Virtual Library

This collection of writings offers a glimpse into the minds of three N.A.A.C.P. leaders who occupied the center of black thought and action during some of the most troublesome and pivotal times of the civil rights movement. The volume delineates fifty-seven years of the N.A.A.C.P.'s program under the successive direction of James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Roy Wilkins. These writings illustrate the vital roles of these three leaders in building a peoples liberation, underscoring not only their progressive influence throughout their time in power, but also a vision of the future as race relations enter the 21st Century. Much of the material, notably "The Secretary's Reports to the Board," is published here for the first time, offering an invaluable resource for those seeking a deeper knowledge of the history of race in America.

Celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary in February 2009, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been the leading and best-known African American civil rights organization in the United States. It has played a major, and at times decisive, role in most of the important developments in the twentieth century civil rights struggle. Drawing on original and previously unpublished scholarship from leading researchers in the United States, Britain, and Europe, this important collection of sixteen original essays offers new and invaluable insights into the work and achievements of the association. The first part of the book offers challenging reappraisals of two of the NAACP's best-known national spokespersons, Walter White and Roy Wilkins. Other essays analyze the association's cultural initiatives and the key role played by its public-relations campaigns in the mid 1950s to counter segregationist propaganda and win over the hearts and minds of American public opinion in the wake of the NAACP's landmark legal victory in Brown v. Board of Education. Others provide thought-provoking accounts of the association's complex and difficult relationship with Martin Luther King, the post-World War II Civil Rights movement, and Black Power radicals of the 1960s. The second part of the collection focuses on the work of the NAACP at state, city, and local levels, examining its grassroots organization throughout the nation from Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit in the North, to California in the West, as well as states across the South including Virginia, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. Providing detailed and fascinating information on hitherto little explored aspects of the association's work, these studies complement the previous essays by demonstrating the impact national initiatives had on local activists and analyzing the often-strained relations between the NAACP national office in New York and its regional branches.

By reassessing the history of the civil rights movement and examining questions and areas of research that need to be addressed by future studies, New Directions in Civil Rights Studies challenges students of the civil rights movement to broaden their vision and, at the same time, to look more closely at the people, the communities, and the networks that provide the rich texture of the movement's history.

“Terror is the given of the place.” The place is El Salvador in 1982, at the ghastly height of its civil war. Didion “brings the country to life” (The New York Times), delivering an anatomy of a particular brand of political terror—its mechanisms, rationales, and intimate relation to United States foreign policy.

As ash travels from battlefields to body dumps, Didion interviews a puppet president, and considers the distinctly Salvadoran grammar of the verb “to disappear.” Here, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean gives us a book that is germane to any country in which bloodshed has become a standard tool of politics.

This study of the Mississippi civil rights movement and the War on Poverty examines the relationship between social movements and policy implementation. A "movement infrastructure" model is developed that focuses on organizational structure, resources, and leadership to account for the impact of social movements on policy implementation. A two-tiered research design is employed that includes (1) a quantitative analysis of poverty programs in Mississippi counties from 1965 to 1971, and (2) case studies that show the complex interaction between the civil rights movement, resistance by whites, local powerholders, and federal agencies. The quantitative analysis shows that counties with strong movement infrastructures generated greater funding for Community Action Programs. The case studies show that movements were excluded from the initial formation of these programs as local whites attempted to preempt civil rights activists. However, in counties with strong movement infrastructures, activists were able to gain access to decision-making bodies and shape the content of poverty programs.

This book places the issue of disability squarely in a social context and considers the implications of this view for the provision of services and for social work practice. In so doing, it starts from the ways in which disabled people have re-defined disability as a social rather than an individual problem and the influence that their organizations have had on service provision. It discusses the implications of this in a variety of different settings and across the life cycle.

The Black Revolution on Campus is the definitive account of an extraordinary but forgotten chapter of the black freedom struggle. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Black students organized hundreds of protests that sparked a period of crackdown, negotiation, and reform that profoundly transformed college life. At stake was the very mission of higher education. Black students demanded that public universities serve their communities; that private universities rethink the mission of elite education; and that black colleges embrace self-determination and resist the threat of integration. Most crucially, black students demanded a role in the definition of scholarly knowledge.<br> <br> <br> <br> Martha Biondi masterfully combines impressive research with a wealth of interviews from participants to tell the story of how students turned the slogan "black power" into a social movement. Vividly demonstrating the critical linkage between the student movement and changes in university culture, Biondi illustrates how victories in establishing Black Studies ultimately produced important intellectual innovations that have had a lasting impact on academic research and university curricula over the past 40 years. This book makes a major contribution to the current debate on Ethnic Studies, access to higher education, and opportunity for all.

The social movement for African-American civil rights is one of most studied and celebrated social phenomena of the twentieth century. One factor in explaining the movement's successes, however, is usually given little if any explicit attention by civil rights scholars, and has not been explained adequately. This is the impact of the Cold on domestic United States race politics, and the process through the Cold War lessened resistance to civil rights movement demands. While past studies of the civil rights movement have properly emphasized sized such variables as demographic shifts, changes in the economy, and social-movement organizational dynamics, the purpose of this article is (1) to stress the contributing importance of America's Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union in the development of black civil rights; and (2) to demonstrate with this important case how the political-process model for the study of social movements can be clarified and made more precise through insights from neoinstitutional theory, now mostly identified with the cultural analysis of organizations. Combining the political-process model's emphasis on agency and opportunity with neoinstitutional theory's stress on legitimacy can help develop the language to explain the Cold War/civil rights connection.

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Mrs. Rosa Parks, weary after a long day at work, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man...and ignited the explosion that was the civil rights movement in America. In this powerful saga, Morris tells the complete story behind the ten years that transformed America, tracing the essential role of the black community organizations that was the real power behind the civil rights movement. Drawing on interviews with more than fifty key leaders, original documents, and other moving firsthand material, he brings to life the people behind the scenes who led the fight to end segregation, providing a critical new understanding of the dynamics of social change.

While usually seen in positive terms, transnational mobilization can sometimes hurt movements as well as help them. An examination of the transnational network of organizations supporting civil rights demands in Northern Ireland between 1967 and 1972 suggests that international involvement, not only can exacerbate problems encountered by domestic coalitions, but can also introduce additional obstacles to the effective pursuit of social change. Using a wide range of sources, four types of impediments to positive issue network dynamics are conceptualized and illustrated—structural, organizational, cultural, and ideological. Structurally, the civil rights network brought together groups outside of Northern Ireland that, otherwise, would not have attempted to cooperate because of diametrically opposed positions on domestic issues. In terms of organization, spatial variations in Irish Diaspora and New Left protest limited sustained network activity to a few societies. Weak ties between organizations located in different societies reduced the likelihood of cooperation. Competition for resources led to the formation of rival transnational blocs within the issue network. Cross-societal differences in cultural norms and group identities led to clashes. Interactions across borders exported and amplified ideological tensions already existing on the domestic-level. The findings suggest that political process assumptions regarding the effects of the presence of external allies require qualification.