The time is now

Commentary: Diversity in physics: Are you part of the problem?

Z. Alexander Looby (1899-1972) and Avon N. Williams, Jr. (1921-1994) were the most prominent civil rights attorneys working in Tennessee during the post-World War II period. They filed dozens of lawsuits pertaining to school desegregation, racial discrimination in employment and public accommodations, and other areas. Looby and Williams's work in school desegregation cases alone encompassed every major case in the state (with the exception of Northcross v. Board of Education), and entered the highest realms of legal activity. Federal judges at the circuit, appeals, and U.S. Supreme Court levels cited and considered many of their cases as the post-Brown v. Board of Education (1954) litigation world unfolded. Looby and Williams also followed their civil rights work into the political world--Looby as Nashville city councilman and Williams as state senator--where they became part of the first major resurgence of black lawmakers in Tennessee since Reconstruction. As Professor Bobby L. Lovett argued, electoral poli tics became the next arena in the fight for equal rights, despite suggestions in the mass media from the early 1970s that the Civil Rights Movement ended when sit-ins, mass marches, and freedom rides were no longer the dominant strategy. (1) In this sense, Looby and Williams set important examples by extending their legal skills beyond the courtroom and into legislative bodies. But more fundamentally, Looby and Williams's civil rights work in the legal and political arenas made them among the most important and widely recognized leaders in Nashville's African American community, and beyond. In addition to legal and political activities, they served their community in numerous other ways that included the churches, schools, and civic organizations. (2) Looby and Williams countered a deeply imbedded tradition in this regard, for prior to their work, many (perhaps most) whites and African Americans alike held little respect for black attorneys in general. For Looby and Williams to emerge as prominent community l eaders presented a impressive example to the contrary, to say the least. AFRICAN AMERICAN ATTORNEYS AND LEGAL ASPECTS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT Many historians have tended to neglect the legal aspects of the Civil Rights Movement, when in fact, litigation and other matters related to the law were often crucial determinants of success or failure. For example, the legendary Montgomery, Alabama, Bus Boycott (1955-56) involved absolutely indispensable legal work that fundamentally influenced the final outcome of that historic and symbolic event. (3) In contrast, an absence of legal help often proved disastrous for civil rights activists, particularly when local and state authorities passed discriminatory laws, issued injunctions against activists, sanctioned massive arrests, and otherwise attempted to enforce segregation or disrupt organized protests. (4) As legal scholars Donald Barnett King and Charles W. Quick observed in 1965, Both positively and negatively, [law] has been instrumental in defining the rights of the Negro in almost every realm of life. (5) Many scholars have almost completely ignored the leadership role of African American attorneys within their immediate communities. The scholarship has also tended to remain rooted in an earlier, disparaging view of black lawyers, who were unfairly caught in a vicious cycle during the Jim Crow era. Before the mid-1940s, these attorneys struggled for respect against the odds of discriminatory legal education, lack of esteem in the black community, inadmissibility to bar associations, shortage of honorable clients, and mistreatment at the hands of racist judges and court officials. African Americans also suffered discrimination in law school admissions. If they managed to earn a law degree, they immediately encountered further discrimination in the legal system. Since a racist and predominantly white society favored white lawyers in the courtroom, many African Americans were disinclined to hire lawyers of their own race. …

Mark Arax's 2004 Los Angeles Times article In a Reverse Migration, Blacks Head he informs us that urban northern and western destinations of African Americans from 1910 to 1970, what we refer to as The Great Migrations, have been undergoing a full scale reversal as African Americans began retracing steps to a place their families once fled--the (A1). The spike southern black population--an increase of 3.6 million during 1990s--coincided with changing ethnic demographics areas to which African Americans traditionally moved opposition to Jim Crow South. Therefore, with appearance of cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Memphis as black Meccas, as DeWayne Wickham points out, the South has emerged as leading source of economic opportunity for black businesses and fertile ground for black politicians (A13). The realignment that Civil Rights Movement engineered resulted a southern transformation that could not overtly and legally deny rights and humanity of African Americans. Yet a landscape that maintains a deep connection to its traditions and legacy, African Americans still find themselves, at times, erased from mythic construction of South and marginalized material areas of social and political power. addition to its role conservative counterrevolution of 1980s and 1990s, a litany of recent events South--specifically dragging death of James Byrd Jasper, Texas, punitive indictments of six African American boys Jena, Louisiana, and federal government's belated response during Hurricane Katrina--have reinforced ideas of South as a site which African Americans still remain an incredibly vulnerable populace. The depiction of South as a dangerous (and at times nightmarish) space for African Americans has an extensive history African American literature. Richard Wright's 1938 collection of short stories, Uncle Tom's Children, for example, depicts southern African Americans struggling to achieve agency an unforgiving, violent Jim Crow South, a struggle buoyed by contemporaneous events like trial of Scottsboro boys and Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Wright's second story collection, Down by Riverside, also points to future by forecasting pervasive instances of white supremacy that accompanied tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, from governmental response to mostly black poor to media construction of black looters and refugees. Ernest Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men presents a late 1970s South that directly contradicts idea of a rapidly changing nation after passage of Voting and Civil Rights Acts 1960s. Gaines's novel, we are witness to a world that has barely changed from world of 1940s that Gaines captures works like Of Love and Dust (1968) and A Lesson Before Dying (1993). Wright and Gaines are part of a larger literary tradition that, as Anissa Wardi claims Death and Arc of Mourning African American Literature, bears witness to truncated narratives of Middle Passage, brutal practices of slavery, and paradoxical configuration of South through myth and memory (28). Instead of merely bearing witness, African Americans Gaines's south Louisiana community assert a collective subjectivity that foreshadows significance of black political, social, and economic life rewriting southern racial narrative and myth that has marginalized or erased legacy of African Americans. Jerry Ward claims that in aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and flooding of New Orleans, 'Down by Riverside' speaks to much more than Flood of 1927 (347). Similarly, return of African Americans to South leads us to view A Gathering of Old Men not only as site of a final battle Civil Rights Movement, but as a potentially regenerative space for a more inclusive, restructured South. …

Reviewed by: The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights by Thomas C. Holt Raymond Arsenault The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights. By Thomas C. Holt. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 151. $18.95, ISBN 978-0-19-752579-1.) An abbreviated format poses a daunting challenge to any author, especially when the subject at hand is as complex and important as the American civil rights movement. Limited to approximately 120 pages of text, Thomas C. Holt had no choice but to avoid literary flourishes and potentially interesting digressions in his effort to produce a book that covers the major topics related to the history of the movement. With this restriction in mind, he set out to write a book that could transcend its brevity by keeping its "eyes on the prize," in the words of a popular movement anthem. The prize, in his view, is to capture the spirit and essence of a grassroots movement that depended heavily on the contributions and sacrifices of the mass of activists commonly known as "foot soldiers" (p. 19). Holt hopes to dispel a common misunderstanding of the civil rights struggle: the belief that the momentum and success of the movement were primarily a function of charismatic leadership and careful management from above. "Freedom," he writes in the final paragraph of the book, "is a prize won not in a single campaign, but in a long struggle waged by a determined and committed people. And, ultimately, it is not exceptional leaders but ordinary people themselves, conscious of the historical possibilities of their moment and acting collectively, who have the capacity to win that fight and change their world" (p. 120). While Holt does not deny the importance of organizational leadership, he is determined to challenge its centrality. This perspective allows him to treat leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, and Stokely Carmichael as flesh and blood figures without turning them into mythic heroes. It also encourages greater appreciation for the critical role that women played in advancing the struggle, and a nuanced and balanced assessment of the relationships between local and national movements and the relative importance and connection between legal battles in the courts and the nonviolent direct-action struggle in the streets. The result is a highly sophisticated account that does full justice to both the strengths and the weaknesses of the movement. The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights is truth-telling history that studiously avoids the pitfalls of a comforting, celebratory narrative. Holt begins fittingly with a highly personal, prologue-like introduction that focuses on his grandmother Carrie Lee Fitzgerald, a Black Virginian who [End Page 423] refused to move to the back of a segregated bus in 1944. This simple act of resistance and courage, much like Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her seat eleven years later, introduces the intimidating world of Jim Crow that movement activists confronted in the years to come. The six chapters that follow offer an effective mix of chronological and thematic analysis, emphasizing change over time and the geographic diversity of discrimination and civil rights activism. One chapter titled "Before Montgomery" sets the stage for two chapters dealing with "Communities Organizing for Change," one subtitled "New South Cities," and the other subtitled "The New 'Old South,'" and a chapter focusing on "Organizing in the 'American Congo': Mississippi's Freedom Summer and Its Aftermath." The final two chapters address "Freedom Movements in the North" and "Legacies: 'Freedom Is a Constant Struggle.'" Despite their brevity, the six chapters offer a wealth of information and interpretive insight on the nature of the post–World War II African American freedom struggle. Holt's command of the secondary literature is sure-handed and reliable, and his conclusions about the complexities of racial discrimination and resistance bear the mark of a veteran scholar at the top of his game. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more valuable or thought-provoking introduction to the history of a movement that changed all of our lives. Raymond Arsenault University of South Florida Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

76 No.2 Understanding the Local Context of the Civil (lights MovementiUsing Service Learning to Develop an Oral History of Our Community By Robert Weldon Simmons III Growing up in Detroit as the son of a mother who attended Speiman College in Atlanta, I was keenly aware of the significance of the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the lives of African Americans. What's more, I was also aware of the links that the Civil Rights Movement had to Detroit. Noting the conversations that my mother had when describing life at Speiman during the late 1960s and my uncles discussing their experience watching Detroit burn during the 1967 social uprising (or riot, as some have suggested) on 12th and Claremont (walking distance from our family home), I knew that the local context of the Civil Rights Movement and the impact of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were often overshadowed by the bigger issues presented in various history textbooks in schools. Accordingly, I have worked with pre-service teachers and co-taught with teachers in middle and high schools to understand how service learning can be utilized to create oral history projects that focus on local communities. All discussions with students regarding the local context of the Civil Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 begin with reading from Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s.1 As my teacher education students read the text, they are amazed at the complexity of the Civil Rights Movement and the story behind the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Middle and high school students seem surprised to find that the struggle for freedom and justice wasn't just a "southern thing with people fighting against the Confederate flag," as suggested by one high school student. Exposure to readings that focus attention on the Civil Rights Movement in cities like Detroit, Chicago, Boston, or Gary, Indiana, as well as how the local community was impacted by the Civil 14 I BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN Vol. 76, No. 2 Rights Act of 1964, leaves students' eyes wide and their mouths open in amazement. As one student said to me in Detroit, "I didn't know we got down like that in the D." To him I said, "We sure did and still do." For students in grades 6-12 who don't find their cities located in the text, they routinely wonder, "What was happening here during that same time period?" Accordingly, I use this type of student curiosity as an opening to educate these students not only about the Civil Rights Movement, but about the work that was done during that era in their own cities. While I was studying the impact of service learning in urban schools in a school in the Midwest, I listened to "You Must Learn" by Boogie Down Productions with a group of African American students in a high school classroom.2 As the music played and the students nodded their heads and took notes on the historical names they recognized, I realized how little they knew about the personal narratives generated by everyday African Americans associated with the Civil Rights Movement. I tossed out a name of a local legend in the Civil Rights Movement and asked them to explain who this person was. Silence fell over the room. Certainly they knew of Rosa Parks sitting on the bus and Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, but they had little knowledge of their local community's participation in the Civil Rights Movement. As my co-teaching partner and I pondered our next series of lessons, we decided to co-construct them with our students. When we initially approached our students about developing a series of lessons focusing on the local context during the Civil Rights Movement, the students were confused. One student said, "Y'all think we know something about teaching?" My response was, "Perhaps you do, but you for sure know something about learning. Now tell me what you want to learn about as it relates to your local community and the Civil Rights Movement...

Resisting “Law and Order” in California: Howard Moore Jr., Angela Davis, and the Politics of Prison Radicalism

Teaching (Cooperative) Business: The “Bluefield Experiment” and the Future of Black Business Schools

Race, Place, and Belonging in the Midwest Kathryn Schumaker James Endersby and William Horner, Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2016. 336 pp. $36.95. Mary Lou Finley, Bernard Lafayette Jr., James R. Ralph Jr., and Pam Smith, eds., The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 495 pp. $40. Lena Hill and Michael Hill, Invisible Hawkeyes: African Americans at the University of Iowa during the Long Civil Rights Era. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016. 230 pp. $20. Natalie Y. Moore, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016. 272 pp. $28.99, cloth. $17, paper. Kerry Pimblott, Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 334 pp. $45. Sun Yung Shin, ed., A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 2016. 224 pp. $18.95, paper. June Manning Thomas, Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. $32.99, paper. In January 1966, Martin Luther King Jr., arrived at his new apartment in Chicago’s West Side, where he and his fellow activists faced a set of concerns that could not properly be classified as the Jim Crow of the South. Legally, the shape of racial injustice differed in the Midwest. Many states in the region [End Page 121] had relatively liberal civil rights laws. And yet African Americans in the Midwest experienced many of Jim Crow’s most pernicious effects including high rates of poverty, limited access to jobs and housing, and poorer educational opportunities compared to their white counterparts. The books reviewed here explore the tension between the image of the Midwest as a welcoming land of opportunity and the reality of persistent racial discrimination and the attendant perpetual struggle for equity and inclusion. Ultimately, each book confronts the issue of belonging—the ability to be recognized as a constituent part of a community, not in the name of “diversity” but instinctively, as it if were common sense. The Chicago Freedom Movement: Martin Luther King Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the North, which chronicles King’s Chicago years, includes a series of essays by historians, musicians, and activists. The collection as a whole argues for the importance of King’s work in Chicago as a turning point in a longer struggle for racial justice in the city. The first chapter, “In Their Own Voices,” includes a wealth of first-person accounts that tell of the distinct issues addressed by the short-lived Chicago Freedom Movement and the diverse ways in which black Chicagoans engaged in the struggle. The rest of the book, which contextualizes the Movement and examines its legacies, focuses heavily on issues of housing, including efforts to secure open housing policies, combat discrimination in lending to black homebuyers, and defend the rights of tenants. Many of the essays confront the characterization of the Chicago Freedom Movement as a failure, which likely accounts for the focus on housing, where the experiences of activists and organizers in Chicago unquestionably had national significance. Less attention is paid to other issues that were central to the Movement, especially education and employment, though the essays engage with other issues including the role of gangs in community organizing, the debate over the concept of nonviolence among the city’s activists, and efforts to combat lead poisoning among the city’s children. Natalie Moore’s engaging book, The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, blends autobiography, sociology, and history to understand the historical roots and contemporary shape of the color line in Chicago. The South Side focuses primarily on the issue of residential segregation and its seeming intractability, centering primarily on Bronzeville. The book is largely animated by a desire to understand how the fate of Bronzeville, once the heart of black Chicago, has diverged so dramatically from that of Harlem. The two neighborhoods share [End Page 122] similarities—historically home to vibrant black communities with proximity to natural features and urban centers...

Thomas E. Graedel, an atmospheric scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill, N.J.), has been made an AGU representative to the Governing Board of the American Institute of Physics (AIP). The board oversees the operations of AIP, a nonprofit umbrella organization for 10 member societies, including AGU. Other AGU members currently on the governing board include Orson Anderson, a geophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles; AGU General Secretary Peter M. Bell of the Norton Company, Worcester, Mass.; AGU Executive Director A. F. Spilhaus, Jr.; and Martin Walt, a geophysicist with the Lockheed Corporation in Palo Alto, Calif.All AGU members receive the benefits of membership in AIP, including the monthly magazine Physics Today. Other AIP services available to AGU members include access to an employment service, AIP's electronic network Pi‐NET, and an insurance program. AGU members can also subscribe to journals published by the American Physical Society, another AIP member society, at discounted rates.—WWM

Let us keep in mind that the Mexican-American can easily become the front-line of defense of the civil liberties of ethnic minorities. The racial, cultural, and historical involvements in his case embrace those of all of the other minority groups. Yet, God bless the law, he is white! So, the Mexican-American can be the wedge for the broadening of civil liberties for others (who are not so fortunate as to be white and Christian!). George I. Sanchez (1958) By embracing whiteness, Americans have reinforced the color line that has denied people of African descent full participation in American democracy. In pursuing White rights, Americans combined Latin American racialism with Anglo racism, and in the process separated themselves and their political agenda from the Black civil rights struggles of the forties and fifties. Neil Foley (1998) (1) THE HISTORY OF RACE AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH IS complex and exciting. The history of American civil rights is also promising, particularly so in regard to understanding the role of whiteness. Both selections above, the first from a American intellectual of the mid-twentieth century and the last a recently published statement from a historian of race and identity, are nominally about whiteness. But the historical actor and the historian discuss whiteness differently. The quotation from the 1950s advocates exploiting legal whiteness to obtain civil rights for both Americans and other minority groups. The one from the 1990s views such a strategy as inherently racist. The historical figure writes of Americans and African Americans cooperating in the pursuit of shared civil rights goals; the historian writes of the absence, the impossibility of cooperation due to American whiteness. This contrast is worth further consideration. This essay examines the American civil rights movement by focusing on the work and ideas of George I. Sanchez--a prominent activist and professor of education at the University of Texas--in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Sanchez is the most significant intellectual of what is commonly referred to as the Mexican American Generation of activists during this period. As a national president of the major American civil rights organization of the era, however, Sanchez's political influence within the American community was just as important as his intellectual leadership. Sanchez pondered notions of whiteness and actively employed them, offering an excellent case study of the making of American civil rights. (2) First, this work examines how Sanchez's civil rights efforts were vitally informed by an ideological perspective that supported gradual, integrationist, liberal reform, a stance that grew out of his activist research on African Americans in the South, Americans in the Southwest, and Latin Americans in Mexico and Venezuela. This New Deal ideological inheritance shaped Sanchez's contention that Americans were one minority group among many needing governmental assistance. Second, this liberal ideology gave rise to a nettlesome citizenship dilemma. During the Great Depression and World War II, Americans' strategic emphasis on American citizenship rhetorically placed them shoulder-to-shoulder with other U.S. minority groups. It also marginalized immigrant Mexicans. The significance of citizenship was controversial within the American community and coincided with the emergence of an aggressive phase of Americans' civil rights litigation that implemented a legal strategy based on their whiteness. Third, Sanchez's correspondence with Thurgood Marshall of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1940s and 1950s reveals early, fragmentary connections between the American and African American civil rights movements. All these topics address important interpretive debates about the role of whiteness. …

The youngest of twenty children of sharecroppers in rural Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer witnessed throughout her childhood the white cruelty, political exclusion, and relentless economic exploitation that defined black existence in the Delta. In this intimate biography, Chana Kai Lee documents Hamer's lifelong crusade to empower the poor through collective action, her rise to national prominence as a civil rights activist, and the personal costs of her ongoing struggle to win a political voice and economic self-sufficiency for blacks in the segregated South. Lee traces Hamer's early work as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in rural Mississippi, documenting the partial blindness she suffered after being arrested and beaten by local officials for leading a group of blacks to register for the vote. Hamer's dramatic appearance at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, where she led a group from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in a bid to unseat the all-white Mississippi delegation, brought both Hamer and the virtual powerlessness of black Mississippians to the nation's attention; but the convention also marked her first debilitating encounter with the middle class of the national civil rights movement. Despite her national visibility, Hamer remained a militant grassroots leader who never stopped working for the betterment of her own community in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Among many local initiatives, she established the Freedom Farm Corporation, a revolutionary cooperative venture aimed at facilitating economic self-sufficiency for the rural poor. Lee renders Hamer's acute political instincts, her rhetorical prowess, and her skill in retooling her past to serve strategic political purposes, as well as her deep frustration with a society that was willing to hold her up as an example of individual heroism but resisted her efforts at collective transformation. Offering a complex understanding of how racism, sexism, violence, and economic injustice intersected to spur the civil rights movement and to shape, and sometimes restrict, the role of women and poor people within it, Lee illuminates the abiding links between political activism and economic transformation. The definitive biography of one of the most important civil rights activists of the twentieth century, For Freedom's Sake documents Fannie Lou Hamer's lifelong crusade to empower the poor through collective action, her rise to national prominence as a civil rights activist, and the personal costs of her ongoing struggle to win a political voice and economic self-sufficiency for blacks in the segregated South.

Evelyn M. Simien is assistant professor in the department of political science at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Her current research interests include African American public opinion ancl political behavior, black feminist thought andcritical race theory, survey research, and quantitative methodoloqy. She can be reached at simien@uconn.e7u. African American women have a long history of political activism, starting with anti-slavery networks, civil rights organizations, and black feminist collectives (Collins 2000). Overcoming racism and sexism has had a profound impact on African American women's political activism by inspiring them to actively participate in social movements, political parties, campaigns, elections, and, ultimately, run for public office. Nonetheless, efforts to transform the curriculum and integrate the perspectives of African American women have met with varying degrees of success. African American women's political activism within the civil rights movement has not been accurately documented but rather conveniently forgotten. African American women were instrumental to the movement in their roles as organizers, fundraisers, and leaders in orchestrating tremendously successful grassroots campaigns that advanced black liberation and attested to their leadership capabilities. It is this writer's view that African American women of the civil rights movement should not to be presented as victims or celebrated as mainstream heroines from a contributionist approach. Perhaps Rosa Parks is the easiest for instructors to use in this way, considering the frequent trivialization of her role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It is in this regard that Cedric the Entertainer's comedic performance in the film, Barbershop, becomes illustrative. He insists that all Rosa Parks did was sit down because she was tired, which minimizes her role as an important civil rights activist. Obviously, this message is problematic. However, it is indicative of an educational system that treats black history month as cultural enrichment. During the month of February, students learn about black firsts and their achievements to develop tolerance for difference as opposed to challenge basic assumptions about cultural stereotypes (Higginbotham 1990; Omolade 1993; Banks 2003). An alternative or transformative approach to the curriculum enables students to critically evaluate political processes. Such an approach allows students to consider why, for example, African American women are conspicuously absent from the curriculum on black leadership and civil rights. Students can begin to question and understand how race, sexuality, class, and gender dynamics operate within the context of the movement. They come to appreciate multiple perspectives and realities as they relate to the unequal distribution of power and privilege in the United States, thereby creating a new framework by which students view key concepts, issues, themes, and problems inherent to the movement that counter mainstream perspectives. African American women are then integrated into the curriculum as leaders, performing roles similar to those of black men without privileging one experience over the other. Therefore, black liberation is not equated with black masculinity or manhood. My course on the civil rights movement is designed to introduce students to black leadership, specifically the principles, goals, and strategies used by African American men and women to secure basic citizenship rights. It provides a fairly broad, yet comprehensive account of the civil rights movement so students can develop a critical perspective of historical and contemporary trends in African American political life. An in-depth analysis of the civil rights movement often inspires students to become more informed and politically active citizens. Through critical examination of the major philosophical and theoretical arguments contesting interlocking systems of oppression, students arrive at some understanding of how African American men and women influenced the political process via public persuasion, litigation, grassroots mobilization, and direct action despite different movement experiences determined by race, sexuality, class, and gender dynamics (Weber 2001). This course is unique in that it expands the curriculum on black leadership and civil rights to include African American women thereby offering students an alternative vision that recognizes African American

As I write this review, at least six predominantly black churches have been burned to the ground by arsonists, to relative media silence. These church burnings, in addition to the Charleston, South Carolina, church shootings in June 2015, resemble too closely attacks on churches of the 1960s. It seems as though this political moment has been indelibly marked by violence toward the African American community, which has spurred intense outcry for justice via social media sites and Internet news sources. These events make Katharine Capshaw’s book Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks all the more timely . Civil Rights Childhood explores the ways that photo images envision, investigate, and impact changing definitions of black childhood in relation to civil rights activism throughout several decades of American history. Capshaw constructs her book chronologically, starting with photobooks published in the 1940s and 1950s through photobooks from the 1990s and early 2000s. Each chapter begins with sociohistorical contexts and then analyzes the arguments made by each text through the construction of images and narrative. For Capshaw, each photobook makes a particular argument about how the Civil Rights Movement affected black childhood, and each photobook was crafted based on the political discourse of the time in which it was created.

Introduction: The Economic Dimensions of the Black Freedom Struggle Michael Ezra Part I: African American Campaigns for Economic Power Before the Civil Rights Movement, 1925-1954 1. A. Philip Randolph, Early Pioneer: The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, National Negro Congress, and the March on Washington Movement Rhonda Jones 2. Mary McLeod Bethune, the National Council of Negro Women, and the Prewar Push for Equal Opportunity in Defense Projects gloria-yvonne 3. The Brooklyn Urban League and Equal Employment Opportunity in New York's War Industries Carla J. DuBose 4. Early Economic Civil Rights in Washington, DC: The New Negro Alliance, Howard University, and the Interracial Workshop Derek Charles Catsam 5. The Moral Economy of Postwar Radical Interracial Summer Camping Orion A. Teal 6. The NAACP Boycott of the Amos 'n' Andy Show Justin T. Lorts Part II: African American Campaigns for Economic Power During the Civil Rights Era and Beyond 7. Economic Civil Rights Activism in Pensacola, Florida J. Michael Butler 8. Muhammad Ali's Main Bout: African American Economic Power and the World Heavyweight Title Michael Ezra 9. Operation Breadbasket in Chicago: Between Civil Rights and Black Capitalism Enrico Beltramini 10. Progress Plaza: Leon Sullivan, Zion Investment Associates, and Black Power in a Philadelphia Shopping Center Stephanie Dyer 11. Black Power on the Factory Floor Kieran W. Taylor 12. Acquiring A Piece of the Action: The Rise and Fall of the Black Capitalism Movement Ibram H. Rogers 13. Soul City, North Carolina and the Business of Black Power Christopher B. Strain

East Meets Black: Asian and Black Masculinities in the Post–Civil Rights EraRacial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship