The Williamston Freedom Movement

The Williamston Freedom Movement PDF

Author: Amanda Hilliard Smith

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0786476362

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During the summer of 1963 civil rights movements were taking place all over the South. In northeastern North Carolina the struggle for freedom focused on the small town of Williamston, where a legacy of voting rights advocacy and a history of violence caught the attention of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The Massachusetts chapter of the SCLC sent fifteen white ministers to Williamston in November in an attempt to increase media coverage. Just as the movement was gaining traction, John F. Kennedy was assassinated and the nation lost interest in Williamston. So far the Williamston Freedom Movement has remained little known, though its impact was significant locally. This book details the events and those who participated, and includes 19 interviews with members of both the black and white community. By studying local movements, historians can better understand how ordinary people contributed to the Civil Rights Movement.

A Little Taste of Freedom

A Little Taste of Freedom PDF

Author: Emilye Crosby

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2006-05-26

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 080787681X

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In this long-term community study of the freedom movement in rural, majority-black Claiborne County, Mississippi, Emilye Crosby explores the impact of the African American freedom struggle on small communities in general and questions common assumptions that are based on the national movement. The legal successes at the national level in the mid 1960s did not end the movement, Crosby contends, but rather emboldened people across the South to initiate waves of new actions around local issues. Escalating assertiveness and demands of African Americans--including the reality of armed self-defense--were critical to ensuring meaningful local change to a remarkably resilient system of white supremacy. In Claiborne County, a highly effective boycott eventually led the Supreme Court to affirm the legality of economic boycotts for political protest. NAACP leader Charles Evers (brother of Medgar) managed to earn seemingly contradictory support from the national NAACP, the segregationist Sovereignty Commission, and white liberals. Studying both black activists and the white opposition, Crosby employs traditional sources and more than 100 oral histories to analyze the political and economic issues in the postmovement period, the impact of the movement and the resilience of white supremacy, and the ways these issues are closely connected to competing histories of the community.

Battling the Plantation Mentality

Battling the Plantation Mentality PDF

Author: Laurie Beth Green

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2009-12-08

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 9780807888872

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African American freedom is often defined in terms of emancipation and civil rights legislation, but it did not arrive with the stroke of a pen or the rap of a gavel. No single event makes this more plain, Laurie Green argues, than the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike, which culminated in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Exploring the notion of "freedom" in postwar Memphis, Green demonstrates that the civil rights movement was battling an ongoing "plantation mentality" based on race, gender, and power that permeated southern culture long before--and even after--the groundbreaking legislation of the mid-1960s. With its slogan "I AM a Man!" the Memphis strike provides a clarion example of how the movement fought for a black freedom that consisted of not only constitutional rights but also social and human rights. As the sharecropping system crumbled and migrants streamed to the cities during and after World War II, the struggle for black freedom touched all aspects of daily life. Green traces the movement to new locations, from protests against police brutality and racist movie censorship policies to innovations in mass culture, such as black-oriented radio stations. Incorporating scores of oral histories, Green demonstrates that the interplay of politics, culture, and consciousness is critical to truly understanding freedom and the black struggle for it.

Along Freedom Road

Along Freedom Road PDF

Author: David S. Cecelski

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0807860735

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David Cecelski chronicles one of the most sustained and successful protests of the civil rights movement--the 1968-69 school boycott in Hyde County, North Carolina. For an entire year, the county's black citizens refused to send their children to school in protest of a desegregation plan that required closing two historically black schools in their remote coastal community. Parents and students held nonviolent protests daily for five months, marched twice on the state capitol in Raleigh, and drove the Ku Klux Klan out of the county in a massive gunfight. The threatened closing of Hyde County's black schools collided with a rich and vibrant educational heritage that had helped to sustain the black community since Reconstruction. As other southern school boards routinely closed black schools and displaced their educational leaders, Hyde County blacks began to fear that school desegregation was undermining--rather than enhancing--this legacy. This book, then, is the story of one county's extraordinary struggle for civil rights, but at the same time it explores the fight for civil rights in all of eastern North Carolina and the dismantling of black education throughout the South.

Freedom Rights

Freedom Rights PDF

Author: Danielle L. McGuire

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2011-11-26

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 0813140242

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In his seminal article "Freedom Then, Freedom Now," renowned civil rights historian Steven F. Lawson described his vision for the future study of the civil rights movement. Lawson called for a deeper examination of the social, economic, and political factors that influenced the movement's development and growth. He urged his fellow scholars to connect the "local with the national, the political with the social," and to investigate the ideological origins of the civil rights movement, its internal dynamics, the role of women, and the significance of gender and sexuality. In Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement, editors Danielle L. McGuire and John Dittmer follow Lawson's example, bringing together the best new scholarship on the modern civil rights movement. The work expands our understanding of the movement by engaging issues of local and national politics, gender and race relations, family, community, and sexuality. The volume addresses cultural, legal, and social developments and also investigates the roots of the movement. Each essay highlights important moments in the history of the struggle, from the impact of the Young Women's Christian Association on integration to the use of the arts as a form of activism. Freedom Rights not only answers Lawson's call for a more dynamic, interactive history of the civil rights movement, but it also helps redefine the field.

The Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement PDF

Author: Bruce J. Dierenfield

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-06-28

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1134812582

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Now in its second edition, The Civil Rights Movement: The Black Freedom Struggle in America recounts the extraordinary story of how tens of thousands of African Americans overcame segregation, exercised their right to vote, and improved their economic standing, and how millions more black people, along with those of different races, continue to fight for racial justice in the wake of continuing police killings of unarmed black men and women. In a concise, chronological fashion, Bruce Dierenfield shows how concerted pressure in a variety of forms has helped realize a more just society for many blacks, though racism is far from being extinguished. The new edition has been fully revised to include an entire chapter on the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. In addition, the black experience in the slave and Jim Crow periods has been expanded, and greater emphasis has been placed throughout on black agency. The book also features revised maps, new primary documents, and an updated further reading section that reflects recent scholarship. This book will provide students of American history with a compelling and comprehensive introduction to the Civil Rights Movement.

Spitter

Spitter PDF

Author: David Vaught

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2022-11-17

Total Pages: 602

ISBN-13: 1648430651

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Finalist for the 2023 CASEY Award Gaylord Jackson Perry was born in 1938 as the younger son of a tobacco sharecropper in Martin County, North Carolina. He and his older brother Jim grew up against a background of backbreaking work six days a week in a community that boasted not a single paved road until the 1950s. Their only relaxation was playing baseball, first with their father and later at school. While both brothers would go on to succeed as pitchers in major league baseball, for Gaylord, success would require a lot of perseverance and an almost equal amount of subterfuge. After a couple of lackluster seasons with the San Francisco Giants, he learned from bullpen-mate Bob Shaw how to throw the illegal spitball. More importantly, he learned to control the tricky pitch and to conceal it from suspicious umpires, opposing managers, and baffled batters. When he finally broke out the spitter in a victory by attrition in a marathon, 32-inning, nine-hour doubleheader against the Mets in May 1964, his destiny was set. The Hall of Famer would go on to a 314–265 win-loss record, with a 3.11 earned-run average and 3,534 career strikeouts, becoming the first pitcher in major league history to win the Cy Young Award in both leagues. Sports historian David Vaught has mined archival and public records, game statistics, media accounts, and previously published works—including Perry’s 1974 autobiography—to compile the first critical biography of a player as famous for his wry humor and downhome banter as for his trademark illegal pitch. Written for baseball fans and American sports historians, Spitter: Baseball’s Notorious Gaylord Perry provides new insights and genuine enjoyment of the game for a wide range of readers.

Historical Dictionary of the Civil Rights Movement

Historical Dictionary of the Civil Rights Movement PDF

Author: Christopher M. Richardson

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-06-11

Total Pages: 663

ISBN-13: 0810880377

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The fiftieth anniversary of many major milestones in what is commonly called the African-American Civil Rights Movement was celebrated in 2013. Fifty years removed from the Birmingham campaign, the assassination of Medgar Evers, and the March on Washington and it is clear that the sacrifices borne by those generations in that decade were not in vain. Monuments, museums, and exhibitions across the world honor the men and women of the Movement and testify to their immeasurable role in redefining the United States. The second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Civil Rights Movement is a guide to the history of the African-American struggle for equal rights in the United States. The history of this period is covered in a detailed chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, significant legal cases, local struggles, forgotten heroes, and prominent women in the Movement. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Civil Rights Movement.

At the Dark End of the Street

At the Dark End of the Street PDF

Author: Danielle L. McGuire

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-10-04

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 0307389243

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Here is the courageous, groundbreaking story of Rosa Parks and Recy Taylor—a story that reinterprets the history of America's civil rights movement in terms of the sexual violence committed against Black women by white men. "An important step to finally facing the terrible legacies of race and gender in this country.” —The Washington Post Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement. The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the 1955 boycott is far different from anything previously written. In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer—Rosa Parks—to Abbeville. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that exposed a ritualized history of sexual assault against Black women and added fire to the growing call for change.

Greater Freedom

Greater Freedom PDF

Author: Charles Wesley McKinney

Publisher: University Press of America

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0761852301

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This book offers a groundbreaking long-term study of Wilson County, North Carolina. Charting the evolution of Wilson's civil rights movement, McKinney argues that African Americans in Wilson created an expansive notion of freedom that influenced every aspect of life in the region and directly confronted the state's reputation for moderation.