Introduction: Brothers and Sisters in Arms

Reviewed by: Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales by Cynthia E. Orozco Rolando Avila Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales. By Cynthia E. Orozco. Foreword by Julián Castro. Hispanic Civil Rights Series. (Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 2022. Pp. xxxviii, 537. Paper, $26.95, ISBN 978-1-55885-896-1.) Cynthia E. Orozco’s stated purpose in her new book Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights: Alonso S. Perales is to rectify a deficiency in the historical record. Orozco explains that even though Alonso S. Perales (1898–1960) was a major civil rights leader, he “has largely been forgotten” (p. xix). [End Page 376] However, that is not entirely true. Perales’s own works are still on library shelves. Although Perales died in 1960 “before the field of Chicano history in the academy existed,” significant works on Perales were indeed published beginning in the 1970s (p. xix). For example, Adela Sloss-Vento published Alonso S. Perales: His Struggle for the Rights of Mexican-Americans (San Antonio, Tex., 1977), and Michael Olivas published In Defense of My People: Alonso S. Perales and the Development of Mexican-American Public Intellectuals (Houston, Tex., 2012). While it may be true that Perales is not as prominent in the literature as he should be—he remains absent, for example, from the American National Biography—he is included in numerous Mexican American reference works, anthologies, and monographs. However, compared with writings about other groups in American history, the dearth of Mexican American political biographies remains glaring. In this regard, Pioneer of Mexican-American Civil Rights is a welcome addition to the literature and will surely become Perales’s standard biography for years to come. Orozco’s book is, to date, the most extensive study of Perales’s life and work. She presents an engaging, well-organized narrative. Twenty-four chapters deal with Perales’s poor upbringing in Texas, military service during World War I, education, political activities, law practice, work as a U.S. diplomat, religion, character, family life, friends, adversaries, events leading to his death, and controversies. The author artfully uses historiography to frame this narrative, and each chapter is bookended by introductory remarks and concluding thoughts. One of the biggest strengths of Orozco’s work here is her use of an extremely large number of available sources, including archival material that was not available to other researchers until recent years. In fact, approximately one-third of the book is composed of supporting documentation, including a selected bibliography (divided by types of sources), a timeline of major events, and extensive notes for each chapter. In sum, the last third of the book is a gold mine for any prospective researcher in this field. Nevertheless, the absence of an index is a major drawback. As a champion for the civil rights of Mexican Americans, Perales was instrumental in the establishment of the Order Sons of America (Orden Hijos de América) in 1921 and the Latin American Citizens League in 1927. In 1929, these two organizations merged to form the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which is still active today. Perales was recognized for his contributions with several honors during his lifetime, the highest of which was awarded to him by Spain in 1952 to honor his advocacy for Spanish-speaking people. It is regrettable that Perales’s contributions were overlooked during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but he is no longer forgotten thanks to conscientious writers like Orozco. Orozco does not shy away from controversies. She makes every effort to present her subject accurately. However, her advocacy for Perales becomes apparent when she confronts critics. This is not a negative. It is part of the book’s overall purpose that the author masterfully achieves. Over the span of this expansive biography, Orozco makes a compelling and well-documented case for Perales’s great importance as a pioneer of Mexican American civil rights. [End Page 377] Rolando Avila University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association

“Only a Moral Power”African Americans, Reformers, and the Repeal of Ohio’s Black Laws L. Diane Barnes (bio) Responding to a critic of his home state of Ohio in 1851, abolitionist Rep. Joshua R. Giddings extolled the virtues of the racial equality that followed the partial repeal of the state’s Black Laws in February 1849. He noted that “a black or mulatto person now enjoys the same liberty to settle in Ohio as [the critic] Col. Schouler, and would be listened to in a court of justice there with the same respect.”1 For Giddings and some other white political abolitionists, the repeal represented a singular accomplishment, a promise of things to come. For African American reformers such as Alfred J. Anderson, Charles B. Ray, and Frederick Douglass, the Ohio repeal suggested “there is yet work for the friends of Universal Freedom in the State of Ohio.” African Americans viewed the “victory” as only a partial achievement. One activist remarked that “the colored population has been in a starving condition, for want of the benefits of education, and the enjoyments of various precious rights, and now our Legislature gives them only a small share of what they should have.”2 Historians sometimes dismiss Ohio’s Black Laws because some were rarely enforced and they seldom prohibited the movement of African Americans into [End Page 7] the state. The state counted a mere 337 African American residents at statehood, but by 1860 the number approached 37,000. At first glance the growing population seems astounding; however, on the eve of the Civil War black Ohioans made up less than 2 percent of the state’s 2.3 million residents. It is likely that some African Americans chose to avoid settling in Ohio, where their rights could fall victim to sporadic Black Law enforcement. To mid-nineteenth-century African Americans and their advocates in the reform community, especially, the very existence of the Black Laws enforced or not, represented one more bastion of racism in antebellum American society. The Black Laws offered a tangible target in the movement for racial equality and black uplift that grew along with immediate abolition after 1830. Repeal of the Ohio Black Laws became a goal of the national and state black convention movements, of regional white abolitionists, and was of national concern to African Americans. Some of their efforts on behalf of African Ohioans will be considered here in an effort to understand the complicated nature of the struggle for racial equality in antebellum America. The very denial of basic civil rights, including the franchise, under Ohio law meant that no matter how hard they struggled, African Americans could claim “only a moral power” in the fight for repeal. It was up to white allies such as Giddings, Salmon P. Chase, and a few like-minded state delegates to push the repeal through the legislature. Chase took up the cause of repeal at a politically expedient time—he would ride his newfound Free Soil constituency all the way to the U.S. Senate. The legislative action to at least partially repeal the laws was made more urgent by a petition and pamphlet campaign from Ohio’s female antislavery activists, and editorials in the national black press. Yet even after repeal, with the exception of a handful of Ohio’s most light-skinned blacks, African American men could still not cast a vote in favor of those who supported civil rights.3 They were denied this basic right of citizenship [End Page 8] under the Ohio constitution, and the state’s Black Laws further restricted civil and political rights.4 The terms “black codes” or “black laws” generally bring to mind the post‒Civil War South, where legal restrictions governed the lives of African Americans. There, laws restricted the freedom of blacks, determined employment patterns, and aimed to keep African Americans laboring for little or no money. By the late nineteenth century Jim Crow laws codified the separation of African Americans and whites in public accommodations and denied blacks access to basic civil rights across the South. These systems evolved in the wake of slavery’s end; however, from the nation’s founding, slavery had...

Pacifist utopias: humanitarianism, tragedy and complicity in the Second World War

Silver and Segregation Wyatt Wells (bio) The early 1890s saw the intersection of the two most divisive political issues of the 19th century: race relations and the currency. An effort to protect the voting rights of southern blacks and another to preserve the gold standard gave rise to an alliance between Silverites and Segregationists that influenced public life in the United States well into the 20th century. Although the Compromise of 1877 terminated Reconstruction, it did not settle the questions of what race relations and politics would look like in the postwar South. Many northern Republicans expected southern Democrats to respect the rights of African Americans, and at least a few of the latter promised to do so. African Americans often voted and, in some areas, held public office. In most southern states, the Republican Party still functioned, electing local officials, state legislators, and the occasional U.S. Representative. In the 1880s a coalition of Republicans and dissident Democrats won state elections in Virginia, and in the 1890s alliances between Republicans and Populists did the same in North Carolina and Louisiana. Nevertheless, during these years, southern Democrats often used fraud and intimidation to eject Republicans from office, and southern states enacted the first Jim Crow statutes. In 1890 a petition from blacks in Oklahoma to President Benjamin Harrison lamented that “[t]he passage of unfair laws affecting elections, labor and the landlord and tenant system, by the legislatures of southern states, has caused widespread unrest and discontent” and “produced a feeling of profound discouragement and utter dismay among Africo-American [sic] voters in the entire country.”1 Click for larger view View full resolution An 1888 cartoon showing Benjamin Harrison in a boat trying to shoot ducks, “voters,” with a musket, “force bill,” and catch fish, “voters.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Many Republicans sympathized with the plight of southern blacks. They valued the GOP’s history as the party of freedom and recognized that the Democrats’ lock on the South made it much harder for their party to win national elections. Unfortunately, the Democrats controlled the U.S. House of Representatives for most of the 1880s, allowing them to block civil rights legislation. In 1888, however, the GOP won control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, and Republicans came to Washington with an ambitious agenda that included a voting rights bill. Senator George Hoar (R-MA) and Representative Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) took charge of what its opponents soon dubbed the “Force Bill.” This measure provided for the appointment of federal election inspectors in any congressional district where a certain number of voters requested it. These inspectors would keep track of voting practices and election returns, and ideally, their very presence would discourage chicanery. If, however, inspectors disagreed with local or state authorities about the outcome of an election, the federal courts would decide the winner. Although less [End Page 2] sweeping than the voting rights measures of Reconstruction or the Civil Rights era—among other things, it only applied to elections to federal office—the Force Bill would have acted as a brake on the pervasive fraud and intimidation that characterized elections in the South and might have set a precedent for further action. It enjoyed strong support among rank-and-file Republicans. As a party operative in Indiana wrote, “Our people are just as anxious for the passage of new elections laws as they were for the pension bill [for veterans of the Civil War]”—a strong statement considering the central role of veterans in the GOP.2 Dissent came from those who considered themselves reformers. The only Republican senator who refused to endorse the Force Bill, Richard Pettigrew of South Dakota, was an agrarian radical who eventually joined the Populist Party. Terrance Powderly, the leader of the country’s largest labor organization, the Knights of Labor, opposed the Force Bill outright. In a printed exchange with Henry Cabot Lodge, he insisted that southern blacks suffered no more from electoral fraud than people in the North and that the secret ballot and better education would eliminate the problem altogether. Overall, Powderly gave the impression that civil rights was a nuisance that distracted reformers...

They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada

Examining the evolution of U.S military policy reveals how debates about the rights and opportunities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people have been shaped by military personnel policies, federal laws, and cultural practices within military units. LGBT individuals have experienced U.S. military service through regulatory regimes that have often defined them as burdensome deviants and denied them civil rights enjoyed by other service members. LGBT people have served as volunteers and conscripts, openly and in the closet. Key periods of U.S. military history for LGBT service include World War II, the Cold War, as well as the Vietnam War era, the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) regime (1994–2010), and the post-DADT period (2011 and beyond). During these periods of time, the armed forces and the United States reassessed the regulation of the service of LGBT service members and implemented changes that affected the rights, opportunities, and safety of LGBT military personnel and potential recruits. Those changes traced a path from outright exclusion of open service by LGBT persons to exemption, under which LGBT persons may serve under certain conditions, which often included the threat of expulsion, punishment, and extra-legal violence. In the post-DADT period, inclusion, or open service by some, but not all, LGBT groups, was made legal and safer through changes in law and military regulations and training that protected against some types of gender-identity and sexual orientation discrimination. Because serving openly in the military is a sign of full citizenship in the United States as well as a means of achieving economic security, eliminating limits on LGBT military service has long been a focus of advocates for civil rights. Military service has been perceived as proving a citizen’s loyalty and patriotism as well as offering material and social advancement. With many LGBT people at greater risk of unemployment, homelessness, and premature death as a result of violence and social ostracism, military service has been an especially critical opportunity for political and economic advancement. Honoring this history and identifying existing trends can help the United States, other nations, and international organizations to adapt their policies in recognition of gender and sexual diversity. Even when excluded by formal policy, people have found ways to serve, sometimes at great personal risk. Although their labor is officially lauded as an asset, their contributions and needs have not been fully recognized or appreciated by the state they pledged to serve. As the nation’s largest employer and provider of structural resources, the U.S. military’s support of LGBT military personnel and veterans matters greatly to social equity for a still-vulnerable LGBT population.

Reviewed by: We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement by Akinyele Omowale Umoja Michael Vinson Williams (bio) We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. By Akinyele Omowale Umoja. (New York: New York University Press, 2013. Pp. 339. $40.00 cloth) In We Will Shoot Back, Akinyele Omowale Umoja presents a compelling and important argument for the role armed resistance played in the Mississippi freedom struggle. Without armed resistance, Umoja contends, many civil rights organizations “would not have been able to organize in Mississippi” (p. 2). Despite advocating nonviolence, We Will Shoot Back demonstrates that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) benefitted from the presence of armed resistors whose actions saved lives in some instances by deterring white violence. Umoja’s strength rests in his deft use of a wide range of source materials, as well as his careful attention to the racial environment of Mississippi and African Americans’ open and sometimes volatile response to racial oppression. We Will Shoot Back then challenges conventional narratives presenting black Mississippians as either passive participants in the movement or as dependent, for the most part, upon the leadership of national civil rights organizations and a nonviolent platform for bringing about sociopolitical change; this approach is far too myopic as Umoja demonstrates. By focusing on the work of key Mississippi activists, such as C. O. Chinn, Vernon Dahmer, [End Page 709] Amzie Moore, and E. W. Steptoe, Umoja provides an important view into the lives, mission, and work of Mississippi civil rights activists and their relationship to the larger movement with armed resistance as the backdrop. He adds to the discussion of civil rights activism by connecting it with armed self-defense in a way that is fresh and symbolic of the ever-changing dynamics of the civil rights struggle. Throughout, We Will Shoot Back provides readers with a sense of the dangers faced by activists, as well as those who were willing to house, feed, and introduce civil rights workers to the larger community. More importantly, the author demonstrates the lengths to which they were willing to go to stand as men and women; shooting back underscored that determination. The depth of white oppression that African Americans faced and what it took to resist will be important to readers’ understanding of what civil rights activism really meant, and Umoja accomplishes this quite well. However, ideas of armed resistance did not always go over smoothly, and he effectively demonstrates the constant tension and divisions created around the issue of armed resistance versus nonviolence as primary strategies. Yet, Umoja acknowledges that ideas about the feasibility of armed resistance changed in light of the inability, or unwillingness, of the federal government to protect those suffering from white oppression and violence. Dave Dennis of CORE symbolized this shift in 1964 when cautioning Robert Kennedy that blacks “shall not watch their families starve, be jailed, beaten, and killed without responding to protect themselves. You have proven by your refusal to act that we have no other recourse but to defend ourselves with whatever means we have at our disposal” (p. 96). Individuals did not use armed resistance as a stand-alone strategy but often employed it in conjunction with economic boycotts to bring about change. Umoja stretches the conventional timeline of the civil rights movement from the late 1960s to include the mid-1970s and does an effective job of demonstrating the ways that small Mississippi towns organized using multiple tactics and blending the strategies of economic boycotts and armed resistance. We Will Shoot Back accomplishes [End Page 710] Umoja’s primary goal of demonstrating that “armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disfranchisement” (p. 2). Thus, he successfully challenges the often silent narrative on the importance and prevalence of armed resistance in Mississippi and, in doing so, We Will Shoot Back underscores the importance of reexamining the Mississippi movement in all of its complexities. Michael Vinson Williams MICHAEL VINSON WILLIAMS is the author of Medgar Evers: Mississippi Martyr and dean of the Division...

Evolving Commemorations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Military Service Noah Riseman (bio) In 1995 Australia’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs sponsored a series of commemorations dubbed Australia Remembers 1945–1995. A review indicated that over 70 percent of Australians and 90 percent of ex-service organizations and communities participated in associated events.1 Yet state reports suggested that one segment of the population did not significantly participate: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. These are Australia’s two Indigenous peoples: Aboriginal people’s traditional lands are on mainland Australia and Tasmania; while Torres Strait Islanders’ traditional lands are the islands of the Torres Strait, separating Australia from Papua New Guinea. Historian Liz Reed argues that the underparticipation of Indigenous communities during Australia Remembers underscored the different agendas of non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians. Both Prime Minister Paul Keating and Veterans’ Affairs Minister Con Sciacca emphasized narratives of racial unity during the war, reflecting the Keating government’s Reconciliation agenda. Although Indigenous Australians did want their war service recognized, they also wanted reparations for their war efforts and recognition of their ongoing marginalization within Australia.2 Flash-forward twenty years to the centenary of the First World War, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inclusion in commemorative events was quite conspicuous. Indeed, in the new millennium there has been a “boom” in commemorations of Indigenous military [End Page 80] service. To an extent this is a symptom of the global “memory boom,” but it is also a significant consequence of the Reconciliation movement and the History Wars.3 The Reconciliation movement of the 1990s sought to unite Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians through new understandings of shared histories, including discussions about violent colonial dispossession. While many Australians embraced the Reconciliation movement, among other sectors of the population there was a backlash against supposed special treatment accorded to Indigenous Australians.4 Part of this backlash manifested as the History Wars, which coincided with the 1996–2007 government of John Howard. Conservative pundits argued that academic historians exaggerated frontier violence and child removal, painting a wholly negative, “black armband” vision of Australian history. Most academic historians and public intellectuals retorted that conservatives were whitewashing Australian history to suit nationalist agendas.5 Indigenous military service comfortably transcended the History Wars while also supporting Reconciliation by showing a history of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians working together. Invoking the language of shared sacrifice and Indigenous inclusion within Australia’s Anzac mythology spoke a language palatable to conservative Australian values. Amidst this wider sociopolitical context, new Indigenous ex-service organizations emerged and received support from local, state, and federal governments for memorials, marches, and services. The boom in Indigenous military commemorations also parallels a widespread valuing of military achievement in Australian society. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, among other historians, have criticized this “militarization of Australian history.” They argue that the valorization of military achievement in Australia is a deliberately manipulated act of conservative propaganda seeking to undermine public memory of colonization and to marginalize the place of Aboriginal victims of frontier violence in Australian history.6 Yet Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have also demonstrated a wish to honor their servicemen and servicewomen and have been doing so since the First World War. Such practices have incorporated Indigenous traditions while concurrently asserting military service as a legitimizing claim to Australian citizenship rights. The escalation of such commemorations in recent years and its increasing recognition by non-Indigenous Australians is in keeping with the global memory boom. While it may be argued that this offers a version of Indigenous Australian history that is “safe” for conservative, nationalistic, military-focused consumption, the boom has not diverted attention from the settler violence and Indigenous resistance to colonialism, sometimes dubbed the frontier wars.7 On the contrary, it has drawn attention to that missing chapter in the national military story. This [End Page 81] article will chronologically outline the history of commemorations of Australian Indigenous military service from the early, locally organized events to the recent boom in state and national commemorations. It relies on a mixture of Indigenous and newspaper sources, and the newspaper sources are especially interesting because they reveal examples of Indigenous participation in...

Today, the military is one the most racially diverse institutions in the United States. But for many decades African American soldiers battled racial discrimination and segregation within its ranks. In the years after World War II, the integration of the armed forces was a touchstone in the homefront struggle for equality-though its importance is often overlooked in contemporary histories of the civil rights movement. Drawing on a wide array of sources, from press reports and newspapers to organizational and presidential archives, historian Christine Knauer recounts the conflicts surrounding black military service and the fight for integration. Let Us Fight as Free Men shows that, even after their service to the nation in World War II, it took the persistent efforts of black soldiers, as well as civilian activists and government policy changes, to integrate the military. In response to unjust treatment during and immediately after the war, African Americans pushed for integration on the strength of their service despite the oppressive limitations they faced on the front and at home. Pressured by civil rights activists such as A. Philip Randolph, President Harry S. Truman passed an executive order that called for equal treatment in the military. Even so, integration took place haltingly and was realized only after the political and strategic realities of the Korean War forced the Army to allow black soldiers to fight alongside their white comrades. While the war pushed the civil rights struggle beyond national boundaries, it also revealed the persistence of racial discrimination and exposed the limits of interracial solidarity. Let Us Fight as Free Men reveals the heated debates about the meaning of military service, manhood, and civil rights strategies within the African American community and the United States as a whole.

Reviewed by: Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle Zoe Trodd Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle Leigh Raiford Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011; 312 pages. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3430-5 During the peak years of the desegregation movement, Martin Luther King Jr. repeatedly explained that visibility was vital to success. “Injustice must be exposed, with all the tensions its exposure creates,” he wrote in 1963. The following year, he noted that the [End Page 149] activist should “force his oppressor to commit his brutality openly . . . with the rest of the world looking on.” He referenced the media’s coverage of the Birmingham campaign and explained, “The brutality with which officials would have quelled the black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved. It was caught—as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught—in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world.” King’s observations reflect a broader understanding on the part of civil rights activists that photography was a key weapon in the freedom struggle. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) enlisted and trained photographers, while the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Congress of Racial Equality supported several. Some leaders took photographs themselves, including Wyatt Walker and Andrew Young of SCLC, and James Forman and Robert Zellner of SNCC. Activists turned photographs into posters, printed them in pamphlets, and displayed them in freedom houses. Outside civil rights organizations, Gordon Parks, Charles Moore, and Frank Dandridge photographed the movement’s events and figures for Life, and photographs of violence against protestors appeared on the front pages of the New York Times and other newspapers. Responding to photographs of the 1963 Birmingham campaign that showed police dogs attacking student demonstrators and fire hoses knocking down protestors, Burke Marshall of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice claimed the images “stirred the feelings” of most whites in the country. For his part, President Kennedy said that the images made him “sick”—their eloquence exceeding that of “explanatory words.” Leigh Raiford, an associate professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and previously the coeditor of The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2006), takes her book’s title from King’s description of such photographs as a “luminous glare.” In this first full length study of photography’s relationship to the freedom struggle, she goes further than a recent cluster of very strong books about visuality and the long civil rights movement that began in anti-lynching, including Shawn Michelle Smith’s Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, [End Page 150] and Visual Culture (Duke University Press, 2004), Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith’s Lynching Photographs (University of California Press, 2008), Amy Louise Wood’s Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), Elizabeth Abel’s Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (University of California Press, 2010), and Martin Berger’s Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (University of California Press, 2011). By stretching her analysis from the anti-lynching campaign (mainly Ida B. Wells and the [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] NAACP), through the Civil Rights Movement (mainly SNCC), to the Black Power Movement (mainly the Black Panther newspaper and Emory Douglas’s photo collages), Raiford is able to chart a shifting, complex, and longstanding relationship between photography and activism, ultimately proving that black visuality has been inextricably connected to the freedom struggle’s construction, development, and consumption. Activists used photographs to remake black identity, reframe national identity, and reject dominant racial ideology, as Raiford demonstrates in this deeply researched and persuasively argued book. Some of the book’s numerous other contributions include an assessment of how activists recontextualized lynching photographs so that their purpose became protest rather than celebration; the demonstration that SNCC’s control of its own media was vital to the movement; and the argument that...

The following article explores the collective identifications (or self-perceptions) among members of the Danish-speaking minority in the Imperial German Army during the First World War, including views on German conscription and military service. Danish historians have traditionally portrayed the minority as soldiers who only served with reluctance, hoping for German defeat in the war and a ‘reunification’ between their home-region, North Schleswig, and the State of Denmark. However, the vast majority of Danish-speakers were well integrated in the German army and served as reliable soldiers throughout the course of the war. At first glance, this seems to constitute a contradiction, but this article will illustrate how members of the Danish minority, in order to serve as loyal soldiers, on the one hand reconciled ideas of both Danish and regional affiliation, as well as ancestral loyalty and civic rights, with feelings of coercion, discrimination and German enmity on the other. Furthermore, feelings of obligation, responsibility and civic duty was also connected with German military service. It will be argued that the key to understand the sometimes-contradictory self-perceptions of the Danish minority soldiers lays in how many-sided understandings of community encased or negotiated feelings of reluctance. If the war experiences of the Danish-speaking minority are viewed in a purely national perspective, it become difficult to explain the various forms of self-perception present in the source material: For instance, German military service could be justified as a way to secure Danish interests regionally within the German state, and a way to improve civic rights for the minority group. In this way, the self-perceptions of a minority soldiers could be Danish in terms of national affiliation, but to a high degree collective ‘identity’ also had the regional community at its centre.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) states in 2018 that safeguarding “civil liberties is critical” to their official duties. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties within DHS, as its website explains, My chapter tracks the centrality of deportability in shaping the civil liberties and rights that DHS is tasked with enforcing. Over the course of the twentieth century, people on US soil saw an expanding list of civil liberties and civil rights. Important scholarship concentrates on the role of the courts, state and federal governments, advocacy groups, social movements, and foreign policy driving these constitutional and cultural changes. For instance, the scholarship illustrates that coming out of World War I, the US Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment did not protect something the Justices labeled “irresponsible speech.” The Supreme Court soon changed course, opening up an era ever since of more robust First Amendment rights. What has not been undertaken in the literature is an examination of the relationship of deportability to the sweep of civil liberties and civil rights. Starting in the second decade of the twentieth century, federal immigration policymakers began multiplying types of immigration statuses. A century later, among many others, there is the H2A status for temporary low-wage workers, the H2B for skilled labor, and permanent residents with green cards. The deportability of each status constrains access to certain liberties and rights. Thus, in 2016, when people from the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties within DHS act, they are not enforcing a uniform body of rights and liberties that applies equally to citizens and immigrants, or even within the large category of immigrants. Instead, they do so within a complicated matrix of liberties and rights attenuated by deportability, which has been shaped by the history of the twentieth century.

Do Supreme Court decisions matter? In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that railroad segregation laws were permissible under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1954 the Court's decision in Brown v. the Board of Education held that the same constitutional provision invalidated statutes segregating public schools How great an impact did judicial rulings such as Plessy and Brown have? How much did such Court decisions influence the larger world of race relations? In From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, Michael J. Klarman examines the social and political impact of the Supreme Court's decisions involving race relations from Plessy, the Progressive Era, and the Interwar Period to World Wars I and II, Brown and the Civil Rights Movement. He explores the wide variety of consequences that Brown may have had--raising the salience of race issues, educating opinion, mobilizing supporters, energizing opponents of racial change. He concludes that Brown was ultimately more important for mobilizing southern white opposition to racial change than for encouraging direct-action protest. The decision created concrete occasions for violent confrontation--court ordered school desegregation and radicalized southern politics, leading to the election of politicians who calculated that violent suppression of civil rights demonstrations would win votes. It was such violence--vividly captured on television--that ultimately transformed northern opinion on race, leading to the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation in the mid 1960s. A fascinating investigation of the Supreme Court's rulings on race, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, spells out in exhaustive detail the political and social context against which the Supreme Court Justices operate and the consequences of those decisions on the civil rights movement and beyond.

Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South

South Africa failing people displaced by xenophobia riots