Civil Rights History

Abstract Memorials and monuments retell the past through a variety of visual media, but especially through words, narratives, and other textual references. Surprisingly, geographers have devoted limited attention to interpreting the actual phrases inscribed into places of memory and how these narratives lie at the heart of the struggle to be remembered (or forgotten) for social groups traditionally excluded from dominant representations of public history. Employing a pedagogical framework called “textual politics,” I describe two ...

The Free Southern Theater was a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) initiative that wanted to bring theatrical performance to rural communities in the deep Southeastern United States. To interpret the critical praxis and broader analytical importance of the Free Southern Theater, we develop and apply two conceptual frameworks: radical placemaking and epistemic violence/justice. As we assert in this paper, the theater program was demonstrative of the fundamental but radical ways SNCC sought to remake places and institutions and create new ones that would respond to the struggles of poor Black southerners, build community capacity for social change, reaffirm visions of Black belonging, and provide respite and self-care for racism-weary communities. The Free Southern Theater also reflected the value that SNCC placed on mobilizing information, communication, and the politics of representation to combat white supremacy, while also articulating and legitimizing an explicitly...

This article recovers a forgotten episode in the history of human rights: the 1944 ‘Declaration on Human Rights' sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. With an unprecedented media campaign and endorsements from ‘1300 distinguished Americans of all faiths,' the 1944 ‘Declaration' at first glance appears to be a prime example of wartime pluralist consensus and liberal internationalism in the USA. Yet as a closer examination of the document’s genesis and reception reveal, the document actually generated a striking array of polar-opposite reactions, including support from conservative isolationists, criticism from civil libertarians, and sharply split reactions from fellow Jewish groups and Catholic organizations. In recapturing this story of political conflict and ideological confusion, I propose to disentangle the stories of liberal internationalism and human rights. Rather than view mid-twentieth-century human rights history as a tale of the 1940s emergence of global civil society and US ethical cosmopolitanism before the arrival of Cold War politics, we do better to see it more as a story of faltering attempts to forge a language of US universalism that would appeal to the moral imagination of the USA.

We five scholars saw Fire!!!’s call to rethink and revisit the Black freedom movement as a challenge. Not only were we inspired by the call, but we wanted to share how we learned from and had been challenged by one another’s work, as we rethought and rewrote freedom movement narratives over the last decade. We each picked primary sources we believe are undervalued and rarely taught in the mainstream narratives of civil rights. We all wrote short descriptions of our submissions: what do these documents teach us about the movement? Then, to invoke the power of group-centered leadership, or the movement idea of call and response, two of us responded to each scholar’s piece. We hope the result enriches and challenges the teaching and sharing of the movement.

We five scholars saw Fire!!!’s call to rethink and revisit the Black freedom movement as a challenge. Not only were we inspired by the call, but we wanted to share how we learned from and had been challenged by one another’s work, as we rethought and rewrote freedom movement narratives over the last decade. We each picked primary sources we believe are undervalued and rarely taught in the mainstream narratives of civil rights. We all wrote short descriptions of our submissions: what do these documents teach us about the movement? Then, to invoke the power of group-centered leadership, or the movement idea of call and response, two of us responded to each scholar’s piece. We hope the result enriches and challenges the teaching and sharing of the movement.

An opinion piece, it clarifies among the popular audience a brief account of the history of the social construction of discrimination towards members of the LGBTQ community, the consequences of the conflation of religious faith -- as the dominant, historical source of the definition of marriage -- with public policy, and to raise the case that the movement towards expanded political and civil rights to now include the LGBTQ community must be seen as part of the comprehensive struggle for human liberation particularly directed against the forces of neocolonialism, manifested contemporarily by neoliberalism, which have thrived through the maintenance of oppressive patriarchal, authoritarian institutions.