Benching Jim Crow

"Historians, sports scholars, and students will refer to Benching Jim Crow for many years to come as the standard source on the integration of intercollegiate sport."ùMark S. Dyreson, author of Making the American Team: Sport, Culture, and the Olympic Experience --

Long before the Montgomery bus boycott ushered in the modern civil rights movement, black and white southerners struggled to forge interracial democracy in America. This innovative book examines the most successful interracial coalition in the nineteenth-century South, Virginia's Readjuster Party, and uncovers a surprising degree of fluidity in postemancipation southern politics. Melding social, cultural, and political history, Jane Dailey chronicles the Readjusters' efforts to foster political cooperation across the color line. She demonstrates that the power of racial rhetoric, and the divisiveness of racial politics, derived from the everyday experiences of individual Virginians_from their local encounters on the sidewalk, before the magistrate's bench, in the schoolroom. In the process, she reveals the power of black and white southerners to both create and resist new systems of racial discrimination. The story of the Readjusters shows how hard white southerners had to work to establish racial domination after emancipation, and how passionately black southerners fought each and every infringement of their rights as Americans.

Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.

This “viscerally powerful . . . compilation of firsthand accounts of the Jim Crow era” won the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Carey McWilliams Award (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review). Based on interviews collected by the Behind the Veil Oral History Project at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, this remarkable book presents for the first time the most extensive oral history ever compiled of African American life under segregation. Men and women from all walks of life tell how their most ordinary activities were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression. Yet Remembering Jim Crow is also a testament to how black southerners fought back against systemic racism—building churches and schools, raising children, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights. The result is a powerful story of individual and community survival.

In the early 1960s, whenever the Today Show discussed integration, wlbt-tv, the nbc affiliate in Jackson, Mississippi, cut away to local news after announcing that the Today Show content was “network news . . . represent[ing] the views of the northern press.” This was only one part of a larger effort by wlbt and other local stations to keep African Americans and integrationists off Jackson’s television screens. Watching Jim Crow presents the vivid story of the successful struggles of African Americans to achieve representation in the tv programming of Jackson, a city many considered one of the strongest bastions of Jim Crow segregation. Steven D. Classen provides a detailed social history of media activism and communications policy during the civil rights era. He focuses on the years between 1955—when Medgar Evers and the naacp began urging the two local stations, wlbt and wjtv, to stop censoring African Americans and discussions of integration—and 1969, when the U.S. Court of Appeals issued a landmark decision denying wlbt renewal of its operating license. During the 1990s, Classen conducted extensive interviews with more than two dozen African Americans living in Jackson, several of whom, decades earlier, had fought to integrate television programming. He draws on these interviews not only to illuminate their perceptions—of the civil rights movement, what they accomplished, and the present as compared with the past—but also to reveal the inadequate representation of their viewpoints in the legal proceedings surrounding wlbt’s licensing. The story told in Watching Jim Crow has significant implications today, not least because the Telecommunications Act of 1996 effectively undid many of the hard-won reforms achieved by activists—including those whose stories Classen relates here.

What was it like growing up white in Mississippi as the Civil Rights Movement exploded in the 1950s and '60s. How did white children reconciled the decency and fairness taught by their parents with the indecency and unfairness of the Mississippi Way of Life, the euphemism applied to the pervasive Jim Crow. How did the Civil Rights Movement influence white kids coming of age in the most segregated place in America? Won Over, a memoir, examines these questions as it traces the journey of United States District Judge William Alsup, born white in 1945 to hard-working parents in Mississippi. They believed in segregation. But they also taught their children fairness and decency and therein lay the conflict, a struggle at the core of the human predicament in the South. As Won Over recalls near its outset, the author's earliest doubt about the system came at age twelve when what he'd thought stood as an abandoned shack at the bottom of a sand quarry turned out to be a school for black kids, whom we saw playing in the mud outside its door. At the end, Won Over reflects on a 1966 challenge by the author and his college roommate to the Mississippi Speaker Ban, an official rule against any "controversial" speaker coming onto a college campus in Mississippi, a rule used to quash their invitation to the state president of the NAACP to speak at their college, Mississippi State University. After a tense showdown, the roommates won that challenge. In January 1967, Aaron Henry became the first black ever to speak on a white college campus in Mississippi, receiving a standing ovation. The memoir traces the influences that drew the author from traditional Southern attitudes toward a color-blind ideal. Those influences included his older sister, Willanna, his closest circle of friends, a charismatic mentor in college, and the moral force of the Civil Rights Movement. Won Over recounts their steps along that journey — a counter protest to a John Birch Society billboard calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren; meeting personally with the brother of slain leader Medgar Evers to convey condolences; a letter to the editor of the statewide paper on behalf of his circle of friends declaring "We are for civil rights for Negroes"; joining his college roommate in a rally at Tougaloo College to support the Meredith March Against Racism; and going to the Liberty Baptist Church in Chicago to hear Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. exhort the faithful in their summer-long protest against housing and employment discrimination. In 1967, William Alsup went on to Harvard Law School, then to clerk for Justice William O. Douglas. He briefly practiced civil rights law in Mississippi before moving to San Francisco, where he became a trial attorney and, in 1999, received an appointment as United States District Judge.

Abstract: This dissertation provides a historical study of Jim Crow in the North via the interplay of race and sport. It analyzes the 1934 benching of Willis Ward, an African-American football player at the University of Michigan and reveals the racialized social order maintained by Michigan's famed Athletic Director Fielding Yost. This study probes how Ward's benching affected his career, especially his work directing hiring practices at the Ford Motor Company. It also explores Ward's conservative politics and his espousal of policies and practices aimed at maintaining the racial status quo. This project also chronicles how racism toward Ward shaped the politics of his teammate and future U.S. President Gerald Ford who supported affirmative action and civil rights legislation but opposed busing as a means to carry out school desegregation. A significant body of scholarship has examined the history of Jim Crow in the South. This dissertation, in contrast, provides an opportunity to examine the North's separate but unequal practices. This previously unstudied history of Ward and other black athletes at Michigan offer four significant insights regarding Northern race relations: it demonstrates how Northern institutions maintained segregationist practices without having the same legal underpinnings that existed in Southern states; it emphasizes the opposition that black athletes faced and exposes how institutions such as Michigan actively engaged in constructing racial barriers that constrained African American performance and compelled these players to exceed standard athletic expectations in order to earn spots on top college teams; it underscores how racial intolerance toward black athletes catalyzed resistance, created race advocacy and opposition, and contributed to a long history of black conservatism; and finally, it stresses how the racism black athletes met on the court and gridiron mirrored the racial prejudice they and other African Americans experienced in their interactions on campus, in the community, and throughout the country. By probing the entrenched restrictions that African Americans encountered in the North, this study provides a more comprehensive view of race relations in America.

Although largely ignored by historians of both baseball in general and the Negro leagues in particular, Latinos have been a significant presence in organized baseball from the beginning. In this benchmark study on Latinos and professional baseball from the 1880s to the present, Adrian Burgos tells a compelling story of the men who negotiated the color line at every turn—passing as "Spanish" in the major leagues or seeking respect and acceptance in the Negro leagues. Burgos draws on archival materials from the U.S., Cuba, and Puerto Rico, as well as Spanish- and English-language publications and interviews with Negro league and major league players. He demonstrates how the manipulation of racial distinctions that allowed management to recruit and sign Latino players provided a template for Brooklyn Dodgers’ general manager Branch Rickey when he initiated the dismantling of the color line by signing Jackie Robinson in 1947. Burgos's extensive examination of Latino participation before and after Robinson's debut documents the ways in which inclusion did not signify equality and shows how notions of racialized difference have persisted for darker-skinned Latinos like Orestes ("Minnie") Miñoso, Roberto Clemente, and Sammy Sosa.