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The article details the development and implementation of a local civil rights history unit at Geneva City High School in Alabama. It discusses the establishment of The People's History of Geneva K-12 Curriculum Project and the teacher workshop that resulted to the creation of the history unit. It explores the design of the unit and how local history supported its learning goals. It also evaluates student learning outcomes such as historical inquiry and understanding of civil rights movement.

Our students ought to know about the history of formal hospital segregation and desegregation. To that end, this article urges those who teach foundational health law and policy courses to do three things. First, to teach the Simkins case. Second, to swap out the usual Medicare signing ceremony picture for one that includes W. Montague Cobb, M.D., Ph.D. Third, to highlight how the implementation of that program for the elderly led, in a matter of months, to the desegregation of hospitals throughout the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section offers news briefs about the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) as of September 2023. Topics discussed include the library's digitization of the title page of the May 22, 1917 issue of the historic newspaper "Atlanta Georgian," the library's release of several newspaper titles to the Georgia Historic Newspapers website, and free online access to oral history interviews of civil rights worker W.W. Law and 20th century Savannah civil rights history.

Most nineteenth-century political debates over U.S. citizenship revolved around the claims of people, often African Americans or immigrants, who aspired to that status. But Native American citizenship's genealogy began instead with the United States assertion of the right to purchase or conquer the territory of its Indigenous neighbors, to replace them as its sole or primary inhabitants, and to make policy for the people thereby dispossessed. These very different histories of citizenship collided in 1866, when the U.S. Senate considered how to codify that status in the Civil Rights Act and Fourteenth Amendment. This article interprets these debates as the collision of an array of distinct and divergent settler colonial processes and experiences. It argues that the ultimate resolution—a half-articulated commitment to let local settler communities decide—both contradicted the ostensible purposes of the Civil Rights Act and accurately reflected how the era's settler colonial society understood the purposes and functions of Native citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author describes her university classroom experiences teaching American Women's history using the 1968 memoir entitled "Coming of Age in Mississippi," by Anne Moody as an example of African American point of view for history.

Between 1774 and 1776 American rebels feared the British government would use French Catholic Canadians to contain their insurrection. As the empire advanced incorporation of its new subjects through the Quebec Act, the Continental Congress invited them to join its fellowship and invaded Canada to secure its cause. The invitations required that the rebels broaden definitions of civil, specifically religious, liberties, whereas enlistment of some Canadians challenged the Continental Army to practice what Congress proclaimed. Recruiting Catholic Francophone "others" by Protestant Anglophones as a strategy of war and nation building tested ideologies within the military sphere; the results reveal a precarious fit between developing public policy, military exigencies, and older biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the history of civil rights for African Americans in relation to the history of Black churches. The author explores the modern meaning of "civil rights" as it changed in the 19th century, examines the private law of religion and the history of contract law, and discusses the theme of the Black freedom struggle.

The article focuses on the Seligman affair, when Jewish banker Joseph Seligman and his family were denied stay at the The Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1877. The author explores how the Seligman affair exemplifies legal anti-Jewish discrimination and anti-Semitism, describes the legislation that disproportionately disadvantaged Jews at this time, and examines how law makers failed to ensure Jewish civil rights.

In 2019, Megan Ming Francis published a path-breaking article challenging the conventional wisdom in the field on a core piece of civil rights history: the role of a philanthropic foundation called the American Fund for Public Service, also known as the Garland Fund, in working alongside the NAACP to produce the organization's famous litigation campaign leading to Brown v. Board of Education. Starting in the late 1920s and early 1930s, education came to occupy a central place in the NAACP's agenda, and education desegregation became the focus of its efforts to break the back of Jim Crow. In Francis's provocative account, the predominantly white Garland Fund captured the agenda of the civil rights organization through its financial influence, shifting the organization's central focus from racial violence toward education equality. An organization that had been focused on protecting Black lives from white violence reoriented its attention to a new campaign, which siphoned off resources from other projects, such as workers' economic rights and Black labor concerns. In this exchange, Francis and legal historian John Fabian Witt debate exactly who captured whom in the relationship between the NAACP and the Garland Fund. Their exchange engages method and substance in the history of civil rights. Among other things, Witt contends that the NAACP's leadership also subtly coopted the Garland Fund's resources and turned them toward the civil rights organization's preexisting objectives rather than vice versa. In Witt's account, the NAACP figured out how to advance its agenda through the Garland Fund, and the efforts of the two organizations became co-joined. The Francis-Witt debate has important implications for our understanding of the paths taken and not taken during the civil rights movement, how social mobilization came to focus on formal legal doctrine rather than concrete social or political ends, and whether the law can truly be turned against systems of oppression. Whichever account is correct, the aftereffects of the NAACP-Garland Fund relationship still reverberate today. The exchange proceeds with an opening statement by Francis, and reply by Witt, and a surreply by Francis, and a closing note from Witt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the conflicts between Catholic churches and Interstate Highway routing during the civil rights era, looking at three Catholic institutions in Birmingham, Alabama, that were adjacent to planned Interstate Highways. The article concludes that Alabama Highway officials did not significantly change Interstate Highway plans because of concerns about the impacts on Catholic institutions, which many Catholics viewed as religiously and racially biased. Catholic institutions that served African American or White children were unable to affect significant changes to politically and racially motivated Interstate Highway routing because those changes would have been to the detriment of middle-class White neighbourhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the concept of black constitutionalism and the resistance to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Topics discussed include black citizenship in the early American republic, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's Dred Scott decision, and the African American's rejection of the ruling's legitimacy and their vision of equality.

The article describes the Fifth Circuit Four, four judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit who, during the late 1950s, became known for a series of decisions crucial in advancing the civil and political rights of African Americans. The Fifth Court helped to break civil rights barriers by enforcing the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. "The Four" were comprised of Chief Judge Elbert Tuttle and his three colleagues John Minor Wisdom, John Robert Brown, and Richard Rives.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is widely regarded as one of the most significant pieces of civil rights legislation in American history. Among its requirements, Title I of the ADA prohibits employers from discriminating against people with disabilities and requires that employers make reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals. Many questions about the scope of the reasonable-accommodation mandate remain, however, as federal circuit courts disagree over whether extended medical leave may be considered a reasonable accommodation and whether an employee on leave is a qualified individual. This Note argues that courts should presume finite unpaid medical leaves of absence are a reasonable accommodation under certain circumstances and shift the focus of judicial inquiry to the employer’s burden of showing undue hardship. Creating a presumption for medical leave is consistent with the text and purpose of the ADA, aligns with Supreme Court case law, and serves as a better framework for balancing competing policy concerns compared to existing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project explores how expressions of public memory that engage with Louis Armstrong reflect the "tensions and contestations" in the study of memory generally and consideration of his legacy specifically. Expressions of public memory as they relate to Armstrong, reflect a lack of understanding of the Black community's struggle for freedom. Armstrong has been posited as a "racial figure." In commemoration, he has been used as an exemplary model that signifies the dilution of racial identity only to binary conceptions of "Tomming" and militant activism. Where public memory has missed the mark in properly commemorating Armstrong's legacy has been its reticence to engage with the dynamic nature of Armstrong's life as reflective of the plurality of the Black community itself over the course of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1970s, grassroots disability movements in many countries changed the thinking around disability and disability politics. Nonetheless, they were also part of larger political upheavals in the western world. How were they inspired by the socialist, feminist, and gay and lesbian movements? In addition, how did they relate to non-disabled allies? Organisations in Denmark and Sweden are investigated and compared to early disability-rights movements in the United Kingdom. Independently of each other, all groups developed materialist models, although only in Sweden and the United Kingdom did this lead to a linguistic distinction between 'impairment' and 'disability'. Danish activists would rather use provocative language, while developing a social understanding of disability. They were also the only ones to discuss gender and sexuality. There are more similarities than differences between the movements, although the Danish specificities contributed to improvements in how Danes with disabilities can develop a positive sex life. In the 1970s, new political ideas grew about ways of living, equality between the sexes, gay and lesbian rights, and sexual freedom. New groups started to talk about how to understand disability. This article investigates whether the new disability groups in Denmark and Sweden talked about these ideas and whether they involved non-disabled people. Danish and Swedish disability groups are compared to early disability rights organisations in the United Kingdom. The Danish and Swedish disability groups were more open to non-disabled members than groups in the United Kingdom. The article also found that the Danish group discussed sexuality a lot. In Sweden and the United Kingdom, the disability groups did not talk about sex at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Thirty-ninth Congress, which was elected in November 1864 and began its first session in December 1865, undertook three tasks: to restore the Union after the Civil War, to amend the Constitution to ensure citizenship to the freedmen, and to legislate federal guarantees for their civil rights. Considering the political constraints of their situation—a hostile President and intransigence in many of the states of the former Confederacy—this essay aims to catalogue and assess the achievements of that Congress. While the Fourteenth Amendment in the long run served its intended purpose and the Civil Rights and Reconstruction Acts secured for a while the integration of the freedmen into the polity, Reconstruction failed to win widespread consent and proved impossible, at least politically, to continuously enforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines an overlooked dimension of the American literary preoccupation with slavery since the 1970s – the mass-market genre of alternate histories of the Civil War that began to proliferate after the end of the civil rights movement. Focussing on the genre's unique blend of historical realism and counterfactual speculation, the essay argues that these novels turn to the Civil War in order to reevaluate the trajectory of US racial history and to reckon with the dramatic racial realignments of the post-civil rights period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First World War saw an unprecedented expansion of the executive powers of the British government that radically changed the relationship between individual citizens and the state. This article offers a new perspective on these developments by analysing the activities of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) between 1916 and 1918. It explores the emergence of civil liberties activism in Britain during the war and its impact on British political culture. The NCCL became an efficiently organised pressure group, campaigning against press censorship, political policing and the suppression of anti-war dissent. This article argues that the innovative campaigning and propaganda methods used by the NCCL mark a moment of innovation that can be described as a revolution in activism. It represents a shift from the grass-roots political associations of the nineteenth century towards more professional forms of political activism that foreshadowed the rise of modern pressure groups and NGOs. The article also explains the emergence of a new discourse about the relationship between civil liberties, democracy and socialism in Britain during the First World War. The NCCL became an important locus for the networks of protest and dissent that emerged in Britain in response to the expansion of the wartime state. The article thus presents a new perspective on the beginnings of civil liberties activism in Britain and the impact of the First World War on its political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First World War saw an unprecedented expansion of the executive powers of the British government that radically changed the relationship between individual citizens and the state. This article offers a new perspective on these developments by analysing the activities of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) between 1916 and 1918. It explores the emergence of civil liberties activism in Britain during the war and its impact on British political culture. The NCCL became an efficiently organised pressure group, campaigning against press censorship, political policing and the suppression of anti-war dissent. This article argues that the innovative campaigning and propaganda methods used by the NCCL mark a moment of innovation that can be described as a revolution in activism. It represents a shift from the grass-roots political associations of the nineteenth century towards more professional forms of political activism that foreshadowed the rise of modern pressure groups and NGOs. The article also explains the emergence of a new discourse about the relationship between civil liberties, democracy and socialism in Britain during the First World War. The NCCL became an important locus for the networks of protest and dissent that emerged in Britain in response to the expansion of the wartime state. The article thus presents a new perspective on the beginnings of civil liberties activism in Britain and the impact of the First World War on its political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the political formula of Romanestan as conceived by Ionel Rotaru (1918–1982), a Romanian refugee in France after the Second World War. Romanestan is the most visible aspect of an ambitious plan demanding rights for those labelled Gypsies throughout the world. This study is of interest because it sheds new light on the problems of social and political readjustment after the Second World War from the standpoint of racial exclusion. Rotaru's project was both the response to longstanding historical racist aggression and also a crucial turning point in the formation of Romani ethnic identity. What makes its study interesting is that the formula of the Romanestan wove the right to exist of those regarded as Gypsies into a creative transnational political project. Based on classified documents, this article highlights the political nature of processes of ethnicization and assesses the performative power of symbols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of the California Supreme Court from 1850 to 1879, with emphasis on individual judicial rights. Topics discussed include the court's handling of cases involving the individual constitutional rights of minorities, the Declaration of Rights covering various common law rights, the practice of using juries in trials, statutory provisions on the waiving of a jury trial and various qualification for jurors as enacted by the Legislature.

In 1955 three individuals converged to change the arc of history, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and arguably the most provocative but least known, Frank Minis Johnson Jr. Johnson served on the Federal District Court of the Middle District of Alabama from 1955 to 1979, during which time his numerous decisions revolutionized Civil Rights. His rulings ended the Montgomery Bus Boycott, integrated public transportation, reformed state prisons, and improved the care for the mentally ill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The confluence of racial unrest and Medicaid expansion in Virginia should inspire a national reimagining of how health care can contribute to health equity. Hospitals in particular can leverage their role as economic drivers in communities to equalize health and social outcomes for all. The urgent need for innovative opioid intervention presents a fertile proving ground for new ways that hospitals can act to reduce the impact of racial inequity. Inspired by the role hospitals played to achieve desegregation during the Civil Rights era, this essay proposes an integrated approach to use Medicaid expansion to advance health and racial healing in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Japanese American Citizens League's (JACL) postwar campaign to secure U.S. citizenship eligibility for first-generation Japanese (Issei) as a civil rights effort that brought Japanese Americans into contention with African American and Afro-Caribbean community leaders during the height of the U.S. Cold War in East Asia. At the same time, JACL's disagreements with Chinese Americans and Japanese American liberals precluded any coherent Japanese or Asian American position on postwar immigration policy. The resulting 1952 McCarran-Walter Act formally ended Asians' exclusion from U.S. immigration and naturalization, even as a colonial quota in the law severely restricted black immigration from the Caribbean and galvanized black protest. This episode of black-Japanese tension complicates scholarly understandings of the liberalization of U.S. immigration and naturalization laws toward Asian peoples as analogous with or complementary to black civil rights gains in the postwar years. In so doing, it suggests the need to think more critically and historically about the cleavages between immigration and civil rights law, and between immigrant rights and civil rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an overview on civil rights and state courts within U.S. President Donald Trump's administration. It mentions about individual rights placed at risk by the Trump administration; President Trump's attempts to curtail civil rights and civil liberties; and safeguarding civil rights and civil liberties in the Trump era. It also informs on how litigators to respond to the Trump administration.

In 1926, local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities in Chicago pursued a deportation drive ostensibly directed at gang members. However, the operation largely took the form of indiscriminate raids on immigrant neighborhoods of the city. Crimmigration in Gangland describes the largely forgotten 1926 deportation drive in Chicago as a means to augment the origin story for "crimmigration." Scholars up until now have mostly contended that the convergence of criminal and immigration law occurred in the 1980s as part of the War on Drugs, with crime serving as a proxy for race for policy makers unable to openly argue for racial exclusion of Latino immigrants in the post-civil rights era. Drawing on original archival research, this article traces those roots back much further, to the Prohibition Era of Gangland Chicago, when they arose in nascent form before being supplanted by the different enforcement dynamics of the Great Depression. A close examination of the deportation drive of 1926 reveals that immigration enforcement at the time contained most of the elements that scholars today have identified when defining crimmigration: a popular preoccupation with "criminal aliens" and attribution of crime problems to them; local/federal collaboration in immigration enforcement; an increase in the criminal grounds for removal; an increase in the criminal prosecution of immigration issues; and an asymmetrical incorporation of criminal procedures into the world of immigration law. These phenomena developed for some of the same reasons that crimmigration arose in a more monolithic form in the 1980s, and indeed, paved the way for it. The 1920s, like the 1980s, came on the heels of a massive surge in immigration as well as a shift in the demographics of immigration. Yet, both were also periods of relative affluence, during which anti-immigration arguments needed to take a different tenor than the protectionist arguments that prevailed during periods of economic insecurity. Like the 1980s, the 1920s also followed on the heels of a "civil rights era": the reconstruction period following the Civil War. Arguments that implicated race were couched in scientific terms during this era of scientific racism and eugenics. Adherents of scientific racism pursued a dubious quest to statistically establish that certain racial and ethnic groups, like Sicilians, had a greater propensity for crime. This principle justified not only limited immigration quotas for Southern and Eastern Europeans, but also deportation efforts like the 1926 raids that targeted Italian Americans, whose "whiteness" was in many ways contested at the time. The 1980s War on Drugs paralleled the Prohibition Era in many ways. One was a return to the focus on crimmigration that developed during the 1920s. Crime served in the 1980s as an effective proxy for race because that linkage had been made so strongly during the earlier period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was written in response to Etzioni’s “Apple: Good Business Poor Citizen” (J Bus Ethics, 2016, doi:10.1007/s10551-016-3233-4). It argues that Etzioni is correct in seeing the recent conflict between Apple and the FBI over cracking the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone as requiring that considerations of national security be balanced against the rights of those it might impact. There are nonetheless critical questions about one must still ask: whose rights are curbed, to what degree, and how does a society decide which side to favor? More attention needs to be paid to the privacy of other iPhone users and, importantly, the burden that hacking the phone might impose on Apple, either impairing its brand value or compromising its business potential. Finally, by asking ‘who judges the balance?’, it questions whether labeling Apple a poor citizen is premature, as they had only begun challenging the FBI’s judgment through the judicial process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1950s Mexican Americans in Tucson participated in civil rights campaigns as members of organizations such as the Alianza Hispano Americana, Arizona Council for Civic Unity, and Tucson Council for Civic Unity. Their goal was to end school segregation laws and to pass legislation abolishing segregation in public accommodations and facilities. Mexican American civil rights leaders and their allies in Tucson worked with an interracial coalition of civic-minded activists to promote civil rights for all Arizonans in the post-World War II era. This article contributes to our understanding of civil rights activism by Mexican Americans in Tucson and their role in advancing the larger anti-segregation and civil rights movements in Arizona and the Southwest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from several periods of English history and building on the literature on culture and institutions, we analyze the co-evolution of education and attitudes toward women's and minority rights. First, we establish a strong association between the size of twenty-first-century educational institutions in a given location and the attitudes prevalent there: the proximity of a large college or university is associated with individual support for women's and minority rights, regardless of whether the individual has been to university. Second, we present evidence for high inter-temporal persistence in the geographical variation in the density of educational institutions over several centuries. Third, we show that the geographical distribution of later educational institutions depends not only on the distribution of medieval institutions, but also on correlates of medieval exposure to ethnic and religious diversity that are likely to have influenced attitudes. Institutions and culture co-evolve, and the inter-temporal persistence of the density of educational institutions is one mechanism (though probably not the only one) that explains the association between medieval exposure to diversity and twenty-first-century attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the work of Anne Spencer, a poet, librarian, and activist, and her poetry focuses on her beloved home and garden. Topics discussed include sacred spaces were a refuge from the Jim Crow South, Spencer's poetry and the force of her personality, the home became a salon of sorts and civil rights history with the founding of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

For decades, bowling has been thought of as a blue-collar sport. But lost on the American public, as well as historians and other scholars of labor history, is the critical role that recreations like bowling played in building industrial unions. As early as 1937, the United Automobile Workers (UAW) had established bowling leagues as a means of bringing workers together through one of the most popular pastimes in the nation. At the same time, bowling, much like baseball, was subject to Jim Crow practices including the exclusion of nonwhite participants—even throughout UAW leagues. The union was silent on the issue of civil rights in recreation through the late 1930s and early 1940s, but by the postwar period, the UAW played a leading role in calling for "fair play" in sport. This article uses bowling as case study to examine how the UAW used bowling to build and sustain the union, promote harmonious intergroup relations among its members, and address issues such as civil rights within the general realm of American life throughout the mid-twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay defines the problem of bildungsroman hermeneutics for literary criticism and social policy in the post-civil rights era. Examining critical responses to Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, it argues that the traditional bildungsroman exerts a powerful hold on interpretations of minority mobility. Bildungsroman hermeneutics understands social relations as organized around individual development. This model undermines the collective politics many critics sense in Cisneros's text and obscures her revisions of the genre. Furthermore, bildungsroman hermeneutics intersects with neoconservative arguments that helped to roll back civil rights reforms and stymie government interventions. To address the inequalities enduring after civil rights we must circumvent an individual-centered template that has shaped plots of narrative and social change. Part of a broader effort to decenter the bildungsroman (including the work of Maxine Hong Kingston and Gloria Naylor), Cisneros's text can help us do so, if we can learn to read it otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores transnational dialogues between peoples of color in Brazil, Spanish-speaking South America, Haiti, and North America on issues relating to revolution, abolitionism, diplomacy, and civil rights in the nineteenth century. By focusing on Emiliano Felipe Benício Mundrucu (1791–1863), a Brazilianpardowho traveled and lived in Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, and the United States, this paper discusses the unique socio-economic, racial, and political perspectives that educated, polyglot, and unusually well-traveled peoples of color brought to debates on abolition, civil rights, and broader hemispheric-wide questions of black identity in this period. It also explores their involvement in transnational revolutionary activity in the early nineteenth century, discussing how Mundrucu, along with other Brazilian secessionists, solicited the help of the young, radical republics of Haiti and Gran Colombia to challenge the Brazilian monarchy in Rio de Janeiro and establish a federalist republic in the north east of the country. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]