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Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement offers the first, and as of…
2018, only comprehensive account of the 1955 murder, the trial, and the 2004-2007 FBI investigation into the case and Mississippi grand jury decision. By all accounts, it is the definitive account of the case. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. Anderson utilizes documents that had never been available to previous researchers, such as the trial transcript, long-hidden depositions by key players in the case, and interviews given by Carolyn Bryant to the FBI in 2004 (her first in fifty years), as well as other recently revealed FBI documents. Anderson also interviewed family members of the accused killers, most of whom agreed to talk for the first time, as well as several journalists who covered the murder trial in 1955. Till's murder and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement. Like no other event in modern history, the death of Emmett Till provoked people all over the United States to seek social change. Anderson's exhaustively researched book was also the basis for the ABC miniseries Women of the Movement, which was written/executive-produced by Marissa Jo Cerar; directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, Tina Mabry, Julie Dash, and Kasi Lemmons; and executive-produced by Jay-Z, Jay Brown, Tyran “Ty Ty” Smith, Will Smith, James Lassiter, Aaron Kaplan, Dana Honor, Michael Lohmann, Rosanna Grace, Alex Foster, John Powers Middleton, and David Clark. For over six decades the Till story has continued to haunt the South as the lingering injustice of Till's murder and the aftermath altered many lives. Fifty years after the murder, renewed interest in the case led the Justice Department to open an investigation into identifying and possibly prosecuting accomplices of the two men originally tried. Between 2004 and 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted the first real probe into the killing and turned up important information that had been lost for decades. Anderson covers the events that led up to this probe in great detail, as well as the investigation itself. This book will stand as the definitive work on Emmett Till for years to come. Incorporating much new information, the book demonstrates how the Emmett Till murder exemplifies the Jim Crow South at its nadir. The author accessed a wealth of new evidence. Anderson made a dozen trips to Mississippi and Chicago over a ten-year period to conduct research and interview witnesses and reporters who covered the trial. In Emmett Till, Anderson corrects the historical record and presents this critical saga in its entirety.Sowing the Wind: The Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890
Par Dorothy Overstreet Pratt. 2017
In 1890, Mississippi called a convention to rewrite its constitution. That convention became the singular event that marked the state's…
transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth and set the path for the state for decades to come. The primary purpose of the convention was to disfranchise African American voters as well as some poor whites. The result was a document that transformed the state for the next century. In Sowing the Wind, Dorothy Overstreet Pratt traces the decision to call that convention, examines the delegates' decisions, and analyzes the impact of their new constitution.Pratt argues the constitution produced a new social structure, which pivoted the state's culture from a class-based system to one centered upon race. Though state leaders had not anticipated this change, they were savvy in their manipulation of the issues. The new constitution effectively filled the goal of disfranchisement. Moreover, unlike the constitutions of many other southern states, it held up against attack for over seventy years. It also hindered the state socially and economically well into the twentieth century.On the Ground: The Black Panther Party in Communities across America
Par Judson L. Jeffries. 2010
The Black Panther Party suffers from a distorted image largely framed by television and print media, including the Panthers' own…
newspaper. These sources frequently reduced the entire organization to the Bay Area where the Panthers were founded, emphasizing the Panthers' militant rhetoric and actions rather than their community survival programs. This image, however, does not mesh with reality. The Panthers worked tirelessly at improving the life chances of the downtrodden regardless of race, gender, creed, or sexual orientation. In order to chronicle the rich history of the Black Panther Party, this anthology examines local Panther activities throughout the United States—in Seattle, Washington; Kansas City, Missouri; New Orleans, Louisiana; Houston, Texas; Des Moines, Iowa; and Detroit, Michigan. This approach features the voices of people who served on the ground—those who kept the offices in order, prepared breakfasts for school children, administered sickle cell anemia tests, set up health clinics, and launched free clothing drives. The essays shed new light on the Black Panther Party, re-evaluating its legacy in American cultural and political history. Just as important, this volume gives voice to those unsung Panthers whose valiant efforts have heretofore gone unnoticed, unheard, or ignored.Black Boys Burning: The 1959 Fire at the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School
Par Grif Stockley. 2017
On the morning of March 5, 1959, Luvenia Long was listening to gospel music when a news bulletin interrupted her…
radio program. Fire had engulfed the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville, thirteen miles outside of Little Rock. Her son Lindsey had been confined there since January 14, after a judge for juveniles found him guilty of stealing from a neighborhood store owner. To her horror, Lindsey was not among the forty-eight boys who had clawed their way through the windows of the dormitory to safety. Instead, he was among the twenty-one boys between the ages of thirteen and seventeen who burned to death. Black Boys Burning presents a focused explanation of how systemic poverty perpetuated by white supremacy sealed the fate of those students. A careful telling of the history of the school and fire, the book provides readers a fresh understanding of the broad implications of white supremacy. Grif Stockley’s research adds to an evolving understanding of the Jim Crow South, Arkansas’s history, the lawyers who capitalized on this tragedy, and the African American victims. In hindsight, the disaster at Wrightsville could have been predicted. Immediately after the fire, an unsigned editorial in the Arkansas Democrat noted long-term deterioration, including the wiring, of the buildings. After the Central High School desegregation crisis in 1957, the boys’ deaths eighteen months later were once again an embarrassment to Arkansas. The fire and its circumstances should have provoked southerners to investigate the realities of their “separate but equal institutions.” However, white supremacy ruled the investigations, and the grand jury declared the event to be an anomaly.The Civil Rights Movement in America (Chancellor Porter L. Fortune Symposium in Southern History Series)
Par David Levering Lewis. 1986
With essays and commentaries by David Levering Lewis, Clayborne Carson, Steven F. Lawson, Nancy J. Weiss, David J. Garrow, John…
Dittmer, Neil R. McMillen, Charles V. Hamilton, Mark V. Tushnet, William H. Chafe, and J. Mills Thornton III The Civil Rights Movement warrants continuing and extensive examination. The six papers in this collection, each supplemented by a follow-up assessment, contribute to a clearer perception of what caused and motivated the movement, of how it functioned, of the changes that occurred within it, and of its accomplishments and shortcomings. Its profound effect upon modern America has so greatly changed relations between the races that C. Vann Woodward has called it the “second revolution.” In a limited space, the eleven scholars range with a definitive view over a large subject. Their papers analyze and emphasize the Civil Rights Movement's important aspects: its origins and causes, its strategies and tactics for accomplishing black freedom, the creative tensions in its leadership, the politics of the movement in the key state of Mississippi, and the role of federal law and federal courts. In this collection a scholarly balance is achieved for each paper by a follow-up commentary from a significant authority. By deepening the understanding of the Civil Rights Movement, these essays underscore what has been gained through struggle, as well as acknowledging the goals that are yet to be attained.Big Jim Eastland: The Godfather of Mississippi
Par J. Lee Annis Jr.. 2016
For decades after the Second World War, Senator James O. Eastland (1904–1986) was one of the more intransigent leaders of…
the Deep South's resistance to what he called “the Second Reconstruction.” And yet he developed, late in his life, a very real friendship with state NAACP chair Aaron Henry. Big Jim Eastland provides the life story of this savvy, unpredictable powerhouse. From 1947 to 1978, Eastland wore that image of resistance proudly, even while recognizing from the beginning his was the losing side. Biographer J. Lee Annis Jr. chronicles such complexities extensively and also delves into many facets lesser known to the general public. Born in the Mississippi Delta as part of the elite planter class, Eastland was appointed to the US Senate in 1941 by Democratic Governor Paul B. Johnson Sr. Eastland ran for and won the Senate seat outright in 1942 and served in the Senate from 1943 until his retirement in 1978. A blunt man of few words but many contradictions, Eastland was an important player in Washington, from his initial stint in 1941 where he rapidly salvaged several key local projects from bungling intervention, to the 1970s when he shepherded the Supreme Court nominees of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford to Senate confirmation. Annis paints a full picture of the man, describing the objections Eastland raised to civil rights proposals and the eventual accommodations he needed to accept after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936
Par Mark Solomon. 1998
The Communist Party was the only political movement on the left in the late 1920s and 1930s to place racial…
justice and equality at the top of its agenda and to seek, and ultimately win, sympathy among African Americans. This historic effort to fuse red and black offers a rich vein of experience and constitutes the theme of The Cry Was Unity. Utilizing for the first time materials related to African Americans from the Moscow archives of the Communist Inter-national (Comintern), The Cry Was Unity traces the trajectory of the black-red relationship from the end of World War I to the tumultuous 1930s. From the just-recovered transcript of the pivotal debate on African Americans at the 6th Comintern Congress in 1928, the book assesses the impact of the Congress's declaration that blacks in the rural South constituted a nation within a nation, entitled to the right of self-determination. Despite the theory's serious flaws, it fused the black struggle for freedom and revolutionary content and demanded that white labor recognize blacks as indispensable allies. As the Great Depression unfolded, the Communists launched intensive campaigns against lynching, evictions, and discrimination in jobs and relief and opened within their own ranks a searing assault on racism. While the Party was never able to win a majority of white workers to the struggle for Negro rights, or to achieve the unqualified support of the black majority, it helped to lay the foundations for the freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. The Cry Was Unity underscores the successes and failures of the Communist-led left and the ways in which it fought against racism and inequality. This struggle comprises an important missing page that needs to be returned to the nation's history.Changing Channels: The Civil Rights Case that Transformed Television
Par Kay Mills. 2004
In the years before the civil rights era, American broadcasting reflected the interests of the white mainstream, especially in the…
South. Today, the face of local television throughout the nation mirrors the diversity of the local populations. The impetus for change began in 1964, when the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ and two black Mississippians, Aaron Henry and Reverend R. L. T. Smith, challenged the broadcasting license of WLBT, an NBC affiliate in Jackson, Mississippi. The lawsuit was the catalyst that would bring social reform to American broadcasting. This station in a city whose population was 40 percent black was charged with failure to give fair coverage to civil rights and to integration issues that were dominating the news. Among offenses cited by the black population were the cancellation of a network interview with the civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall and editorializing against the integration of the University of Mississippi. However, muscle, money, and a powerhouse Washington, D.C., law firm were on the side of the station. Despite the charges, the Federal Communications Commission twice renewed the station's license. Twice the challengers won appeals to the federal courts. Warren Burger, then a federal appeals court judge, wrote decisions on both challenges. The first ordered the FCC to allow public participation in its proceedings. The second, an unprecedented move, took the license from WLBT. This well-told, deeply researched history of the case covers the legal battles over their more than fifteen years and reports the ultimate victory for civil rights. Aaron Henry, a black civil rights leader and one of the plaintiffs, became the station's chairman of the board. WLBT's new manager, William Dilday, was the first black person in the South to hold such a position. Burger's decision on this Mississippi case had widescale repercussions, for it allowed community groups in other regions to challenge their stations and to negotiate for improved services and for the employment of minorities.No Small Thing: The 1963 Mississippi Freedom Vote (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies)
Par William H. Lawson. 2018
The Mississippi Freedom Vote in 1963 consisted of an integrated citizens' campaign for civil rights. With candidates Aaron Henry, a…
black pharmacist from Clarksdale for governor, and Reverend Ed King, a college chaplain from Vicksburg for lieutenant governor, the Freedom Vote ran a platform aimed at obtaining votes, justice, jobs, and education for blacks in the Magnolia State.Through speeches, photographs, media coverage, and campaign materials, William H. Lawson examines the rhetoric and methods of the Mississippi Freedom Vote. Lawson looks at the vote itself rather than the already much-studied events surrounding it, an emphasis new in scholarship. Even though the actual campaign was carried out from October 13 to November 4, the Freedom Vote's impact far transcended those few weeks in the fall. Campaign manager Bob Moses rightly calls the Freedom Vote "one of the most unique voting campaigns in American history." Lawson demonstrates that the Freedom Vote remains a key moment in the history of civil rights in Mississippi, one that grew out of a rich tradition of protest and direct action.Though the campaign is overshadowed by other major events in the arc of the civil rights movement, Lawson regards the Mississippi Freedom Vote as an early and crucial exercise of citizenship in a lineage of racial protest during the 1960s. While more attention has been paid to the March on Washington and the protests in Birmingham or to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Freedom Summer murders, this book yields a long-overdue, in-depth analysis of this crucial movement.To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies)
Par William Sturkey, Jon N. Hale. 2015
Fifty years after Freedom Summer, To Write in the Light of Freedom offers a glimpse into the hearts of the…
African American youths who attended the Mississippi Freedom Schools in 1964. One of the most successful initiatives of Freedom Summer, more than forty Freedom Schools opened doors to thousands of young African American students. Here they learned civics, politics, and history, curriculum that helped them instead of the degrading lessons supporting segregation and Jim Crow and sanctioned by White Citizen's Councils. Young people enhanced their self-esteem and gained a new outlook on the future. And at more than a dozen of these schools, students wrote, edited, printed and published their own newspapers. For more than five decades, the Mississippi Freedom Schools have served as powerful models of educational activism. Yet, little has been published that documents black Mississippi youths' responses to this profound experience.America's Great Storm: Leading through Hurricane Katrina
Par Haley Barbour. 2015
When Hurricane Katrina hit Mississippi on August 29, 2005, it unleashed the costliest natural disaster in American history, and the…
third deadliest. Haley Barbour had been Mississippi's governor for only twenty months when he assumed responsibility for guiding his pummeled, stricken state's recovery and rebuilding efforts. America's Great Storm is not only a personal memoir of his role in that recovery, but also a sifting of the many lessons he learned about leadership in a time of massive crisis. For the book, the authors interviewed more than forty-five key people involved in helping Mississippi recover, including local, state, and federal officials as well as private citizens who played pivotal roles in the weeks and months following Katrina's landfall. In addition to covering in detail the events of September and October 2005, chapters focus on the special legislative session that allowed casinos to build on shore; the role of the recovery commission chaired by Jim Barksdale; a behind-the-scenes description of working with Congress to pass an unprecedented, multi-billion-dollar emergency disaster assistance appropriation; and the enormous roles played by volunteers in rebuilding the entire housing, transportation, and education infrastructure of South Mississippi and the Gulf Coast. A final chapter analyzes the leadership skills and strategies Barbour employed on behalf of the people of his state, observations that will be valuable to anyone tasked with managing in a crisis.The Grenada Revolution: Reflections and Lessons (Caribbean Studies Series)
Par Wendy C. Grenade. 2015
Grenada experienced much turmoil in the 1970s and 1980s, culminating in an armed Marxist revolution, a bloody military coup, and…
finally in 1983 Operation Urgent Fury, a United States-led invasion. Wendy C. Grenade combines various perspectives to tell a Caribbean story about this revolution, weaving together historical accounts of slain Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, the New Jewel Leftist Movement, and contemporary analysis. There is much controversy. Though the Organization of American States formally requested intervention from President Ronald Reagan, world media coverage was largely negative and skeptical, if not baffled, by the action, which resulted in a rapid defeat and the deposition of the Revolutionary Military Council.By examining the possibilities and contradictions of the Grenada Revolution, the contributors draw upon thirty years' of hindsight to illuminate a crucial period of the Cold War. Beyond geopolitics, the book interrogates but transcends the nuances and peculiarities of Grenada's political history to situate this revolution in its larger Caribbean and global context. In doing so, contributors seek to unsettle old debates while providing fresh understandings about a critical period in the Caribbean's postcolonial experience. This collection throws into sharp focus the centrality of the Grenada Revolution, offering a timely contribution to Caribbean scholarship and to wider understanding of politics in small developing, postcolonial societies.Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)
Par John N. Herbers. 2018
Former New York Times correspondent John N. Herbers (1923-2017), who covered the civil rights movement for more than a decade,…
has produced Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist, a compelling story of national and historical significance. Born in the South during a time of entrenched racial segregation, Herbers witnessed a succession of landmark civil rights uprisings that rocked the country, the world, and his own conscience. Herbers's retrospective is a timely and critical illumination on America's current racial dilemmas and ongoing quest for justice.Herbers's reporting began in 1951, when he covered the brutal execution of Willie McGee, a black man convicted for the rape of a white housewife, and the 1955 trial for the murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. With immediacy and first-hand detail, Herbers describes the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the death of four black girls in the Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing; extensive travels and interviews with Martin Luther King Jr.; Ku Klux Klan cross-burning rallies and private meetings; the Freedom Summer murders in Philadelphia, Mississippi; and marches and riots in St. Augustine, Florida, and Selma, Alabama, that led to passage of national civil rights legislation.This account is also a personal journey as Herbers witnessed the movement with the conflicted eyes of a man dedicated to his southern heritage but who also rejected the prescribed laws and mores of a prejudiced society. His story provides a complex understanding of how the southern status quo, in which the white establishment benefited at the expense of African Americans, was transformed by a national outcry for justice.Freedom Rider Diary: Smuggled Notes from Parchman Prison (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)
Par Carol Ruth Silver. 2014
Arrested as a Freedom Rider in June of 1961, Carol Ruth Silver, a twenty-two-year-old recent college graduate originally from Massachusetts,…
spent the next forty days in Mississippi jail cells, including the Maximum-Security Unit at the infamous Parchman Prison Farm. She chronicled the events and her experiences on hidden scraps of paper which amazingly she was able to smuggle out. These raw written scraps she fashioned into a manuscript, which has waited, unread for more than fifty years. Freedom Rider Diary is that account. Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States in 1961 to test the US Supreme Court rulings outlawing segregation in interstate bus and terminal facilities. Brutality and arrests inflicted on the Riders called national attention to the disregard for federal law and the local violence used to enforce segregation. Police arrested Riders for trespassing, unlawful assembly, and violating state and local Jim Crow laws, along with other alleged offenses, but they often allowed white mobs to attack the Riders without arrest or intervention. This book offers a heretofore unavailable detailed diary from a woman Freedom Rider along with an introduction by historian Raymond Arsenault, author of the definitive history of the Freedom Rides. In a personal essay detailing her life before and after the Freedom Rides, Silver explores what led her to join the movement and explains how, galvanized by her actions and those of her compatriots in 1961, she spent her life and career fighting for civil rights. Framing essays and personal and historical photographs make the diary an ideal book for the general public, scholars, and students of the movement that changed America.Negative Intelligence: The Army and the American Left, 1917-1941
Par Roy Talbert Jr.. 1991
During World War I, in the period of the Red Scare, and throughout the Great Depression, the army's domestic spy…
agency mounted an extensive surveillance campaign focused on civilians and groups deemed subversive. Negative Intelligence traces the fascinating and astonishing story of military espionage on the home front. Created by Major General Ralph H. Van Deman in 1917, the Negative Branch of Military, or MI, spied on American reformers in a program of civilian surveillance that surpassed even that of the Department of Justice's Bureau of Investigation. Among the targets were the Industrial Workers of the World, the American Civil Liberties Union, and “Negro Subversion.” Documentation of MI's program of domestic espionage is from recently opened Military Intelligence archives. Closely allied with private vigilante groups, the Army conducted illegal raids, made illegal arrests, subjected many citizens to interrogation, and developed an elaborate filing system for its dossiers. After World War I the hysteria continued, with MI's direct focus beamed upon a new enemy, the Bolsheviki. Although MI's abuses have been overshadowed by those of the Department of Justice, army espionage was in many ways more aggressive than its civilian counterpart. Negative Intelligence documents these abuses and shows how until 1921 the attempts to restrain MI's work failed. After this time, with limited staff and funding MI could do no more than maintain close liaison with private super-patriotic groups. However, the coming of the Great Depression fired up the rebirth of the army's civilian espionage programs. Then as World War II approached, internal security once again became a national policy, and J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation moved his powerful network into the supreme position of domestic spying.Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Economic Management and Green Development (Applied Economics and Policy Studies)
Par Xiaolong Li, Chunhui Yuan, John Kent. 2024
Economics has always been a heated research topic and green development is rising and integrating with various fields for interdisciplinary…
studies. Initiated in 2017, the International Conference on Economic Management and Green Development (ICEMGD) is an annual conference aiming at bringing together researchers from the fields of economics, business management, public administration, and green development for the sharing of research methods and theoretical breakthroughs. The 7th International Conference on Economic Management and Green Development (ICEMGD 2023) was held on August 6, 2023. It was a hybrid conference including several on-site workshops and an online session. The workshops were held in London, Galaţi, Birmingham, Sydney, and Beijing. The proceedings consist of papers accepted by ICEMGD 2023, which are carefully selected and reviewed by professional reviewers from corresponding research fields and the editing committee of the conference. The papers have a diverse range of topics situated at the intersecting fields of economic management, public administration, and green development. ICEMGD is working to provide a platform for international participants from fields like macro- and microeconomics, international economics, finance, agricultural economics, health economics, business management and marketing strategies, regional development studies, social governance, and sustainable development. This proceedings volume, together with the conference, looks forward to sparking inspiration and promoting collaborations. This book will be of interest to researchers, academics, professionals, and policymakers in the fields of economic management, public administration, and development studies.Social Work and Social Policy Transformations in Central and Southeast Europe
Par Maja Gerovska Mitev. 2024
This book provides a picture of recent developments in social policy and social work in Central and Southeast Europe, especially…
trends after the COVID-19 pandemic, which necessitated significant welfare modifications. Through a comparative method, the book draws analytical conclusions about the interdependence between welfare state reforms and social work practices in Central and Southeast Europe and provides an overview of future perspectives regarding social policy and social service provision in this region. The book covers four EU member states (Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Croatia) and three EU candidate countries (North Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina). By critically contextualising existing welfare state categorisations, the book aims to examine the link between the welfare state reforms and implications for social work in Central and Southeast Europe. The country-based chapters of this contributed volume: outline the context in which social policy and social work have developed and map the main changes in the welfare state since the transition from socialism; elaborate the country-specific welfare state discourse and discussions, which through literature review depict the conceptual debates about the welfare state, social justice, equality, poverty, entitlements for cash transfer and services, privatization, and accessibility; indicate the key challenges in social policy and social work; and provide indications about the future perspectives of social policy and social service provision. Social Work and Social Policy Transformations in Central and Southeast Europe addresses the scarcity of literature on social policy and social work in this region. The book is primarily intended for social policy researchers and scholars, and students in social work, social policy, political science, and sociology. It is an invaluable resource for researchers from all fields of social sciences and should provoke wider academic and professional interest."The common themes of transformation, restructuring and crises, synthesized in excellent Introductory and Concluding chapters, make the book an essential source for an understanding of contemporary policies and practices, the complex role played by historical legacies, and offer a model of what a comparative policy approach should look like".—Paul Stubbs, Senior Research Fellow, The Institute of Economics, Zagreb, CroatiaThis open access book sets out simple solutions to managing complex catastrophes. It focusses on four kinds of crises –…
climate change, crime-war cascades, epidemics and financial crises. These catastrophes are conceived as complex and prone to cascade effects. This book is optimistic in explaining that there are identifiable simple institutions that international society can strengthen and some simple principles that can help humankind to control the expanding gamut of complex catastrophes that confront the planet including simple, stable institutions and regulatory bodies. It draws on a wide range of current and past crises and challenges, from the Cold War to COVID-19, and from Weapons of Mass Destruction to restorative diplomacy with States like China, to provide an urgent and timely path forward. It speaks to those interested in criminology, public policy and international relations, political science, sociology, public health and economics.Mississippi: The Closed Society
Par James W. Silver. 2012
Mississippi: The Closed Society is a book about an insurrection in modern America, more particularly, about the social and historical…
background of that insurrection. It is written by a Mississippian who is a historian, and who, on September 30, 1962, witnessed the long night of riot that exploded on the campus of the University of Mississippi at Oxford, when students, and, later, adults with no connection with the University, attacked United States marshals sent to the campus to protect James H. Meredith, the first African American to attend Ole Miss. In the first part of Mississippi: The Closed Society, Silver describes how the state's commitment to the doctrine of white supremacy led to a situation in which the Mississippian found that continued intransigence (and possibly violence) was the only course offered to him. In these chapters the author speaks in the more formal measures of the historian. In the second part of the book, “Some Letters from the Closed Society,” he reproduces (among other correspondence and memoranda) a series of his letters to friends and family—and critics—in the days and weeks after the insurrection. Here he reveals himself more personally and forcefully. In both parts of the book are disclosed the mind and heart of the Mississippian who is as haunted as William Faulkner was by the moral chaos of his native land.Desi Divas: Political Activism in South Asian American Cultural Performances
Par Christine L. Garlough. 2013
Desi Divas: Political Activism in South Asian American Cultural Performances is the product of five years of field research with…
progressive activists associated with the School for Indian Languages and Cultures (SILC), South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), the feminist dance collective Post Natyam, and the grassroots feminist political organization South Asian Sisters. Christine L. Garlough explores how traditional cultural forms may be critically appropriated by marginalized groups and used as rhetorical tools to promote deliberation and debate, spur understanding and connection, broaden political engagement, and advance particular social identities. Within this framework she examines how these performance activists advocate a political commitment to both justice and care, to both deliberative discussion and deeper understanding. To consider how this might happen in diasporic performance contexts, Garlough weaves together two lines of thinking. One grows from feminist theory and draws upon a core literature concerning the ethics of care. The other comes from rhetoric, philosophy, and political science literature on recognition and acknowledgment. This dual approach is used to reflect upon South Asian American women's performances that address pressing social problems related to gender inequality, immigration rights, ethnic stereotyping, hate crimes, and religious violence. Case study chapters address the relatively unknown history of South Asian American rhetorical performances from the early 1800s to the present. Avant-garde feminist performances by the Post Natyam dance collective appropriate women's folk practices and Hindu goddess figures make rhetorical claims about hate crimes against South Asian Americans after 9/11. In Yoni ki Bat (a South Asian American version of The Vagina Monologues) a progressive performer transforms aspects of the Mahabharata narrative to address issues of sexual violence, such as incest and rape. Throughout the volume, Garlough argues that these performers rely on calls for acknowledgment that intertwine calls for justice and care. That is, they embed their testimony in traditional cultural forms to invite interest, reflection, and connection.