Way Up North in Louisville

Way Up North in Louisville PDF

Author: Luther Adams

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2010-11-29

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780807899434

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Luther Adams demonstrates that in the wake of World War II, when roughly half the black population left the South seeking greater opportunity and freedom in the North and West, the same desire often anchored African Americans to the South. Way Up North in Louisville explores the forces that led blacks to move to urban centers in the South to make their homes. Adams defines "home" as a commitment to life in the South that fueled the emergence of a more cohesive sense of urban community and enabled southern blacks to maintain their ties to the South as a place of personal identity, family, and community. This commitment to the South energized the rise of a more militant movement for full citizenship rights and respect for the humanity of black people. Way Up North in Louisville offers a powerful reinterpretation of the modern civil rights movement and of the transformations in black urban life within the interrelated contexts of migration, work, and urban renewal, which spurred the fight against residential segregation and economic inequality. While acknowledging the destructive downside of emerging postindustrialism for African Americans in the Jim Crow South, Adams concludes that persistent patterns of economic and racial inequality did not rob black people of their capacity to act in their own interests.

The Rest of the Dream

The Rest of the Dream PDF

Author: Wade Hall

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-12-14

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 081318942X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In The Rest of the Dream, Lyman Johnson, grassroots civil rights leader, tells his own story. All four of Johnson's grandparents were slaves in Tennessee. Yet his father was a college graduate, principal of a black school, and the inspiration for his son's love of justice. Lyman Johnson was born in 1906 during the darkest days of segregation. He learned from his father not to sit in the "crow's nest" reserved for blacks in his hometown movie theater. This refusal to accept second-class citizenship became a guiding principle in Johnson's life. Johnson was almost forty-three when he won admission to graduate study at the University of Kentucky in 1949. Crosses were burned on campus. Because of his family commitments, he returned to his teaching position in Louisville and never completed his doctorate. Thirty years later the university that fought to keep him out awarded him an honorary doctor of letters degree. Johnson earned his doctorate the hard way—by saying no to the crow's nest and other marks of inequality. Johnson's graphic recall of people and incidents and his storyteller's talent for narrative make this record of a unique American life filled with suspense, humor, tragedy, and triumph.

Workers on Arrival

Workers on Arrival PDF

Author: Joe William Trotter

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2021-01-19

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0520377516

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"An eloquent and essential correction to contemporary discussions of the American working class."—The Nation From the ongoing issues of poverty, health, housing, and employment to the recent upsurge of lethal police-community relations, the black working class stands at the center of perceptions of social and racial conflict today. Journalists and public policy analysts often discuss the black poor as “consumers” rather than “producers,” as “takers” rather than “givers,” and as “liabilities” instead of “assets.” In his engrossing history, Workers on Arrival, Joe William Trotter, Jr., refutes these perceptions by charting the black working class’s vast contributions to the making of America. Covering the last four hundred years since Africans were first brought to Virginia in 1619, Trotter traces the complicated journey of black workers from the transatlantic slave trade to the demise of the industrial order in the twenty-first century. At the center of this compelling, fast-paced narrative are the actual experiences of these African American men and women. A dynamic and vital history of remarkable contributions despite repeated setbacks, Workers on Arrival expands our understanding of America’s economic and industrial growth, its cities, ideas, and institutions, and the real challenges confronting black urban communities today.

Between North and South

Between North and South PDF

Author: Brett Gadsden

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-10-08

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0812207971

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Between North and South chronicles the three-decade-long struggle over segregated schooling in Delaware, a key border state and important site of civil rights activism and white reaction. Historian Brett Gadsden begins by tracing the origins of a long litigation campaign by NAACP attorneys who translated popular complaints about the inequities in Jim Crow schooling into challenges to racial proscriptions in public education. Their legal victories subsequently provided the evidentiary basis for the Supreme Court's historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, marking Delaware as a center of civil rights advancements. Gadsden's further examination of a novel metropolitan approach to address the problem of segregation in city and suburban schools, wherein proponents highlighted the web of state-sponsored discrimination that produced interrelated school and residential segregation, reveals the strategic creativity of civil rights activists. He shows us how, even in the face of concerted white opposition, these activists continued to advance civil rights reforms into the 1970s, secured one of the most progressive busing remedies in the nation, and created a potential model for desegregation efforts across the United States. Between North and South also explores how activists on both sides of the contest in this border state—adjacent to the Mason-Dixon line—helped create, perpetuate, and contest ideas of southern exceptionalism and northern innocence. Gadsden offers instead a new framework in which "southern-style" and "northern-style" modes of racial segregation and discrimination are revealed largely as regional myths that civil rights activists and opponents alternately evoked and strategically deployed to both advance and thwart reform.

Isaac Murphy

Isaac Murphy PDF

Author: Katherine C. Mooney

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2023-05-02

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 0300271670

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The rise and fall of one of America’s first Black sports celebrities Isaac Murphy, born enslaved in 1861, still reigns as one of the greatest jockeys in American history. Black jockeys like Murphy were at the top of the most popular sport in America at the end of the nineteenth century. They were internationally famous, the first African American superstar athletes—and with wins in three Kentucky Derbies and countless other prestigious races, Murphy was the greatest of them all. At the same time, he lived through the seismic events of Emancipation and Reconstruction and formative conflicts over freedom and equality in the United States. And inevitably he was drawn into those conflicts, with devastating consequences. Katherine C. Mooney uncovers the history of Murphy’s troubled life, his death in 1896 at age thirty-five, and his afterlife. In recounting Murphy’s personal story, she also tells two of the great stories of change in nineteenth-century America: the debates over what a multiracial democracy might look like and the battles over who was to hold power in an economy that increasingly resembled the corporate, wealth-polarized world we know today.

Hollywood Tiki: Film in the Era of the Pineapple Cocktail

Hollywood Tiki: Film in the Era of the Pineapple Cocktail PDF

Author: Adam Foshko and Jason Henderson

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2022-08

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 146714990X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Island Escapes, South Seas Adventures, and Musical Surf Parties of Midcentury Cinema Tiki Culture arose as the defining expression of American pop culture during World War II and its influence continued through the 1960s. The essence of Tiki featured heavily in films of the era, depicting palm-tree and cocktail-laden escapes that captivated audiences nationwide. Films like South Pacific and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit were a hodgepodge of jungle imagery and World War II Pacific theater memories. A fascination with the new State of Hawaii was reflected in Elvis's Blue Hawaii, while balmy youth flicks like Beach Blanket Bingo and Gidget showcased surf, sun and fun. Join authors Jason Henderson and Adam Foshko as they explore films about the experiences of war filtered through the tropical splendor that defined an era.

Vagrant Nation

Vagrant Nation PDF

Author: Risa Goluboff

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-01-25

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0190262273

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In 1950s America, it was remarkably easy for police to arrest almost anyone for almost any reason. The criminal justice system-and especially the age-old law of vagrancy-served not only to maintain safety and order but also to enforce conventional standards of morality and propriety. A person could be arrested for sporting a beard, making a speech, or working too little. Yet by the end of the 1960s, vagrancy laws were discredited and American society was fundamentally transformed. What happened? In Vagrant Nation, Risa Goluboff answers that question by showing how constitutional challenges to vagrancy laws shaped the multiple movements that made "the 1960s." Vagrancy laws were so broad and flexible that they made it possible for the police to arrest anyone out of place: Beats and hippies; Communists and Vietnam War protestors; racial minorities and civil rights activists; gays, single women, and prostitutes. As hundreds of these "vagrants" and their lawyers challenged vagrancy laws in court, the laws became a flashpoint for debates about radically different visions of order and freedom. Goluboff's compelling account of those challenges rewrites the history of the civil rights, peace, gay rights, welfare rights, sexual, and cultural revolutions. As Goluboff links the human stories of those arrested to the great controversies of the time, she makes coherent an era that often seems chaotic. She also powerfully demonstrates how ordinary people, with the help of lawyers and judges, can change the meaning of the Constitution. The Supreme Court's 1972 decision declaring vagrancy laws unconstitutional continues to shape conflicts between police power and constitutional rights, including clashes over stop-and-frisk, homelessness, sexual freedom, and public protests. Since the downfall of vagrancy law, battles over what, if anything, should replace it, like battles over the legacy of the sixties transformations themselves, are far from over.

The Geography of Hate

The Geography of Hate PDF

Author: Jennifer Sdunzik

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2023-11-07

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 0252055020

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The uncomfortable truths that shaped small communities in the midwest During the Great Migration, Black Americans sought new lives in midwestern small towns only to confront the pervasive efforts of white residents determined to maintain their area’s preferred cultural and racial identity. Jennifer Sdunzik explores this widespread phenomenon by examining how it played out in one midwestern community. Sdunzik merges state and communal histories, interviews and analyses of population data, and spatial and ethnographic materials to create a rich public history that reclaims Black contributions and history. She also explores the conscious and unconscious white actions that all but erased Black Americans--and the terror and exclusion used against them--from the history of many midwestern communities. An innovative challenge to myth and perceived wisdom, The Geography of Hate reveals the socioeconomic, political, and cultural forces that prevailed in midwestern towns and helps explain the systemic racism and endemic nativism that remain entrenched in American life.

Not Free, Not for All

Not Free, Not for All PDF

Author: Cheryl Knott

Publisher: UMass + ORM

Published: 2017-02-14

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1613764332

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Americans tend to imagine their public libraries as time-honored advocates of equitable access to information for all. Through much of the twentieth century, however, many black Americans were denied access to public libraries or allowed admittance only to separate and smaller buildings and collections. While scholars have examined and continue to uncover the history of school segregation, there has been much less research published on the segregation of public libraries in the Jim Crow South. In fact, much of the writing on public library history has failed to note these racial exclusions. In Not Free, Not for All, Cheryl Knott traces the establishment, growth, and eventual demise of separate public libraries for African Americans in the South, disrupting the popular image of the American public library as historically welcoming readers from all walks of life. Using institutional records, contemporaneous newspaper and magazine articles, and other primary sources together with scholarly work in the fields of print culture and civil rights history, Knott reconstructs a complex story involving both animosity and cooperation among whites and blacks who valued what libraries had to offer. African American library advocates, staff, and users emerge as the creators of their own separate collections and services with both symbolic and material importance, even as they worked toward dismantling those very institutions during the era of desegregation.

Two Centuries of Black Louisville

Two Centuries of Black Louisville PDF

Author: Mervin Aubespin

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9781935497363

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Since the settlement of Louisville in 1778, African Americans have created a history behind the wall of slavery and the veil of segregation, and have forged a remarkably vibrant community that, at times, influenced the political and cultural history of the nation. This community, while not entirely beyond the reach of white Louisvillians, was certainly beyond their field of vision - and its people and its achievements are largely unknown, even to more recent generations of African Americans themselves.Over the past two centuries and more, black Louisville faced many challenges: creating a free black community in the midst of slavery; the struggle to end slavery itself; the struggle to expand the limits of freedom in a segregated society; creating meaning and culture; the struggle to end segregation; and the struggle to expand the limits of freedom in a society in which African Americans are "neither separate nor equal." Louisville African Americans met each of these challenges and, by so doing, they created a community and defined its identity and character. When most successful, they capitalized on their opportunities and assets, the most important of which derived from Louisville's favorable location, the need for black labor, the need for black votes and the presence of a few influential white allies. The resulting economic and political capacity, when used astutely, could wrest concessions from white businesses and political leaders that advanced the interests of the entire African American community.The purpose of Two Centuries of Black Louisville: A Photographic History is simply to tell this story in words and images - a history in which all, irrespective of race and place, can take pride.