Exam 2 IDs Flashcards
March Against Fear
The March Against Fear began on June 5, 1966 when James Meredith (who was the man who integrated UMiss) decided to start a solitary march from Memphis, TN to Jackson, MS to protest against racism. Shortly after beginning his march, Meredith was shot and wounded. The symbolic nature of this event is significant; the man who was dedicated to nonviolent direct action social protest, even while being harassed on the way into UMiss, gets violently shot while demonstrating a peaceful march to end racial violence. The significance of the March is that when CR activists heard about Meredith’s injury, they (including Carmichael, King, and other CR leaders) flooded to Greenwood, MS to continue the March in Meredith’s name. The significance of this is that it is here in Greenwood where Carmichael first uses the slogan “Black Power” to try to get the “Black people in this country to unite, to recognize their heritage, and to build a sense of community.”
Moynihan Report
The Moynihan Report was a study performed by Assistant Labor Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965. The study was titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” and its purpose was to examine the roots and prevalence of poverty and high rates of black unemployment especially in African American urban communities. The significance of the Moynihan Report is that its conclusions declared that “at the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family.”
“The family structure of lower class Negroes is highly unstable, and in many urban centers is approaching complete breakdown”
Concludes that out of wedlock births and divorce produced a “tangle of pathology” in the African American family
States that African Americans could only achieve equality with the “establishment of a stable Negro family structure”
“In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.” He says the cause of black poverty/unemployment = black single mothers.
Critiques of the Report:
•De-emphasizes impact of structural inequality on unemployment, housing segregation, etc.
•Pathologizes urban African Americans
•Simplistic causation: Does single parenting cause poverty in African American families, or does poverty cause single parenting?
•Critique of the “myth of the matriarchy”
•Lays the blame on black female headed homes
•Implications for black women and children
The Moynihan report blamed female headed households and not poverty and structural inequality for problems in black urban communities.
COINTELPRO
FBI Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) defines the BPP as the “greatest threat” to national security.
Campaigns to destroy black nationalist groups:
Ridicule, discredit leaders, worked with local officials (tried to plant fake evidence that Carmichael was a CIA informant)
Armed raids on local BPP headquarters
30 BPP Members killed, 750 jailed or arrested
Undercover agents infiltrated the Panthers
Provoked violence and criminal acts
Why were the Panthers viewed as so dangerous?
Intersectionality
Black Women at the Intersection of Race and Gender
•Marginalization of black women leaders within traditional Civil Rights
•Viewing the fight against racial oppression as most important
•Birth of Second Wave Feminism in the late 1960s—many of the white women involved were veterans of SNCC, Freedom Rides, CORE
•Viewing the fight against gender oppression as most important
•Where does that leave black women who face double jeopardy: “The phenomenon of being black and female in a country that is both racist and sexist”
•Kimberle Crenshaw: politics of intersectionality
o“The concept of intersectionality highlights the fact that women of color are situated within at least two subordinated groups that frequently pursue conflicting agenda”
Black Women in Black Power Movements
•By 1970, 2/3 of the membership of the Black Panther Party were women
•Redefining Revolutionary Womanhood
•Challenging notions of patriarchy from within the Black Power Movement—especially concerning issues of sexuality and reproduction
•What was Assata Shakur’s role in the Black Liberation Struggle?
•Black women also under surveillance by the state; COINTELPRO
•African American Women in the late 1960s and early 1970s reconceptualized what it meant to be black and a woman
•Politics of intersectionality
•Black women worked within Black Nationalist groups as well as formed their own organizations to address the issues that most concerned them
•Rise and challenges of Black feminist organizations
•Black women like Shirley Chisholm made gains within electoral politics and built intersectional coalitions
o Her presidential run in 1972
Angela Davis
Identify:
Historical Context:
Significance:
Combahee River Collective
The Combahee River Collective was created by a group of black lesbian feminists who decided to split from the National Black Feminist Organization in 1975.
Rise of Black Feminism
Creation of the Combahee River Collective (1975)
The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.
The major source of difficulty in our political work is that we are not just trying to fight oppression on one front or even two, but instead to address a whole range of oppressions. We do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual, or class privilege to rely upon, nor do we have even the minimal access to resources and power that groups who possess anyone of these types of privilege have.
Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) was a poet, playwright, and activist for racial solidarity in the late 1960s to early 1970s. He was significant because he expressed the growing sentiments of many black activists in the late 1960s to early 1970s. His recurrent cry “It’s Nation Time” would be the beckoning call for a proposed national conference of black activists in 1972.
Hardcore black nationalist
Born LeRoi Jones (1934-2014)
Chose the name Imamu Amiri Baraka means “spiritual leader, prince, blessed” in Swahili.
The “father of the black arts movement”
Educated at Howard University
Establishes the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem (1964)
Moves to Newark, NJ (1966)
Used poems and plays as vehicles for black revolutionary struggle.
“It’s Nation Time”
Imamu Amiri Baraka means “spiritual leader, prince, blessed” in Swahili and is the chosen name of LeRoi Jones. The celebrated “father of the black arts movement” remained prolific, influential, and controversial after five decades of creative engagement in America’s “culture war.”
Mass Incarceration
1980s-today
affects minorities more
Michelle Alexander “…argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system. Mass incarceration– not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement– is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement.”
Orangeburg Massacre
The Orangeburg Massacre refers to the shooting of protestors by South Carolina Highway Patrol Officers that were demonstrating against racial segregation at a local bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina near South Carolina State University on the evening of February 8, 1968.
Cicero, IL
The marches in the Chicago suburbs helped galvanize support for the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, extending federal prohibitions against discrimination to private housing. The act also created the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, which enforces the law.
Acting on his own, Jesse Jackson announces a march into Cicero, Illinois, a suburb known for its racial hatred. Concerned about possible rioting, leaders on both sides call a summit and on August 26 sign a ten point agreement calling for the enforcement of open housing laws and desegregated public housing. Dr. King announces that no more marches will take place. In response, skeptical local groups announce their own march. When 250 marchers go to Cicero, they find 3000 law enforcement officers, and a large mob of angry whites, who yell slurs and throw bricks. Unconstrained by Dr. King and the SCLC, the group responds with violence. Soon King will depart Chicago, having resolved little.
The Chicago Freedom Movement was the most ambitious civil rights campaign in the North of the United States, lasted from mid-1965 to early 1967, and is largely credited with inspiring the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
Lowndes County Freedom Organization
The Lowndes County Freedom Organization was founded in 1965 in Lowndes County, AL to address the disproportionately low black voter registration rates in the county resulting from racial violence and retaliation experienced by blacks for going to the polls, even after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had been passed.
[The organization often depicted its panther as opposing a white rooster, which represented white supremacy.]
Stokely Carmichael was the first president of the organization, and the LCFO aimed to increase black voter registration and set up health clinics in disadvantaged areas; these are examples of the organization’s comprehensive, grassroots, unapologetically pro-black agenda. The LCFO is significant because its message of black courage, determination, and freedom (symbolized by a black panther) emerges within a volatile southern context, which is counter-intuitive because often the powerful aggressive black movements (including the Black Panthers, started in Oakland, CA) started in the North, Midwest, or West.
Within the South, this larger quest for freedom continues, even after 1965 when much activism was seen in the North.
The demands of the LCFO were similar to those being made by people in the Northern CRM.
This is important because it is happening in the South, in the very places where the nonviolent direct action social protests had taken place; the powerful Black Panther symbol of the LCFO comes to mark what people today think of as Black Power, even though that phrase was not coined until the following year.
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission)
The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the “Kerner Commission”) was established in 1967 by President Lyndon Baines Johnson in response to urban rebellions. The Commission underwent an extensive study that not only revealed what happened in the riots but what the conditions were of the cities that were rioting. The significance of the Commission is that it warned that even as the nation was celebrating some civil rights victories, it was still “moving toward two societies: one black, one white–separate and unequal.” The Commission called for the federal government to implement programs for jobs, housing, and education in order to remedy the situation. However, when the Kerner Commission report came out, President Johnson essentially ignored it by not doing anything with the information. The Commission recognized that the riots were not just acts of roving hoodlums, but many of the issues that were being raised with the rebellions were valid.
