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Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” has been canonized as an essential statement of the political theory of civil disobedience. This article examines the early reception of Ki...

During the mid-twentieth century, many southern White religious leaders proudly championed police brutality and other forms of state-sanctioned violence against Black citizens. In Martin Luther King, Jr’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, he defends direct-action non-violent protests as he responds to criticisms and offers his own critique of the clergymen who gave commendations to “the police force for keeping ‘order’ and ‘preventing violence,’” while ignoring the “ugly and inhumane treatment” that the police exerted on non-violent Black protestors who sought to stand up for their rights. King intentionally includes examples of violence against older Black women and girls in his critique. In this article, the historical grounding in King’s critique is expanded to reflect longstanding support of police violence in White communities and a form of sanction through silence in Black communities centered around communal survival in the face of violent White power structures. This article highlights religious communities which ignored at best and sanctioned at worst police violence against Black women and girls and identifies the need for change in the twenty-first century. Ultimately, it calls for leaders to be in proximate location to police violence so when they see it, they can be moved ethically to address it.

Inspired by Martin Luther King's “Drum Major Instinct” sermon, President Bill Clinton signed the King Holiday and Service Act of 1994 and transformed the King holiday into a day of service. By linking the holiday to his community service initiatives, Clinton, and Coretta Scott King, encouraged Americans to continue King's work by helping America's poor through racially integrated service activities. Since the inaugural 1986 holiday, scholars have claimed that King Day abets amnesia more than it encourages remembrance; however, this reform illustrates that the holiday is an evolving and dynamic form of history that can be used to continue the work of the civil rights movement.

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable.—Dr. Martin Luther King [(1)][1]In 1986, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released the Report of the Secretary’s Task Force on Black and Minority Health [(2)][2]. Commonly known as the Heckler Report , this landmark document

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”- Martin Luther King Jr Martin Luther King Jr’s quote delineates the inhumanity of unjust and unequal he...

How might teachers challenge oversimplified narratives regarding the life and deedsof Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK), in order to support ideals of human rights in education?In this study, we examine ...

Arendt’s work on civil disobedience sets out an optimistic portrayal of the possibilities of such forms of action in re-energising the spirit of American politics in the late twentieth cent...

This paper focuses on the contributions of Chris Lebron's book The Making of Black Lives Matter: The History of an Idea. Specifically, I examine his discussion of James Baldwin, Martin Luther King,...

This article explains how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) partnered with African American minister Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux to discredit and neutralize Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The Elder, the nation's first minister (black or white) to have his own weekly television show, colluded with the Bureau to shape public opinion against King and cast doubt upon King's religious commitments and activities. Michaux was, what I call, a Bureau Clergyman: a minister who was an FBI “Special Service Contact” or on the Bureau's “Special Correspondents Lists.” Far from secret informants, black and white male clergy in these official Bureau programs enjoyed very public and cooperative relationships with the FBI and were occasionally “called into service” to work in concert with the FBI. The FBI called upon Michaux and he willingly used his status, popular media ministry, and cold war spirituality to publically scandalize King as a communist and defend the Bureau against King's criticisms. In the end, the Elder demonized King, contested calls for black equality under the law, and lionized the FBI as the keeper of Christian America. The story moves the field beyond the very well known narratives of the FBI's hostility towards religion and reveals how the Bureau publicly embraced religion and commissioned their clergymen to help maintain prevailing social arrangements. Michaux's relationship with the FBI also offers a window into the overlooked religious dimensions of the FBI's opposition to King, even as it highlights how black clergy articulated and followed competing ideologies of black liberation during the civil rights movement.

2016 marked the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the Martin Luther King Day, which honors the civil rights leader and recognizes the contributions of African Americans. However, the holiday has also become a day of debate over King's legacy and, in turn, over the (mis)use of the nation's civil religion. On the one hand, the civil religious narrative of enduring unity, of the Promised Land, and of King as the nation's redeemer, which evolved around the implementation of the holiday during the 1970s and early 1980s, appealed to a broad audience and forged a sense of unity. On the other hand, it also masked real progress and lead to a symbolic “pseudo-integration” of African Americans. Hence, as the ideals of the Declaration of Independence seemed to be finally achieved, it is not surprising that King has been succcessfully turned into a poster boy against affirmative action.

This research tracked the representations of Martin Luther King, Jr. in public art from 1967 until the present. The author's theory before beginning research was that depictions of Martin Luther King, Jr. have changed since his death. The author propounded that public opinion of King was negative during his lifetime but transformed into a positive viewpoint after his assassination. The author formulated that public art of King would change from before and after his death and that this artwork would reflect the artists' or patrons' agendas more so than any objective portrayal of King. The goal of the research was to evaluate public art examples, analyze them for their motivation, and either prove or disprove the original theory.

The paper commences by considering the similarity between Dr King, MK Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and argues that they are high mimetic figures who inspire us to be better. Their legacy and memory operate as a yardstick by which we can evaluate the conduct of those exercising public and private power over us. Each remains dominant in his respective society decades after passing on or leaving public life, and the paper suggests that very little societal value is had by deconstructing their lives and judging facets of their lives through the prism of latter day morality. We gain more by leaving their high mimetic status undisturbed. There is a clear link between their various struggles with King being heavily influenced by the writings and thinking of Gandhi, who commenced his career as a liberation activist in South Africa. King was instrumental in commencing the discourse on economic sanctions to force the Apartheid government to change and the Indian government had a long and committed relationship with the ANC. The second half of the paper turns to an analysis of how Dr King's legacy impacted directly and indirectly on developments in South Africa. One of the key objectives of the Civil Rights movement in the USA was to attain substantive equality and to improve the quality of life of all. The paper then turns to assessing the extent to which democratic South Africa has achieved these objectives and concludes that the picture is mixed. Important pioneering changes such as enabling gays and lesbians to marry have taught important lessons about taking rights seriously. However, despite important advancements, neither poverty nor inequality has been appreciably reduced. One of the major failures has been the inability to provide appropriate, effective and relevant education to African children in public schools. Effectively educating previously disadvantaged persons represents one of the few means at our disposal of reducing inequality and breaking the cycle of poverty. Fortunately, there is a general awareness in the country that something needs to be done about this crisis urgently. The paper notes comments by President Zuma that the level of wealth in white households is six times that of black households. The critique is that comments of this nature do not demonstrate an acknowledgment by the ANC that, after 19 years in power, they must also accept responsibility for statistics such as this. Keywords: Martin Luther King; Mahatma Gandhi; Nelson Mandela

This essay examines Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 speech “Where Do We Go from Here?” Delivered at the 11th annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the speech addressed the contentious racial politics that permeated the post–Voting Rights landscape. I argue that the speech constituted King’s call for the SCLC to reinvent its ethos—both its “character” and its “dwelling place.” In issuing this call, King cultivated new possibilities for the conceptualization and practice of social justice activism.

It is possible to look at radical social movements from the perspective of social performance theory; though, being wedded to nonsymbolic and realist methods, few contemporary social scientists would agree. Despite their immensely practical goals, the success of both Chinese Communists and American civil rights protesters depended on achieving performative power, all in the service of dramatically connecting with their audiences. The same can be said for the Black Lives Matter movement.

This chapter explores Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s (MLK) contribution to Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) and its association with the USA’s Modern Civil Rights Movement (MCRM). The exploration begins with a synopsis of the MCRM: its antecedents, a biographical sketch of MLK and a precis of his leadership. A discussion of MLK’s support of BIG and a brief survey of his long-term influence follow, ending with the conclusion. The goal is to identify and analyze the international thought-leader, Nobel Peace Laureate and civil rights strategist’s approach (justifications and strategies) to realizing BIG for practical and theoretical lessons that could inform future and current BIG activism.

To inform the ongoing discussion of whether claims of conscientious objection allow medical professionals to refuse to perform tasks that would otherwise be their duty, this paper begins with a review of the philosophical literature that describes conscience as either a moral sense or the dictate of reason. Even though authors have starkly different views on what conscience is, advocates of both approaches agree that conscience should be obeyed and that keeping promises is a conscience-given moral imperative. The paper then considers exemplars of conscientious objection—Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.—to identify the critical feature of conscientious objection as willingness to bear the burdens of one’s convictions. It concludes by showing that medical professionals who put their own interests before their patients’ welfare violate their previous commitments and misappropriate the title “conscientious objector” because they are unwilling to bear the burdens of their choices and instead impose burdens on their patients and colleagues.

For those who have studied the black freedom struggle, it is a given that King’s legacy has not only been ‘whitewashed’ to neutralize its radical elements but also that this ‘sanitized’ version is used to undermine similar ones in the current movement for racial equality. This article, however, zooms in on the ways in which today’s left-leaning black activists use the existence of this ‘sanitized’ version of King’s legacy to their advantage. Particularly the recent #ReclaimMLK campaigns in the USA and black engagement with King legacy projects in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands reveal how it can be used as a potent tool to justify contemporary protests. This provides valuable insights into the possible trajectory of 21st century black activism as well as the interrelation between the black freedom struggles on both continents.

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” That was in April 1963, more than a half-century ago. He had been jailed for his agitation to end injustice against non-white people in his own country, and he would be killed soon after by an assassin who hated him and his vision.

The Civil Rights Movement is deeply intertwined with Lyndon B. Johnson. Throughout his career, Johnson supported the quest of African-Americans for political and civil rights. They found in him an ally whose role was fundamental in fullfilling the goals of Martin Luther King, Jr, and the Civil Rights Movement. This paper will examine the role of the Johnson presidency in the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964.

“The Miracle of the Golden Arches: Race and Fast Food in Los Angeles” examines the Los Angeles chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and its advocacy on behalf of the city’s black McDonald’s franchisees. The franchisees believed that McDonald’s limited their ability to franchise restaurants outside of predominately black neighborhoods. Analyzing the rhetoric surrounding these disputes, the article argues that despite their economic prosperity as a group, African American McDonald’s franchisees often found themselves in an uneasy position as models of racial progress and victims of racial discrimination. The article covers the period between two urban uprisings—the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 and the days after police officers were acquitted of beating Rodney King in 1992—to expose the relationship between McDonald’s and black consumers in moments of economic, social, and racial crisis.

ABSTRCTThis is a biographical essay about Stanley Levison, who is the subject of Ben Kamin’s Dangerous Friendship: Stanley Levison, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Kennedy Brothers (2014). Levison was a communist and friend of Martin Luther King. The review focuses on the limitations and strengths of the book, of Levison and of the Civil Rights Movement. At a time when the Communist Party was facing difficult challenges, Levison was not totally a failure in helping to uphold the aspirations of the underprivileged.

In 1953, black citizens of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, undertook a boycott against the city’s bus company after the Baton Rouge City-Parish Council voted to raise the fares on municipal buses by 50%. The boycott only lasted a few days and in the minds of many locals was only a partial success. Nonetheless, the action drew the attention of outsiders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., who would use the 1953 events in Baton Rouge as a template for the more expansive and comprehensive Montgomery Bus Boycott a few years later. This chapter tells the story of the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott and reveals the dynamics at work in the protest.

Nonviolent mass protests are often considered as having been mainly responsible for the two major legislative gains of the Civil Rights Movement half a century ago—the 1964 Civil Rights Act (CRA) and the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). In this article, I argue that it was the combination of that course and the threat of violence on the part of African Americans that fully explain those two victories. A close reading of the texts and actions of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X is indispensable for my claim. The archival evidence, as well, makes a convincing case for the CRA, its proposal by the John F. Kennedy (JFK) administration and enactment by Congress. For the VRA, its proposal by the Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) administration and enactment by Congress, the evidence is more circumstantial but still compelling. The evidence reveals that for the threat of violence to have been credible, actual violence was required, as events in Birmingham, Alabama, demonstrate. Such violence, the “long hot summe...

Historians have posited several theories in an attempt to explain what many regard as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s radical departure, in the late 1960's, from his earlier, liberal framing of civil rights reform. Rather than view his increasingly critical statements against the Vietnam War and the liberal establishment as evidence of a fundamental change in his thinking, a number of scholars have braided the continuity of King's thought within frameworks of democratic socialism and the long civil rights movement, respectively. King's lifelong struggle for racial justice in America, they argue, was rife with broader and more radical implications than that of a national campaign for political inclusion. His message was global, and it was revolutionary. However, when depicting him exclusively in the context of black radicals during “the long civil rights movement,“ or the labor movement, these scholars have a tendency to downplay the most fundamental component of King's activism - his religion. More so than he referenced the brave black leaders of previous civil rights campaigns, King drew upon the writings and ideas of social gospel thinkers, such as Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr. By analyzing King within the context of “the long social gospel movement” in addition to “the long civil rights movement,” we can explain his radical social mission in terms of race and class, but without marginalizing the Christian values at the core of his calling.

Richard H. King's article begins by examining the way Ava DuVernay's recent film Selma deals with the relationship between Martin Luther King and previous accounts/representations of the Civil Rights Movement, and how other feature films such as Mississippi Burning and documentaries such as Stanley Nelson's Freedom Summer depict the movement. This in turn raises the question of what the dominant narrative of the Civil Rights Movement actually has been, and still is. King concludes that it is the King-centred ‘From Montgomery to Memphis’ narrative. He goes on to explore the ways in which this dominant narrative has been challenged by, for instance, the SNCC-related narrative found, most accessibly, in Nelson's documentary and, more broadly conceived, in Jacqueline Dowd Hall's influential 2005 article ‘The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past’. Also, along the way, King discusses the relative strengths of feature films v. documentaries in illuminating the past. When comparin...

Through examples of grace and gift of reconciliation the meaning of grace is interpreted in relation to social and political transformation. Grace is understood as the unexpected kairotic moment of change, where the future opens up for new possibilities of reconciliation in situations of conflict. It is a moment you cannot plan for, but hope for to happen. Trusting in the possibility of a gracious moment can influence your work in the present. Hoping and waiting for the gracious moment of reconciliation is linked to a praxis of active nonviolence as seen in the work of Martin Luther King, Jr.

This article examines Martin Luther King, Jr.'s controversial Riverside Speech where he denounced the Vietnam War. Although King's biographers and other scholars have written about the Riverside speech, they have not analyzed King's Riverside speech through the prism of Cold War Civil Rights. This examination of King's Riverside speech remedies this omission by explaining why King waited so long to speak out against the war, and why civil rights activists as late as 1967 were still wary about criticizing American Cold War foreign policy because of the legacy of the Red Scare. While the Cold War helped spur civil rights advances, this article demonstrates that the civil rights movement was a casualty of the Vietnam War.

In a 1964 speech in London, Martin Luther King assessed the struggle against segregation in the USA and apartheid in South Africa. He ended with a quote from a black slave preacher mapping the road...

The entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. was the premier celebrity fundraiser for the civil rights movement, but his public image, which consisted of an unusual combination of daring and deferential behavior, also made him vulnerable to charges of ‘accommodationism’ throughout his career. When, in 1972, Davis kissed the notoriously racist Archie Bunker on an episode of All in the Family and then hugged President Richard Nixon at the Republican National Convention a few months later, his deferential behavior overwhelmed his public image and went on to overshadow Davis's historical legacy. Thus, his political activism has received little examination. I argue that his daring and deferential behavior—reflected most famously in his affiliation with the so-called Rat Pack—allowed him to headline hugely successful benefit shows, rally black supporters of the civil rights movement, help broaden its base, and bring in other celebrities to the cause in the 1950s and 60s, often helping the movement at key moments. When, in the 1970s, the movement shifted its focus from integration to cultural nationalism, Davis continued his political activism with less successful, yet noteworthy, results. This article contributes to the historiography of Davis biographies, the civil rights movement, and the culture of celebrity.

Our ethical obligations to patients are sometimes overridden by the state, but as a profession we’re generally OK with this. Good medical practice doesn’t expect us to protect the confession of a murderer, or disobey the direction of a judge. But what would we do if the state required something of our profession that overrode our ethical judgement? Would we fight, fudge, or fold? ‘Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that..’ (Martin Luther King Jr, 1963) The US is the only G7 country that executes convicted criminals. There are 31 states that execute, and most require the participation of a licensed physician,1 with doctors variably required to cannulate, titrate drugs, and judge effective progress, unconsciousness, and death. American Medical Association (AMA) guidelines ban physician participation in execution but the AMA does not license doctors.2 Doctors theoretically face being struck off by state medical boards for participating, but none has been. In …

“The right to vote in peace and freedom is a fundamental democratic right”, postulates His Lordship Justice V.C.R.A.C. Crabbe, Supreme Court judge of Ghana and first Sole Electoral Commissioner of Ghana. Martin Luther King, Jr., the iconic civil rights leader of the USA, said: “a voteless people is a powerless people”. But the electorate must know who they can vote for, where, when and how to exercise their fundamental civic right, and have the right to register and vote in peace and freedom. The electoral process encompasses promulgating an enactment, evolving procedures and modalities, and mobilizing, informing, educating and whipping up interest among the electorate. Thus the media become the hub around which any electoral process revolves. Countries in the south take cognizance of this and, notwithstanding a paucity of resources and their inadequacies, have for decades been searching for appropriate strategies to achieve this goal.

This research article deals for the first time with the reaction of Martin Luther King Jr. to the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. In doing so, it also presents a document of special relevance: the draft of a previously-unknown private letter from dr. King to President Kennedy, in which the civil rights leader praised Kennedy’s management of that crucial nuclear confrontation between US and USSR and saw in it the potential for détente. The paper reflects on the elements currently available for the interpretation of this piece of evidence and, with regard to the relationship between the two leaders, it argues that the way Kennedy handled the Cuban crisis may well have played a role in Dr. King’s reassessment of Kennedy’s evolving qualities of leadership - a view that King will further develop over the course of 1963 (in the most fruitful months of their cooperation) and will express after Dallas.

At the Riverside Church in New York, April 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. did not just speak out against the war in Vietnam, he was in many ways defending one of the underlying ideological strategies of the entire civil rights movement. He urged people to avoid confusing dissent with disloyalty, stressed that he voiced his opinion to save the soul of America, and cautioned against what he called “smooth patriotism”.i2This article forwards and explores the idea that a significant ideological characteristic of the civil rights movement was the concept and use of an ‘alternative patriotism.’ After exploring its value as a lens through which to view King and the movement, and the ‘smooth’ patriotism that they were pitted against, the article discusses how the open-housing campaign in Chicago witnessed a fundamental shift in how the strategy was utilised. This represented a broader concern in social and human rights, and helps an understanding of the move toward a more ‘militant’ position from 1966 onwards.

The collapse of the Kerry talks and the devastating cycle of attacks and reprisals that ensued marked the end of an era, the passing of a time when a negotiated peace seemed a realistic possibility. In considering the way forward in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, this essay examines the relational changes that brought about the settlement ending apartheid in South Africa, with a focus on three key players: Nelson Mandela, F. W. de Klerk, and Roelf Meyer. It then briefly describes the relation-building framework developed by the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation and explains how it provides an alternative to solutions-based and rights-based approaches to resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Drawing inspiration from Martin Luther King, Jr., it concludes with reflections on the importance of non-violence in altering the discourse between Israelis and Palestinians.

The contrast, often painted in simplistic colours, between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as civil rights campaigners bolsters an erroneous reading of the freedom struggle of African-Americans, leaving the impression that the resort to violence and self-defence propounded by Malcolm X was a purely circumstantial departure from the general strategy of the civil rights movement. In fact, both of them reflected long on the capacity of violence and a contrario of non-violence to bring about political and social transformation in the context of the extreme brutality and oppression being suffered by African-Americans. Their dilemma stemmed from an old intellectual tradition of the America of the slave period. Well before the ideas of Gandhi won over the African-American elite, and even before Henry David Thoreau laid the theoretical basis for civil disobedience, African slaves gave thought to the legitimacy and effectiveness of violence to amend their situation. The importance of the non-violent movement in the United States and the historical significance of Martin Luther King cannot be understood unless a true measure is taken of the anti-slavery struggle. While within the religious domain, the Black Church played a major role in dissuading violence, secular thought in favour of legitimate forceful rebellion also found itself confronted by a counter-argument which advanced the power of social change and resistance to injustice that non-violence could effect. This article particularly addresses the challenges to their consciences that confronted the militants of non-violence in their campaign for the abolition of slavery and notably those facing the central figure of that struggle, the former slave become the apostle of liberation, Frederick Douglass.

Résumé.Des citoyens peuvent-ils désobéir à la loi, pourtant issue de la volonté majoritaire et de la décision du Parlement légitimement élu, au seul motif qu'elle leur semble injuste ? Face à la pensée conservatrice, tenante de l'ordre établi et réfractaire à la moindre transgression (« mieux vaut une injustice qu'un désordre »), la philosophie libérale contemporaine a fourni une défense de la légitimité démocratique de la désobéissance civile. Cependant, les justifications rawlsienne et habermassienne de la désobéissance civile semblent bien timorées dès qu'on accepte de les comparer à la pensée politique des activistes désobéissants eux-mêmes, à savoir Gandhi, Martin Luther King et Howard Zinn. Cette « pensée désobéissante » méconnue, voire occultée, vient révéler les insuffisances et les présupposés de la conception libérale de la désobéissance civile.Abstract.Can citizens disobey the law, which comes from the will of the majority and the decision of the legitimately elected Parliament, merely because it seems to them unjust? Opposing conservative thought, which defends the established order and condemns any transgression, contemporary liberal thought has provided a defense of the democratic legitimacy of civil disobedience. However, the Rawlsian and Habermasian justifications of civil disobedience seem rather weak when compared to the political thought of disobedient activists themselves, namely Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Howard Zinn. This overlooked “disobedient thought” reveals the shortcomings and assumptions of the liberal concept of civil disobedience.

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr’s address at the August 1963 March on Washington, and his dream of a future America on which he ended it, is an iconic, for some even synecdochical, moment of the black ...

I use a variety of sources to understand a collective response from national government. A description of the variables used for each institution is described below. Measures of public opinion and the civil rights movement are constantly included in the analysis of each institution. Thus, I begin with these universal variables. Public Opinion : Using the Gallup’s Most Important Problem series, I code the percentage of respondents who felt that racial and ethnic minority concerns were the most important problems facing the nation. This is used as a thermometer to gauge the relevance of racial issues. Civil Rights Movement : The civil rights movement is dated from 1960 to 1968. Naturally, there are events that took place in the 1950s, a time period I believe to be a part of the civil rights movement, that are not included in this study. The use of 1960 is simply a byproduct of the available data on political protest. The year 1968 is selected as the end of this period because it coincides with the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which fragmented the movement. Moreover, this year is often considered to have signaled the decline of movement activism (see Lawson and Payne 1998).

We finished penning this special issue and sending it to press on martin Luther King Jr. Day. We take pause, honoring Martin Luther King's memory and we are dedicating this project to his profound vision as a public intellectual and world activist for whom two of his breakthrough ideas are particularly relevant to this collection. The guest editors, along with the contributors, are reinforcing his messages for the current and future eras that "leadership is the action of ideas to make change, through the agency of individuals" (p. 74) and that "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" (p. 75) (see Temes 1996).

Although the critical turn in place name study recognizes the central and contested place that toponyms hold in people's lives and identity struggles, little work has explicitly analyzed place naming rights in terms of social justice, citizenship, and belonging. We introduce readers to the naming of streets for slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr and use two brief case studies from the southeastern USA (Statesboro, Georgia and Greenville, North Carolina) to discuss the barriers that hinder the creation of a landscape that truly reflects the teachings of King. Naming opponents, sometimes with the (un)witting cooperation of black activists, impose spatial, scalar limits on the rights of African Americans to participate in the street naming process and to appropriate the identity of streets outside of their neighborhoods, even though challenging historically entrenched patterns of racial segregation and marginalization is exactly the purpose of many street naming campaigns. The case of King stree...

States across the United States are increasingly enacting harsh and punitive immigration laws to encourage what proponents refer to as self-deportation. This paper examines the ideological forces that are nurturing and legitimizing this movement. It specifically focuses on the notion of the good citizen as an ideological construct that inherently makes the undocumented immigrant a threat that must be neutralized for the sake of maintaining law and order. In this way, the good citizen emerges as a natural threat to the undocumented immigrant, as the good citizen is presumably first and foremost obligated to be law-abiding, including upholding laws that aim to push undocumented immigrants to self-deport. This paper looks at how these new immigration laws reify and expand this threat through the notion of good citizenship.