Kyle Ainsworth | Mekala Audain | Gordon S. Barker | Sylviane A. Diouf | Roy E. Finkenbine | Graham Russell Gao Hodges | Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie | Viola Franziska Müller | James David Nichols | Damian Alan Pargas | Matthew PinskerA volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller

Southern History Remixed spotlights the key role of popular music in the shaping of the United States South from the late nineteenth century to the era of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. While musical activities are often sidelined in historical narratives of the region, Michael Bertrand shows that they can reveal much about social history and culture change as he connects the rise of rock ‘n’ roll to the civil rights movement for racial equality.In this book, Bertrand traces a long-term culture war in which white southerners struggled over the region’s cultural complexion with music serving as an engine that both sustained and challenged white supremacy. He shows how rock ‘n’ roll emerged as a working-class genre with biracial sources that stoked white racial anxieties and engaged the region’s color and culture lines. This book discusses the conflict over southern identity that played out in responses to jazz, barn dance radio, Pentecostal and gospel music, Black radio programming, and rhythm and blues, concluding with a close look at the popularity of Elvis Presley within a racially segregated society.Southern History Remixed suggests that both Black and white southerners have used music as a tool to resist or negotiate a rigid regional hierarchy. Urging readers and scholars to take the study of popular music seriously, Bertrand argues that what occurs in the music world affects and reflects what happens in politics and history.

Highlighting the contributions of Methodist women in advocating for progressive reform from 1900 to the present   This book tells the stories of nine southern Methodist women, who, inspired by their faith, carried forward the spirit of progressivism. They fought for racial equality, challenged white male supremacy, and addressed class oppression. The white and Black women featured here responded to local human rights violations with compassion, advocating for expanded and more diverse private and public services in the United States. Motivated by a modernist interpretation of the Gospel authorized by the tenets of Methodism, these women expanded notions of southern identity and womanhood. Their actions supported the Black freedom struggle and promoted women’s rights, gaining momentum after the 1939 rise of the Women’s Society of Christian Service—the largest Protestant women’s organization in the country. Grounded in research from church archives and interviews, this book shows how Methodist traditions provided spiritual, theological, and doctrinal support for social justice work among laywomen and female clergy. With Methodism as a case in point, this book expands the historical narrative of twentieth-century reform movements to include the South’s progressive religious traditions.Contributors: Chelsea Elizabeth Hodge | Fran Wescott | Janet Lynn Allured | Randall M. Miller | Jeanette Stokes | M. Kathryn Armistead | Stanley Harrold | Rachel Sauls | Helen R. Neinast | Jennifer Copeland | Katie W. Powell A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller

The African American experience in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley from the antebellum period through ReconstructionThis book examines the complexities of life for African Americans in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. Although the Valley was a site of fierce conflicts during the Civil War and its military activity has been extensively studied, scholars have largely ignored the Black experience in the region until now.Correcting previous assumptions that slavery was not important to the Valley, and that enslaved people were treated better there than in other parts of the South, Jonathan Noyalas demonstrates the strong hold of slavery in the region. He explains that during the war, enslaved and free African Americans navigated a borderland that changed hands frequently—where it was possible to be in Union territory one day, Confederate territory the next, and no-man’s land another. He shows that the region’s enslaved population resisted slavery and supported the Union war effort by serving as scouts, spies, and laborers, or by fleeing to enlist in regiments of the United States Colored Troops.Noyalas draws on untapped primary resources, including thousands of records from the Freedmen’s Bureau and contemporary newspapers, to continue the story and reveal the challenges African Americans faced from former Confederates after the war. He traces their actions, which were shaped uniquely by the volatility of the struggle in this region, to ensure that the war’s emancipationist legacy would survive.A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. MillerPublication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This volume closely examines the movement to resettle black Americans in Africa, an effort led by the American Colonization Society during the nineteenth century and a heavily debated part of American history. Some believe it was inspired by antislavery principles, but others think it was a proslavery reaction against the presence of free blacks in society.Moving beyond this simplistic debate, contributors link the movement to other historical developments of the time, revealing a complex web of different schemes, ideologies, and activities behind the relocation of African Americans to Liberia. They explain what colonization, emigration, immigration, abolition, and emancipation meant within nuanced nineteenth-century contexts, looking through many lenses to more accurately reflect the past.Contributors: Eric Burin | Andrew Diemer | David F. Ericson | Bronwen Everill | Nicholas Guyatt | Debra Newman Ham | Matthew J. Hetrick | Gale Kenny | Phillip W. Magness | Brandon Mills | Robert Murray | Sebastian N. Page | Daniel Preston | Beverly Tomek | Andrew N. Wegmann | Ben Wright | Nicholas P. Wood

Southern Association for Women Historians Julia Cherry Spruill Prize. Finalist, Hooks National Book AwardHow Black women used lessons in literacy to crack the foundation of white supremacy.This book details how African American women used lessons in basic literacy to crack the foundation of white supremacy and sow seeds for collective action during the civil rights movement. Deanna Gillespie traces the history of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP), a grassroots initiative that taught people to read and write in preparation for literacy tests required for voter registration—a profoundly powerful objective in the Jim Crow South.Born in 1957 as a result of discussions between community activist Esau Jenkins, schoolteacher Septima Clark, and Highlander Folk School director Myles Horton, the CEP became a part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1961. The teachers, mostly Black women, gathered friends and neighbors in living rooms, churches, beauty salons, and community centers. Through the work of the CEP, literate Black men and women were able to gather their own information, determine fair compensation for a day’s work, and register formal complaints.Drawing on teachers’ reports and correspondence, oral history interviews, and papers from a variety of civil rights organizations, Gillespie follows the growth of the CEP from its beginnings in the South Carolina Sea Islands to southeastern Georgia, the Mississippi Delta, and Alabama’s Black Belt. This book retells the story of the civil rights movement from the vantage point of activists who have often been overlooked and makeshift classrooms where local people discussed, organized, and demanded change.A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller

Inside the experiences of immigrants from Latin America and the CaribbeanLatino Orlando portrays the experiences of first- and second-generation immigrants who have come to the Orlando metropolitan area from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and other Latin American countries. While much research on immigration focuses on urban destinations, Simone Delerme delves into a middle- and upper-class suburban context, highlighting the profound demographic and cultural transformation of an overlooked immigrant hub.Drawing on interviews, observations, fieldwork, census data, and traditional and new media, Delerme reveals the important role of real estate developers in attracting Puerto Ricans—some of the first Spanish-speaking immigrants in the region—to Central Florida in the 1970s. She traces how language became a way of racializing and segregating Latino communities, leading to the growth of suburban ethnic enclaves. She documents not only the tensions between Latinos and non-Latinos, but also the class-based distinctions that cause dissent within the Latino population. Arguing that Latino migrants are complicating racial categorizations and challenging the deep-rooted Black-white binary that has long prevailed in the American South, Latino Orlando breaks down stereotypes of neighborhood decline and urban poverty and illustrates the diversity of Latinos in the region.A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller

Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council award for Excellence in Research in Using the Holdings of Archives