Debating The Civil Rights Movement 1945 1968

This excellent introduction to the civil rights movement captures the drama and impact of the black struggle for equality. Written by two of the most respected scholars of African-American history, Steven F. Lawson and Charles Payne examine the individuals who made the movement a success, both at the highest level of government and in the grassroot trenches.

Over the past thirty years, Steven F. Lawson has established himself as one of the nation's leading historians of the black struggle for equality. Civil Rights Crossroads is an important collection of Lawson's writings about the civil rights movement that is essential reading for anyone concerned about the past, present, and future of race relations in America. Lawson examines the movement from a variety of perspectives -- local and national, political and social -- to offer penetrating insights into the civil rights movement and its influence on contemporary society. Civil Rights Crossroads also illuminates the role of a broad array of civil rights activists, familiar and unfamiliar. Lawson describes the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson to shape the direction of the struggle, as well as the extraordinary contributions of ordinary people like Fannie Lou Hamer, Harry T. Moore, Ruth Perry, Theodore Gibson, and many other unsung heroes of the most important social movement of the twentieth century. Lawson also examines the decades-long battle to achieve and expand the right of African Americans to vote and to implement the ballot as the cornerstone of attempts at political liberation.

Here is the first full-length study to examine the changing academic debate on developments in African American history from the 1890s to the present. It provides a critical historiographical review of the most current thinking and explains how and why research and discourse have evolved in the ways that they have. Individual chapters focus on particular periods in African American history from the spread of racial segregation in the 1890s through to the postwar Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement of the sixties and seventies.

This momentous work offers a groundbreaking history of the early civil rights movement in the South. Using wide-ranging archival work and extensive interviews with movement participants, Charles Payne uncovers a chapter of American social history forged locally, in places like Greenwood, Mississippi, where countless unsung African Americans risked their lives for the freedom struggle. The leaders were ordinary women and men--sharecroppers, domestics, high school students, beauticians, independent farmers--committed to organizing the civil rights struggle house by house, block by block, relationship by relationship. Payne brilliantly brings to life the tradition of grassroots African American activism, long practiced yet poorly understood. Payne overturns familiar ideas about community activism in the 1960s. The young organizers who were the engines of change in the state were not following any charismatic national leader. Far from being a complete break with the past, their work was based directly on the work of an older generation of activists, people like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Amzie Moore, Medgar Evers, Aaron Henry. These leaders set the standards of courage against which young organizers judged themselves; they served as models of activism that balanced humanism with militance. While historians have commonly portrayed the movement leadership as male, ministerial, and well-educated, Payne finds that organizers in Mississippi and elsewhere in the most dangerous parts of the South looked for leadership to working-class rural Blacks, and especially to women. Payne also finds that Black churches, typically portrayed as frontrunners in the civil rights struggle, were in fact late supporters of the movement.

This book examines the historiography of the African American freedom struggle from the 1890s to the present. It considers how, and why, the study of African American history developed from being a marginalized subject in American universities and colleges at the start of the twentieth century to become one of the most extensively researched fields in American history today. There is analysis of the changing scholarly interpretations of African American leaders from Booker T. Washington through to Barack Obama. The impact and significance of the leading civil rights organizations are assessed, as well as the white segregationists who opposed them and the civil rights policies of presidential administrations from Woodrow Wilson to Donald Trump. The civil rights struggle is also discussed in the context of wider, political, social and economic changes in the United States and developments in popular culture.

Over the past thirty years, Steven F. Lawson has established himself as one of the nation's leading historians of the black struggle for equality. Civil Rights Crossroads is an important collection of Lawson's writings about the civil rights movement that is essential reading for anyone concerned about the past, present, and future of race relations in America. Lawson examines the movement from a variety of perspectives—local and national, political and social—to offer penetrating insights into the civil rights movement and its influence on contemporary society. Civil Rights Crossroads also illuminates the role of a broad array of civil rights activists, familiar and unfamiliar. Lawson describes the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson to shape the direction of the struggle, as well as the extraordinary contributions of ordinary people like Fannie Lou Hamer, Harry T. Moore, Ruth Perry, Theodore Gibson, and many other unsung heroes of the most important social movement of the twentieth century. Lawson also examines the decades-long battle to achieve and expand the right of African Americans to vote and to implement the ballot as the cornerstone of attempts at political liberation.

Pros and Cons: A Debaters Handbook offers a unique and invaluable guide to the arguments both for and against over 140 current controversies and global issues. Since it was first published in 1896 the handbook has been regularly updated and this nineteenth edition includes new entries on topics such as the right to possess nuclear weapons, the bailing out of failing industries, the protection of indigenous languages and the torture of suspected terrorists. Equal coverage is given to both sides of each debate in a dual column format which allows for easy comparison. Each entry also includes a list of related topics and suggestions for possible motions. The introductory essay describes debating technique, covering the rules, structure and type of debate, and offering tips on how to become a successful speaker. The book is then divided into eight thematic sections, where specific subjects are covered individually.