Struggle for a Better South

Struggle for a Better South PDF

Author: G. Michel

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2004-11-26

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1403981817

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Struggle for a Better South dispels the notion that all whites in the South stood united against social change in the 1960s. Gregg Michel's compelling study of the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), the leading progressive organization created by young white activists in the South during that tumultuous decade, fills a crucial gap in the literature about New Left activism. Michel shows that the SSOC was the only activist group of the era that worked to cultivate white support for the social movement. The SSOC's members gave themselves the delicate task of reconciling their love for the South and its history - warts and all - with their modern-day commitment to equality and justice for all people.

Struggle for Mastery

Struggle for Mastery PDF

Author: Michael Perman

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2003-04-03

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 0807860255

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Around 1900, the southern states embarked on a series of political campaigns aimed at disfranchising large numbers of voters. By 1908, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia had succeeded in depriving virtually all African Americans, and a large number of lower-class whites, of the voting rights they had possessed since Reconstruction--rights they would not regain for over half a century. Struggle for Mastery is the most complete and systematic study to date of the history of disfranchisement in the South. After examining the origins and objectives of disfranchisement, Michael Perman traces the process as it unfolded state by state. Because he examines each state within its region-wide context, he is able to identify patterns and connections that have previously gone unnoticed. Broadening the context even further, Perman explores the federal government's seeming acquiescence in this development, the relationship between disfranchisement and segregation, and the political system that emerged after the decimation of the South's electorate. The result is an insightful and persuasive interpretation of this highly significant, yet generally misunderstood, episode in U.S. history.

People's War

People's War PDF

Author: Anthea Jeffrey

Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers

Published: 2019-05-15

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 1868429970

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

More than 25 years have passed since South Africans were being shot or hacked or burned to death in political violence, and the memory of the trauma has faded. Nevertheless, some 20 500 people were killed between 1984 and 1994. Conventional wisdom has it that most died as a result of the ANC's people's war. Many books have been written on South Africa's political transition, but none has dealt adequately with the people's war. This book does. It shows the extraordinary success of the people's war in giving the ANC a virtual monopoly on power, as well as the great cost at which this was done. The high price of it is still being paid. Apart from the terror and killings it sparked at the time, the people's war set in motion forces that cannot easily be tamed. Violence, once unleashed, is not easy to stamp out. 'Ungovernability', once generated, is not readily reversed. For this new edition, Anthea Jeffery has revised and abridged her seminal work. She has also included a brief overview of the ANC's National Democratic Revolution for which the people's war was intended to prepare the way. Since 1994, the NDR has been implemented in many different spheres. It is now being speeded up in its second and more radical phase.

The South China Sea

The South China Sea PDF

Author: Bill Hayton

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2014-10-28

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0300189540

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

China’s rise has upset the global balance of power, and the first place to feel the strain is Beijing’s back yard: the South China Sea. For decades tensions have smoldered in the region, but today the threat of a direct confrontation among superpowers grows ever more likely. This important book is the first to make clear sense of the South Sea disputes. Bill Hayton, a journalist with extensive experience in the region, examines the high stakes involved for rival nations that include Vietnam, India, Taiwan, the Philippines, and China, as well as the United States, Russia, and others. Hayton also lays out the daunting obstacles that stand in the way of peaceful resolution. Through lively stories of individuals who have shaped current conflicts—businessmen, scientists, shippers, archaeologists, soldiers, diplomats, and more—Hayton makes understandable the complex history and contemporary reality of the South China Sea. He underscores its crucial importance as the passageway for half the world’s merchant shipping and one-third of its oil and gas. Whoever controls these waters controls the access between Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Pacific. The author critiques various claims and positions (that China has historic claim to the Sea, for example), overturns conventional wisdoms (such as America’s overblown fears of China’s nationalism and military resurgence), and outlines what the future may hold for this clamorous region of international rivalry.

Stories of Struggle

Stories of Struggle PDF

Author: Claudia Smith Brinson

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2020-11-03

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1643361082

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In this pioneering study of the long and arduous struggle for civil rights in South Carolina, longtime journalist Claudia Smith Brinson details the lynchings, beatings, bombings, cross burnings, death threats, arson, and venomous hatred that black South Carolinians endured—as well as the astonishing courage, devotion, dignity, and compassion of those who risked their lives for equality. Through extensive research and interviews with more than one hundred fifty civil rights activists, many of whom had never shared their stories with anyone, Brinson chronicles twenty pivotal years of petitioning, preaching, picketing, boycotting, marching, and holding sit-ins. Participants' use of nonviolent direct action altered the landscape of civil rights in South Carolina and reverberated throughout the South. These firsthand accounts include those of the unsung petitioners who risked their lives by supporting Summerton's Briggs v. Elliot, a lawsuit that led to the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision; the thousands of students who were arrested and jailed in 1960 for protests in Rock Hill, Orangeburg, Denmark, Columbia, and Sumter; and the black female employees and leaders who defied a governor and his armed troops during the 1969 hospital strike in Charleston. Brinson also highlights contributions made by remarkable but lesser-known activists, including James M. Hinton Sr., president of the South Carolina Conference of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Thomas W. Gaither, Congress of Racial Equality field secretary and scout for the Freedom Rides; Charles F. McDew, a South Carolina State College student and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and Mary Moultrie, grassroots leader of the 1969 hospital workers' strike. These intimate stories of courage and conviction, both heartbreaking and inspiring, shine a light on the progress achieved by nonviolent civil rights activists while also revealing white South Carolinians' often violent resistance to change. Although significant racial disparities remain, the sacrifices of these brave men and women produced real progress—and hope for the future.

This Great Struggle

This Great Struggle PDF

Author: Steven E. Woodworth

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2011-04-16

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 1442210877

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Referring to the war that was raging across parts of the American landscape, Abraham Lincoln told Congress in 1862, "We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope on earth." Lincoln recognized what was at stake in the American Civil War: not only freedom for 3.5 million slaves but also survival of self-government in the last place on earth where it could have the opportunity of developing freely. Noted historian Steven E. Woodworth tells the story of what many regard as the defining event in United States history. While covering all theaters of war, he emphasizes the importance of action in the region between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River in determining its outcome. Woodworth argues that the Civil War had a distinct purpose that was understood by most of its participants: it was primarily a conflict over the issue of slavery. The soldiers who filled the ranks of the armies on both sides knew what they were fighting for. The outcome of the war—after its beginnings at Fort Sumter to the Confederate surrender four years later—was the result of the actions and decisions made by those soldiers and millions of other Americans. Written in clear and compelling fashion, This Great Struggle is their story—and ours.

Hope and Despair

Hope and Despair PDF

Author: Monia Mazigh

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Published: 2009-10-20

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1551993309

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The inspiring story of Monia Mazigh’s courageous fight to free her husband, Maher Arar, from a Syrian jail. On September 26, 2002, Maher Arar boarded an American Airlines plane bound for New York, returning early from vacation with his family because a work project needed his attention. He was a Canadian citizen, a telecommunications engineer and entrepreneur who had never been in trouble with the law. His nightmare began when he was pulled aside by Immigration officials at JFK airport, questioned, held without access to a lawyer, and ultimately deported to Syria on the suspicion that he had terrorist links. He would remain there, tortured and imprisoned for over one year. Meanwhile his wife, Monia, and their two children stayed on visiting family in Tunisia, unaware that their lives were about to be torn apart. Upon her return to Canada, Monia was horrified at the media’s and public’s willingness to assume that the Canadian police and intelligence agencies, and their American counterparts, take on her husband as a terrorist was correct. She began a tireless campaign to bring public attention and government action to her husband’s plight, eventually turning the tide of public opinion in Arar’s favour, and gaining his release and return to Canada. Of her willingness to speak out, she has said that she was never afraid: “I had lost my life. I didn’t have more to lose.” This is a remarkable story of personal courage, and of an extraordinary woman who lets us into her life so that other Canadians can understand the denial of rights and the discarding of human rights her family suffered. Candid, poignant, and inspiring, this is the most important book of the season.

Subversive Southerner

Subversive Southerner PDF

Author: Catherine Fosl

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2006-08-01

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 0813191726

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

With a Foreword by Angela Y. Davis Winner of the 2003 Oral History Association Book AwardWinner of the 2003 Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights Outstanding Book Award Anne McCarty Braden (1924-2006) was a courageous southern white woman who in the late 1940s rejected her segregationist and privileged past to become a lifelong crusader against racial discrimination. Arousing the conscience of white southerners to the reality of racial injustice, Braden was branded a communist and seditionist by southern politicians who used McCarthyism to buttress legal and institutional segregation as it came under fire in deferral courts. She became, nevertheless, one of the civil rights movement's staunchest white allies and one of five southern whites commended by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Although Braden remained a controversial figure even in the movement, her commitment superseded her radical reputation, and she became a mentor and advisor to students who launched the 1960s sit-ins and to successive generations of peace and justice activists. In this riveting, oral history-based biography, Catherine Fosl also offers a social history of how racism, sexism, and anticommunism overlapped in the twentieth-century south and how ripples from the Cold War divided and limited the southern civil rights movement.

The Warmth of Other Suns

The Warmth of Other Suns PDF

Author: Isabel Wilkerson

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-10-04

Total Pages: 642

ISBN-13: 0679763880

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this beautifully written masterwork, the Pulitzer Prize–winnner and bestselling author of Caste chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.