|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
In The South Strikes Back, Hodding Carter III describes the birth
of the white Citizens' Council in the Mississippi Delta and its
spread throughout the South. Carter begins with a brief historical
overview and traces the formation of the Council, its treatment of
African Americans, and its impact on white communities, concluding
with an analysis of the Council's future in Mississippi. Through
economic boycott, social pressure, and political influence, the
Citizens' Council was able to subdue its opponents and dominate the
communities in which it operated. Carter considers trends working
against the Council-the federal government's efforts to improve
voting rights for African Americans, economic growth within African
American communities, and especially the fact that the Citizens'
Council was founded on the defense of segregation's status quo and
dedicated to its preservation. As Carter writes in the final
chapter, "Defense of the status quo, as history has shown often
enough, is an arduous task at best. When, in a democracy such as
ours, it involves the repression of a minority, it becomes an
impossibility.
No Straight Path tells the stories of ten successful female
historians who came of age in an era when it was unusual for women
to pursue careers in academia, especially in the field of history.
These first-person accounts illuminate the experiences women of the
post- World War II generation encountered when they chose to enter
this male-dominated professional world. None of the contributors
took a straight path into the profession; most first opted instead
for the more conventional pursuits of college, public-school
teaching, marriage, and motherhood. Despite these commonalities,
their stories are individually unique: one rose from poverty in
Arkansas to attend graduate school at Rutgers before earning the
chairmanship of the history department at the University of
Memphis; another pursued an archaeology degree, studied social
work, and served as a college administrator before becoming a
history professor at Tulane University; a third was a lobbyist who
attended seminary, then taught high school, entered the history
graduate program at Indiana University, and helped develop two
honors colleges before entering academia; and yet another grew up
in segregated Memphis and then worked in public schools in New
Jersey before earning a graduate degree in history at the
University of Memphis, where she now teaches. The experiences of
the other historians featured in this collection are equally varied
and distinctive. Several themes emerge in their collective stories.
Most assumed they would become teachers, nurses, secretaries, or
society ladies- the only ""respectable"" choices available to women
at the time. The obligations of marriage and family, they believed,
would far outweigh their careers outside the home. Upon making the
unusual decision, at the time, to move beyond high-school teaching
and attend graduate school, few grasped the extent to which men
dominated the field of history or that they would be perceived by
many as little more than objects of sexual desire. The work/home
balance proved problematic for them throughout their careers, as
they struggled to combine the needs and demands of their families
with the expectations of the profession. These women had no road
maps to follow. The giants who preceded them- Gerda Lerner, Anne
Firor Scott, Linda K. Kerber, Joan Wallach Scott, A. Elizabeth
Taylor, and others- had breached the gates but only with great
drive and determination. Few of the contributors to No Straight
Path expected to undertake such heroics or to rise to that level of
accomplishment. They may have had modest expectations when entering
the field, but with the help of female scholars past and present,
they kept climbing and reached a level of success within the
profession that holds great promise for the women who follow.
In Resisting Equality Stephanie R. Rolph examines the history of
the Citizens' Council, an organisation committed to coordinating
opposition to desegregation and black voting rights. In the first
comprehensive study of this racist group, Rolph follows the
Citizens' Council from its establishment in the Mississippi Delta,
through its expansion into other areas of the country and its
success in incorporating elements of its agenda into national
politics, to its formal dissolution in 1989. Founded in 1954, two
months after the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S.
Supreme Court, the Council spread rapidly in its home state of
Mississippi. Initially, the organisation relied on local chapters
to monitor signs of black activism and take action to suppress that
activism through economic and sometimes violent means. As the
decade came to a close, however, the Council's influence expanded
into Mississippi's political institutions, silencing white
moderates and facilitating a wave of terror that severely
obstructed black Mississippians' participation in the civil rights
movement. As the Citizens' Council reached the peak of its power in
Mississippi, its ambitions extended beyond the South. Alliances
with like-minded organisations across the country supplemented
waning influence at home, and the Council movement found itself in
league with the earliest sparks of conservative ascension,
cultivating consistent messages of grievance against minority
groups and urging the necessity of white unity. Much more than a
local arm of white terror, the Council's work intersected with
anticommunism, conservative ideology, grassroots activism, and
Radical Right organisations that facilitated its journey from the
margins into mainstream politics. Perhaps most crucially, Rolph
examines the extent to which the organisation survived the
successes of the civil rights movement and found continued
relevance even after the Council's campaign to preserve
state-sanctioned forms of white supremacy ended in defeat. Using
the Council's own materials, papers from its political allies, oral
histories, and newspaper accounts, Resisting Equality illuminates
the motives and mechanisms of this destructive group.
In The South Strikes Back, Hodding Carter III describes the birth
of the white Citizens' Council in the Mississippi Delta and its
spread throughout the South. Carter begins with a brief historical
overview and traces the formation of the Council, its treatment of
African Americans, and its impact on white communities, concluding
with an analysis of the Council's future in Mississippi. Through
economic boycott, social pressure, and political influence, the
Citizens' Council was able to subdue its opponents and dominate the
communities in which it operated. Carter considers trends working
against the Council-the federal government's efforts to improve
voting rights for African Americans, economic growth within African
American communities, and especially the fact that the Citizens'
Council was founded on the defense of segregation's status quo and
dedicated to its preservation. As Carter writes in the final
chapter, "Defense of the status quo, as history has shown often
enough, is an arduous task at best. When, in a democracy such as
ours, it involves the repression of a minority, it becomes an
impossibility.
|
You may like...
Finding Dory
Ellen DeGeneres, Albert Brooks, …
Blu-ray disc
(1)
R40
Discovery Miles 400
Tenet
John David Washington, Robert Pattinson
Blu-ray disc
(1)
R54
R45
Discovery Miles 450
|