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Martin Luther King's 1965 address from Montgomery, Alabama, the center of much racial conflict at the time and the location of the well-publicized bus boycott a decade earlier, is often considered by historians to be the culmination of the civil rights era in American history. In his momentous speech, King declared that segregation was “on its deathbed” and that the movement had already achieved significant milestones. Although the civil rights movement had won many battles in the struggle for racial equality by the mid-1960s, including legislation to guarantee black voting rights and to desegregate public accommodations, the fight to implement the new laws was just starting. In reality, King's speech in Montgomery represented a new beginning rather than a conclusion to the movement, a fact that King acknowledged in the address. This book begins where many histories of the civil rights movement end, with King's triumphant march from the iconic battleground of Selma to Montgomery. The book focuses on events in the South following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. It examines the social, economic, and political implications of these laws in the decades following their passage, discussing the empowerment of black southerners, white resistance, accommodation and acceptance, and the nation's political will. The book also provides a fascinating history of the often-overlooked period of race relations during the presidential administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, and both George H. W. and George W. Bush.

America’s First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark is a political and intellectual biography of one of the foremost activists, intellectuals, orators, and politicians in 19th century African-American history whose life is a testament to the black radical intellectual and political traditions. As a black radical intellectual, Peter H. Clark (1829-1925) used education, oratory, and editorials to confront the American conscience, critique the hypocrisies in the national discourse, and articulate a radical, more inclusive, democratic, and egalitarian vision of America. As a pioneer of the black radical political tradition, he used radical political ideas to forge a path to full and equal citizenship for his people. He embraced everything from radical abolitionism to revolutionary armed violence to socialism. As the first known black socialist, Clark was just one of a few native-born American leaders in a movement dominated by German immigrants. He became one of the most influential of the American socialists and his socialist lectures between 1876 and 1879 stand as the foundation of early black socialist thought. Although he never held a formal political position, Clark proved to be an astute politician who used both parties as tools to get what he wanted for African Americans and himself: political power. He exerted great influence on legislators, Ohio governors, Presidents, and Supreme Court Justices-- all of whom knew him personally and sought his help in courting the African-American vote. In his quest for power, he employed every strategy imaginable, including critiquing his party from within, joining factional and third parties, playing machine politics, advocating political realignment and political independence, and bribery. This book ultimately chronicles the rise and fall of a man who became corrupted by an unrelenting quest for political power.

This book explores what James Weldon Johnson called the “art approach to the Negro problem.” The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) developed a strategy that attempted to eradicate racial prejudice through altering the way African Americans were portrayed in a wide range of media and through the development and promotion of black literary and artistic talent. It launched a number of cultural campaigns during its first half century, which included publishing art and literature in its magazine and encouraging the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, using the arts to change white attitudes toward lynching, protesting against racial stereotypes in film and television, and lobbying for more positive depictions of African Americans. The book asks what this work reveals about the NAACP as an organization and how it approached questions of assimilation, cultural pluralism, class bias, cultural elitism, censorship, and propaganda. Finally, Art for Equality examines the relationship between culture and civil rights. It argues that the NAACP's cultural strategy was designed to complement its other work by changing white attitudes toward the race and by forging a black identity. As such its cultural campaigns should be evaluated as one front in the battle for racial equality.

On June 8, 1883, Rev. Elisha Green was traveling by train from Maysville to Paris, Kentucky. At Millersburg, about forty students from the Millersburg Female College crowded onto the train, accompanied by their music teacher, Frank L. Bristow, and the college president, George T. Gould. Gould grabbed the reverend by the shoulder and ordered him to give up his seat. When Green refused, Bristow and Gould assaulted him until the conductor intervened and ordered the assailants to stop or he would throw them off of the train. Friends advised Green to take legal action, and he did, winning his case against his assailants in March 1884, though with only token compensation. The significance of this case lies not only in the prevailing justice of the 1800s, but also in the fact that a black man won a lawsuit against two white men. In The Assault on Elisha Green: Race and Religion in a Kentucky Community, historian Randolph Paul Runyon recounts one man's pursuit of justice over violence and racism in the nineteenth century. He tells the story of Green's life and follows the network of relationships that led to the event of the assault. Tracing these three men's lives brings the reader from the slavery era to the eve of the First World War, from Kentucky to New Mexico, from Covington to the Kentucky River Palisades, with particular focus on Mason and Bourbon Counties. In this engagingly written tale, Runyon masterfully interweaves background information with the immediacy of the harrowing attack and its aftermath, revealing the true character of the primary actors and the racial tensions unique to a border state.

Without question, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is the face of the civil rights revolution that reshaped the social and political landscape of the United States. Although many biographers and historians have examined Dr. King's activism, few have recognized the pivotal role that the people of Montgomery, Alabama, played in preparing him for leadership. King arrived in Montgomery as a virtually unknown doctoral student, but his activities there—from organizing the Montgomery bus boycott to building relationships with local activists such as Rufus Lewis, E. D. Nixon, and Virginia Durr—established him as the movement's most visible leader. This book illustrates how the people of Montgomery influenced King as much as he influenced them. In Montgomery, brave citizens, both black and white, spearheaded a protest movement that also launched King's public ministry. It demonstrates that spending his formative years in the city of Montgomery gave King the skills and experience to become a hero to generations of Americans.

One of the lesser-known stories of the Civil War is the role played by escaped slaves in the Union blockade along the Atlantic coast. From the beginning of the war, many African American refugees sought avenues of escape to the North. Due to their sheer numbers, those who reached Union forces presented a problem for the military. The problem was partially resolved by the First Confiscation Act of 1861, which permitted the seizure of property used in support of the South's war effort, including slaves. Eventually regarded as contraband of war, the runaways became known as contrabands. This book examines the relationship between the Union Navy and the contrabands. The navy established colonies for the former slaves and, in return, some contrabands served as crewmen on navy ships and gunboats and as river pilots, spies, and guides. The book presents a rare picture of the contrabands and casts light on the vital contributions of African Americans to the Union Navy and the Union cause.

Situated on the banks of the Ohio River, Louisville, Kentucky, represents a cultural and geographical intersection of North and South. Throughout its history, Louisville has simultaneously displayed northern and southern characteristics in its race relations. In their struggles against racial injustice in the mid-twentieth century, activists in Louisville crossed racial, economic, and political dividing lines to form a wide array of alliances not seen in other cities of its size. This book provides the first comprehensive look at the distinctive elements of Louisville's civil rights movement. The book frames the analysis by defining a border as a space where historical patterns and social concerns overlap. From this vantage point, it argues that broad coalitions of Louisvillians waged long-term, interconnected battles during the city's civil rights movement. It shows that Louisville's border city dynamics influenced both its racial tensions and its citizens' approaches to change. Unlike African Americans in southern cities, Louisville's black citizens did not face entrenched restrictions against voting and other forms of civic engagement. Louisville schools were integrated relatively peacefully in 1956, long before their counterparts in the Deep South. However, the city bore the marks of Jim Crow segregation in public accommodations until the 1960s. Louisville joined other southern cities that were feeling the heat of racial tensions, primarily during open housing and busing conflicts (more commonly seen in the North) in the late 1960s and 1970s. In response to Louisville's unique blend of racial problems, activists employed northern models of voter mobilization and lobbying, as well as methods of civil disobedience usually seen in the South.

Between 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson defined affirmative action as a legitimate federal goal, and 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon named one of affirmative action's chief antagonists the head of the Department of Labor, government officials at all levels addressed racial economic inequality in earnest. Providing members of historically disadvantaged groups an equal chance at obtaining limited and competitive positions, affirmative action had the potential to alienate large numbers of white Americans, even those who had viewed school desegregation and voting rights in a positive light. Thus, affirmative action was — and continues to be — controversial. This book examines federal efforts to diversify the construction trades from the 1950s through the 1970s, offering valuable insights into the origins of affirmative action-related policy. The book analyzes how community activism pushed the federal government to address issues of racial exclusion and marginalization in the construction industry with programs in key American cities.

This book analyzes World War I-era South Carolina, a state whose white minority maintained political power by rigidly enforcing white supremacy over an African American majority. Considering the aspirations and actions of both black and white reformers, the book looks at the influence of a multifaceted ideology of white supremacy that became a barrier to the region's progress. Detailing African American resistance to white supremacy long before the Civil Rights era, the book illuminates the critical nature of South Carolina to the civil rights movement.

Using the borderland community of Cairo, Illinois as a case study, this book chronicles the Black church’s overlooked contributions to the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. While Black Power’s reverberations in the church – from radicalized clergy to new institutions and theologies – have received due attention, their impact on grassroots struggles has not. Shifting focus from the seminary to the streets, this project traces the dynamic interaction between the Black church and Black Power at a critical flashpoint. Identified by contemporaries as the site of the country’s longest protracted struggle for racial justice, Cairo captured national attention and became a potent symbol of Black working-class insurgency and a beacon of radical Black Christianity. In a period plagued by sectarianism, the Cairo United Front assembled a surprisingly broad-based coalition under the banner of a new spiritual philosophy and a set of shared cultural practices rooted in the Black church. However, in an era of conservative ascendancy Black Power’s reliance upon such funds proved to be a double-edged sword. By the mid-1970s, white denominational organizations retreated under mounting opposition from state agencies and their own congregants. This project situates grassroots activists, rather than trained religious theorists, as key agents in the production, consumption, and transmission of Black Theology.

This book explores the expulsion and enslavement of free people of color in the antebellum South. It considers why Southern states moved towards expelling and enslaving free blacks in the 1850s, and it situates these legislative debates within the context of a growing number of restrictions imposed upon free people of color over the course of the antebellum era. Explanations about why some free people of color petitioned for residency rights or enslavement are at the heart of this book, which argues that some free people of color placed their families first in “choosing” enslavement over freedom. Anxious about being separated from beloved family members through increasingly repressive expulsion laws. In the face of rising impoverishment, some free blacks took the desperate measure of seeking enslavement for themselves, and sometimes their family members. Legislation on expulsion and enslavement allowed free people of color to petition state legislatures or country courts requesting residency or bondage, and free blacks used the law to seek both during the 1850s. Requests for enslavement, while sometimes motivated largely by the oppressive pressure of whites, were also influenced by the initiative of free people of color themselves.

This book documents the history of Brooklyn CORE from 1960-1964. The everyday, internal dynamics of this interracial chapter, and its relationship with National CORE and the wider movement, take center stage in this drama of how women and men in the urban North built one of the country’s most notable protest organizations of the early 1960s. Brooklyn CORE’s campaigns to open housing and job opportunities for African Americans and Puerto Ricans, and its efforts to improve local public education and environmental conditions, are the main topics of this book. Focusing on Brooklyn CORE’s protest campaigns shows how difficult it was for activists in northern cities to bring about permanent economic and social change through non-violent, dramatic, direct action protests. Frustrated in its attempts to move the system through “acceptable” means, Brooklyn CORE resorted to desperate measures, such as a threatened stall-in at the 1964 World’s Fair. The reaction of politicians and media sources revealed the power of those in control to define the bounds of legitimate protest. Despite the chapter’s disintegration in the mid-1960s, which had little to do with the movement’s ideological shift toward Black Power and Black Nationalism, one of the purposes of this book is to find Brooklyn CORE’s lasting influence even in its apparent defeats. Most important, an examination of Brooklyn CORE’s history reveals how the northern movement’s goals to eliminate racial discrimination and class inequality in American cities have remained largely unfulfilled because of structural forces far beyond a single organization’s power to change.

Gateway to Equality demonstrates that from the 1930s to the 1960s, a critical mass of black working-class women forged a most expansive social justice struggle for economic dignity in St. Louis. Women mobilized and resisted as they sought jobs, a living wage, decent working conditions, affordable housing, and economic projection. Their community-based economic politics drew public attention to their status as key members of the urban working class and disrupted mainstream conceptualizations such as “worker,” “the working class,” and “the labor movement.” With support from black middle-class women reformers, black working-class women summoned the broader public sphere to embrace concern and responsibility for black women’s survival Merging women’s rights, labor, and civil rights agendas, black working-class women forged struggles that challenged and disrupted political discourses and practices as they questioned the role of the state, the limits and possibilities of American citizenship and democracy, and the reach and uses of economic power.

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, alumni and students from historically black colleges and universities contributed to the American Protestant mission movement in West Africa. Those contributions extended beyond the manual labor endeavors promoted by Booker T. Washington and the Phelps Stokes Fund; African American missionaries also adapted classical studies and self-help ideology to a transnational context. This book analyzes the effects and significance of black education strategies through the ministries of Althea Brown and Alonzo Edmiston from 1902 to 1941. Brown specialized in language, music, and cultural analysis while her husband engaged in preaching, agricultural research, and mediation on behalf of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission in what became the Belgian Congo. Personal and professional partnership motivated the two missionaries to interpret their responsibilities as a combination of training from Fisk University, Tuskegee Institute, and Stillman Institute. Each of these institutions held a symbolic meaning in the contexts of the Southern Presbyterian Church and European colonialism in Africa. Denominational administrators and colonial officials understood African American missionaries as leaders with the potential to challenge racial hierarchies. This perception influenced the shifting relations between African Christians and black missionaries during the development of village churches. The Edmistons’ pedagogical interest in adapting to local conditions encouraged Presbyterian converts and students to promote their interests and their authority within the Congo Mission. At the same time, occasional segregation and expulsion of African American missionaries from overseas ministry enabled them to influence early civil rights activities in the American South.

Amid general unification behind anticommunism, Emmett Louis Till's 1955 lynching engendered regional stories and illuminated racial dispositions that placed center stage all the vitriolic hatred that remained as a legacy of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy. Chronicling events surrounding the lynching, regional press coverage of the Till saga marked a response to people's views of the place in which they lived and how their locale compared to the rest of the nation. Using regionalism as a lens, this book provides a textual analysis of press coverage of Emmett Till's lynching. The regional press strategically highlighted aspects of the Till saga that best framed their perspective on American race relations, and, through their letters to the editor, readers both supported their local papers' coverage and challenged the staff to intensify their reports. Even with the horrific nature of the crime and the national climate after the 1954 and 1955 Brown v. Board of Education decisions, Till's death would not have garnered the attention it received were it not for his family, the black press, and civil rights organizations. Mamie Till-Mobley allowed the world to see gruesome images of her son, and civil rights organizations and black news outlets lambasted the state of Mississippi for the crime. The Emmett Till saga struck a chord for many who followed the saga through the pages of regional and national publications, and, unwilling to let his brutal murder go unchallenged, they leaped into the burgeoning modern civil rights movement and formed the Emmett Till generation.

It is 1960, six years after the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation in the public schools was prohibited and states were ordered to come up with plans for integrating African Americans into the white school systems. An unanticipated response to desegregation was that not all African Americans favored the process, because it meant that some of their cherished institutions would be changed forever. Few such institutions were affected more than the strong tradition of black high school basketball. And nowhere in the nation was that tradition stronger than in basketball-mad Kentucky, where more than fifty black high schools proudly competed in their own league for more than a quarter century. The Kentucky experience of desegregation reflects the dissonance when logic meets emotion. The story centers on Lincoln Institute, a black high school near Louisville founded in 1912 after the state legislature passed a law “to prohibit white and colored persons from attending the same school.” Lincoln Institute was led by a charismatic academic and theologian named Whitney M. Young. In more than three decades as the school's leader, Young overcame prejudice, funding issues, and politics to create a bastion of excellence and respect in the black community. In Integrated, former Lincoln Institute players, students, and teachers tell their stories of angst, regret, and resilience during a largely ignored transitional period in the nation's story of desegregation. Their experiences within the broader racial themes of the 1950s and 1960s provide a unique perspective on one of America's most transformative periods.

This collective biography of James and Esther Cooper Jackson argues that, in the face of major political transformations, activists responded to new political contexts and drew on their own personal needs, demands, and relationships to craft their contributions to the black freedom movement. A black Communist couple, Esther and Jack navigated through difficult circumstances, including the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, and continued to influence the trajectory of black freedom in the twentieth-century United States. But their approaches changed as politics shifted, as their family grew, and as their relationship evolved. By following one couple over the course of a sixty-five-year, gender-egalitarian marriage, this work offers a new look at the history of social movements as it illustrates how individuals and families responded to change and revised their ideas about participation in movements as they matured. As activists during the Popular Front, McCarthy, civil rights, and post–civil rights years, Esther and Jack held on to their core ideals while adapting to the dominant trends. Their lives also illuminate the relationship between mainstream civil rights organizations and the Left by illustrating that the political spectrum in the black freedom movement was consistently more fluid, complex, and informed by earlier activist trends than the traditional narrative suggests.

This is the first book-length study of enslaved men and masculinity in the antebellum South. It examines the close relationships shared among enslaved men and argues that the lives of these men were intertwined. Across the antebellum South, enslaved men created an all-male subculture, engaging in homosocial recreational pursuits such as drinking, gambling, wrestling, and hunting. Through these activities, they constructed markers of status, identity, and masculinity and forged lasting friendships. The book argues that homosocial company was integral to the gendered identity and self-esteem of enslaved men. The emotional landscape they created together offered them a vital mutual support network through which to resist the horrors of slavery. Through each other, enslaved men created a secret world that defied and subverted the authority of the slaveholder. The author argues that enslaved men, together, refused to be emasculated.

The story of the Ohio River and its settlements are an integral part of American history, particularly during the country's westward expansion. The vibrant African American communities along the Ohio's banks, however, have rarely been studied in depth. Blacks have lived in the Ohio River Valley since the late eighteenth century, and since the river divided the free labor North and the slave labor South, black communities faced unique challenges. This book examines the lives of African Americans in the counties along the northern and southern banks of the Ohio River both before and in the years directly following the Civil War. Gleaning material from biographies and primary sources written as early as the 1860s, as well as public records, the book separates historical truth from the legends that grew up surrounding these communities. The Ohio River may have separated freedom and slavery, but it was not a barrier to the racial prejudice in the region. The book compares early black communities on the northern shore with their southern counterparts, noting that many similarities existed despite the fact that the Roebling Suspension Bridge, constructed in 1866 at Cincinnati, was the first bridge to join the shores. Free blacks in the lower Midwest had difficulty finding employment and adequate housing. Education for their children was severely restricted if not completely forbidden, and blacks could neither vote nor testify against whites in court. Indiana and Illinois passed laws to prevent black migrants from settling within their borders, and blacks already living in those states were pressured to leave. Despite these challenges, black river communities continued to thrive during slavery, after emancipation, and throughout the Jim Crow era. Families were established despite forced separations and the lack of legally recognized marriages. Blacks were subjected to intimidation and violence on both shores and were denied even the most basic state-supported services. As a result, communities were left to devise their own strategies for preventing homelessness, disease, and unemployment.

During the Great Migration, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became a mecca for African Americans seeking better job opportunities, wages, and living conditions. The city's thriving economy and vibrant social and cultural scenes inspired dreams of prosperity and a new start, but this urban haven was not free of discrimination and despair. In the face of injustice, activists formed the Urban League of Pittsburgh (ULP) in 1918 to combat prejudice and support the city's growing African American population. In this broad-ranging history, Joe William Trotter Jr. uses this noteworthy branch of the National Urban League to provide new insights into an organization that has often faced criticism for its social programs' deep class and gender limitations. Surveying issues including housing, healthcare, and occupational mobility, Trotter underscores how the ULP -- often in concert with the Urban League's national headquarters -- bridged social divisions to improve the lives of black citizens of every class. He also sheds new light on the branch's nonviolent direct-action campaigns and places these powerful grassroots operations within the context of the modern Black Freedom Movement. The impact of the National Urban League is a hotly debated topic in African American social and political history. Trotter's study provides valuable new insights that demonstrate how the organization has relieved massive suffering and racial inequality in US cities for more than a century.