Race, Reason, and Massive Resistance

Race, Reason, and Massive Resistance PDF

Author: David John Mays

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 0820330256

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These private writings by a prominent white southern lawyer offer insight into his state’s embrace of massive white resistance following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. David J. Mays of Richmond, Virginia, was a highly regarded attorney, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, and a member of his city’s political and social elite. He was also a diarist for most of his adult life. This volume comprises diary excerpts from the years 1954 to 1959. For much of this time Mays was counsel to the commission, chaired by state senator Garland Gray, that was charged with formulating Virginia’s response to federal mandates concerning the integration of public schools. Later, Mays was involved in litigation triggered by that response. Mays chronicled the state’s bitter and divisive shift away from the Gray Commission’s proposal that school integration questions be settled at the local level. Instead, Virginia’s arch-segregationists, led by U.S. senator Harry F. Byrd, championed a monolithic defiance of integration at the highest state and federal levels. Many leading Virginians of the time appear in Mays’s diary, along with details of their roles in the battle against desegregation as it was fought in the media, courts, polls, and government back rooms. Mays’s own racial attitudes were hardly progressive; yet his temperament and legal training put a relatively moderate public face on them. As James R. Sweeney notes, Mays’s differences with extremists were about means more than ends--about “not the morality of Jim Crow but the best tactics for defending it.”

The Rise of Massive Resistance

The Rise of Massive Resistance PDF

Author: Numan V. Bartley

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 1999-07-01

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9780807124192

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Originally published in 1969, The Rise of Massive Resistance was the first scholarly work to deal decisively with the politics of southern resistance to public school integration. Today, it remains one of the most important books on the subject. For this thirtieth anniversary edition, Numan Bartley has included a new preface in which he reflects on his reasons for writing the book and why it has stood the test of time. Bartley gives a step-by-step account of opposition to school desegregation in each southern state during the 1950s and clarifies the attitudes underlying massive resistance by examining the roles played by such southern leaders as James F. Byrnes, Harry Flood Byrd, James O. Eastland, Orval E. Faubus, Claude Pepper, Estes Kefauver, Richard B. Russell, Herman Talmadge, “Big Jim” Folsom, and Earl K. Long. He also closely analyzes the attitudes of the Eisenhower administration and national leaders toward the South and explores the activities of the Citizens’ Councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and other local groups that emerged to defend “the southern way of life.” His closing “Critical Essay on Authorities” still forms an excellent guide to primary and secondary sources on opposition to Brown v. Board of Education.

The Struggle and the Urban South

The Struggle and the Urban South PDF

Author: David Taft Terry

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2019-06-15

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0820355089

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Through the example of Baltimore, Maryland, David Taft Terry explores the historical importance of African American resistance to Jim Crow laws in the South’s largest cities. Terry also adds to our understanding of the underexplored historical period of the civil rights movement, prior to the 1960s. Baltimore, one of the South largest cities, was a crucible of segregationist laws and practices. In response, from the 1890s through the 1950s, African Americans there (like those in the South’s other major cities) shaped an evolving resistance to segregation across three themes. The first theme involved black southerners’ development of a counter-narrative to Jim Crow’s demeaning doctrines about them. Second, through participation in a national antisegregation agenda, urban South blacks nurtured a dynamic tension between their local branches of social justice organizations and national offices, so that southern blacks retained self-determination while expanding local resources for resistance. Third, with the rise of new antisegregation orthodoxies in the immediate post-World War II years, the urban South’s black leaders, citizens, and students and their allies worked ceaselessly to instigate confrontations between southern white transgressors and federal white enforcers. Along the way, African Americans worked to define equality for themselves and to gain the required power to demand it. They forged the protest traditions of an enduring black struggle for equality in the urban South. By 1960 that struggle had inspired a national civil rights movement.

Mothers of Massive Resistance

Mothers of Massive Resistance PDF

Author: Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 019027171X

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Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s this book explores the grassroots workers who maintained the system of racial segregation. For decades white women performed duties that upheld white over black: censoring textbooks, deciding on the racial identity of their neighbors, celebrating school choice, and lobbying elected officials. They instilled beliefs in racial hierarchies in their children, built national networks, and experimented with a color-blind political discourse. White women's segregationist politics stretched across the nation, overlapping with and shaping the rise of the New Right.

Remaking the Rural South

Remaking the Rural South PDF

Author: Robert Hunt Ferguson

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2018-01-15

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 0820351784

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This is the first book-length study of Delta Cooperative Farm (1936–42) and its descendant, Providence Farm (1938–56). The two intentional communities drew on internationalist practices of cooperative communalism and pragmatically challenged Jim Crow segregation and plantation labor. In the winter of 1936, two dozen black and white ex-sharecropping families settled on some two thousand acres in the rural Mississippi Delta, one of the most insular and oppressive regions in the nation. Thus began a twenty-year experiment—across two communities—in interracialism, Christian socialism, cooperative farming, and civil and economic activism. Robert Hunt Ferguson recalls the genesis of Delta and Providence: how they were modeled after cooperative farms in Japan and Soviet Russia and how they rose in reaction to the exploitation of small- scale, dispossessed farmers. Although the staff, volunteers, and residents were very much everyday people—a mix of Christian socialists, political leftists, union organizers, and sharecroppers—the farms had the backing of such leading figures as philanthropist Sherwood Eddy, who purchased the land, and educator Charles Spurgeon Johnson and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who served as trustees. On these farms, residents developed a cooperative economy, operated a desegregated health clinic, held interracial church services and labor union meetings, and managed a credit union. Ferguson tells how a variety of factors related to World War II forced the closing of Delta, while Providence finally succumbed to economic boycotts and outside threats from white racists. Remaking the Rural South shows how a small group of committed people challenged hegemonic social and economic structures by going about their daily routines. Far from living in a closed society, activists at Delta and Providence engaged in a local movement with national and international roots and consequences.

New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South

New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South PDF

Author: Claudrena N. Harold

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2016-10-01

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 0820349844

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This study details how the development and maturation of New Negro politics and thought were shaped not only by New York–based intellectuals and revolutionary transformations in Europe, but also by people, ideas, and organizations rooted in the South. Claudrena N. Harold probes into critical events and developments below the Mason-Dixon Line, sharpening our understanding of how many black activists—along with particular segments of the white American Left—arrived at their views on the politics of race, nationhood, and the capitalist political economy. Focusing on Garveyites, A. Philip Randolph’s militant unionists, and black anti-imperialist protest groups, among others, Harold argues that the South was a largely overlooked “incubator of black protest activity” between World War I and the Great Depression. The activity she uncovers had implications beyond the region and adds complexity to a historical moment in which black southerners provided exciting organizational models of grassroots labor activism, assisted in the revitalization of black nationalist politics, engaged in robust intellectual arguments on the future of the South, and challenged the governance of historically black colleges. To uplift the race and by extension transform the world, New Negro southerners risked social isolation, ridicule, and even death. Their stories are reminders that black southerners played a crucial role not only in African Americans’ revolutionary quest for political empowerment, ontological clarity, and existential freedom but also in the global struggle to bring forth a more just and democratic world free from racial subjugation, dehumanizing labor practices, and colonial oppression.

Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood

Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood PDF

Author: Rebecca Brückmann

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2021-01-01

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0820358347

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Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood offers a comparative sociocultural and spatial history of white supremacist women who were active in segregationist grassroots activism in Little Rock, New Orleans, and Charleston from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Through her examination, Rebecca Brückmann uncovers and evaluates the roles, actions, self-understandings, and media representations of segregationist women in massive resistance in urban and metropolitan settings. Brückmann argues that white women were motivated by an everyday culture of white supremacy, and they created performative spaces for their segregationist agitation in the public sphere to legitimize their actions. While other studies of mass resistance have focused on maternalism, Brückmann shows that women’s invocation of motherhood was varied and primarily served as a tactical tool to continuously expand these women’s spaces. Through this examination she differentiates the circumstances, tactics, and representations used in the creation of performative spaces by working-class, middle-class, and elite women engaged in massive resistance. Brückmann focuses on the transgressive “street politics” of working-class female activists in Little Rock and New Orleans that contrasted with the more traditional political actions of segregationist, middle-class, and elite women in Charleston, who aligned white supremacist agitation with long-standing experience in conservative women’s clubs, including the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Working-class women’s groups chose consciously transgressive strategies, including violence, to elicit shock value and create states of emergency to further legitimize their actions and push for white supremacy.

Fight Against Fear

Fight Against Fear PDF

Author: Clive Webb

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2011-03-15

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 082034009X

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In the uneasily shared history of Jews and blacks in America, the struggle for civil rights in the South may be the least understood episode. Fight against Fear is the first book to focus on Jews and African Americans in that remarkable place and time. Mindful of both communities' precarious and contradictory standings in the South, Clive Webb tells a complex story of resistance and complicity, conviction and apathy. Webb begins by ranging over the experiences of southern Jews up to the eve of the civil rights movement--from antebellum slaveowners to refugees who fled Hitler's Europe only to arrive in the Jim Crow South. He then shows how the historical burden of ambivalence between Jews and blacks weighed on such issues as school desegregation, the white massive resistance movement, and business boycotts and sit-ins. As many Jews grappled as never before with the ways they had become--and yet never could become--southerners, their empathy with African Americans translated into scattered, individual actions rather than any large-scale, organized alliance between the two groups. The reasons for this are clear, Webb says, once we get past the notion that the choices of the much larger, less conservative, and urban-centered Jewish populations of the North define those of all American Jews. To understand Jews in the South we must look at their particular circumstances: their small numbers and wide distribution, denominational rifts, and well-founded anxiety over defying racial and class customs set by the region's white Protestant majority. For better or worse, we continue to define the history of Jews and blacks in America by its flash points. By setting aside emotions and shallow perceptions, Fight against Fear takes a substantial step toward giving these two communities the more open and evenhanded consideration their shared experiences demand.

Race and Reason

Race and Reason PDF

Author: Carleton Putnam

Publisher: Ostara Publications

Published: 2019-05-24

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13: 9781646065752

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First published in 1961, this was the first major book to address race and racial differences in a calm, educated and sophisticated manner just as the "Civil Rights" revolution began sweeping America and overturning the established order. Written by one of America's most successful businessmen--the founder and president of Delta Airlines--Race and Reason is a question and answer format book dealing with race, racial differences, and which answers every liberal argument--and counter argument--with passion, reason, compassion and intellect. It addresses the issues of physical, mental and psychological racial differences, backed up with meticulous research, statistics and analysis--and proves conclusively that integration can only lead to the harming of all races, and the destruction of Western European civilization in particular. "Unquestionably a major common denominator of fallacy in the many-sided equalitarian ideology was the suppression of the truth concerning the genetic foundation of life. We saw this truth around us every day, in the color of our children's eyes, in the structure of their bones, in the cast of their countenances, in the qualities of mind and heart that paralleled these elements, yet trance-like we clung to the belief that it did not exist. "Genetic racial limitations should have been as clear as crystal. All history taught it. All free science confirmed it. Few but a patently self-serving minority of trained investigators contested it. Yet the leading nation of the free world embraced the fallacy, used its influence in foreign affairs in support of it, and corrupted its own people in its name."--From the conclusion. REVIEWS: "One of the most important books of this generation." --American Bar Association Journal. "Incisive, authoritative, effective... Mr. Putnam has put all serious and objective students of the race problem in his debt." --Richmond Times-Dispatch. "I urge thoughtful citizens to read Putnam's analysis and, in keeping with constitutional principles of freedom of speech and press, to provoke public debate between the unpopular ideas he presents and those currently popular." --William Shockley, Nobel laureate. "Sane and Thoughtful... Without doubt an important and significant contribution to this vexing subject." --Manchester News. "A blockbuster in print... Here is a book that ought to be read by every thinking American, North and South." --Kingsport Times-News. "A real contribution to the history of our times... a scholarly effort to put the issue of race inside the framework of American traditions and world history." --Charleston News and Courier. "Race and Reason is a masterstroke... I believe it is the most important single document yet published on the question." --Editor, Farmville Herald. About the author: Carleton Putnam (1901-1998) was an American lawyer, businessman, biographer and writer. He graduated from Princeton University in 1924 and received a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) from Columbia Law School in 1932. He founded Chicago & Southern Airlines in 1933, which in 1953 was merged with Delta Air Lines. He would later serve as chief executive officer of Delta Air Lines and hold a seat on its board of directors until his death.