African American civil rights

Blaxploitation: 'Foxy Brown Trailer - Directed by Jack Hill and starring Antonio Fargas, Peter Brown, Terry Carter, Terry Carter, Harry Holcombe.'

'In 1921, White rioters destroyed a beacon of Black prosperity and security.'

'The Ku Klux Klan was at the height of its popularity when more than 30,000 members — racists and anti-Semites marching 22 abreast and 14 rows deep — paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington on Aug. 8, 1925.'

'In the summer of 1955, administrators at the University of Texas at Austin had a problem: The U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, handed down the previous year, required educational institutions to integrate their classrooms. But the regents overseeing the state university system’s flagship campus, the old alumni who formed the donor base, and the segregationist political forces that pulled the purse strings were all determined to find ways to keep African Americans from stepping foot on campus.'

'America in the summer of 1919 ran red with blood from racial violence, and yet today, 100 years later, not many people know it even happened.'

'It’s a striking photograph: six young black women with a spectrum of complexions, faces paused in mid-exclamation, fists raised in simultaneous solidarity at a Black Panther rally. Even their afros are emphatic and resolute as they stand in tandem in Oakland’s DeFremery Park, then and now a popular gathering place for the community’s African-Americans.'

'African American women played major roles in local and national organizing efforts and frequently were the majority in local chapters of groups as dissimilar as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Black Panther Party. Even familiar names like Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King have become little more than sanitized national icons, while their decades-long efforts to secure racial, economic, and gender justice remain relatively unknown. Aside from activists and scholars, even fewer of us know much, if anything, about the female allies of the black freedom struggle, including white southerners as well as other women of color. A closer look at the women who made enormous contributions to both the modern civil rights and Black Power movements sheds new light on these struggles, including the historic national victories we think we fully understand, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In short, examining women’s participation in the “long civil rights movement,” which historians increasingly date to the New Deal and World War II, calls for a redefinition of more conventional notions of leadership, protest, and politics.'

 'Many extraordinary women, and often unsung heroes, played significant roles in the Civil Rights Movement and beyond. Their words and actions continue to inspire our work as we fight for a better and equal world for all people..

'African American leader and prominent figure in the Nation of Islam who articulated concepts of race pride and black nationalism in the early 1960s. After his assassination, the widespread distribution of his life story, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), made him an ideological hero, especially among black youth.'

'The Great War was a “transformative moment” for African Americans, who fought for the U.S. even as they were denied access to Democracy.'

'In “Race Against Time,” Jerry Mitchell chronicles belated efforts — many of them spurred by his own work as a journalist — to prosecute perpetrators of racially motivated violence in Alabama and Mississippi during the 1960s. Beginning in the 1980s, as a reporter for the Jackson, Miss., Clarion-Ledger, Mitchell decided to reinvestigate unsolved civil-rights-era murder cases, pursuing old leads, uncovering new evidence and publishing article after article after article. His journalistic coups revealed an uncanny ability to wheedle incriminating remarks from defensive suspects and damning observations from unfriendly witnesses.'

'This teacher-led lecture guides students through the key dilemmas facing the likes of MLK and JFK in this critical period.'

'Nearly 100 years after a race massacre left hundreds of black people dead, Tulsa began searching for evidence that victims of one of the country’s worst episodes of racial violence were buried in mass graves.'

The Nation review of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, by Kathleen Belew. The 'book isn’t only a definitive history of white-racist violence in late-20th-century America, but also a rigorous meditation on the relationship between American militarism abroad and extremism at home, with distressing implications for the United States in 2018 and beyond. Two fundamental insights underpin the book: first, that there exists a profound relationship between America’s military violence and domestic right-wing paramilitary organizations, and, second, that the character of that relationship underwent a decisive change in the late 1970s and early ’80s.' 

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'From violent riots to the adoption of a new state flag featuring a Confederate symbol, segregationists across the South fought to preserve a Jim Crow South.'

'Many women played important roles in the Civil Rights Movement, from leading local civil rights organizations to serving as lawyers on school segregation lawsuits. Their efforts to lead the movement were often overshadowed by men, who still get more attention and credit for its successes in popular historical narratives and commemorations.  Many women experienced gender discrimination and sexual harassment within the movement and later turned towards the feminist movement in the 1970s.  The Civil Rights History Project interviews with participants in the struggle include both expressions of pride in women’s achievements and also candid assessments about the difficulties they faced within the movement.'