Results by title

718 books match the query 'Civil rights' and 10 start with o

Sort by

Obliged to Help

Adolphine Fletcher Terry and the Progressive South

Stephanie Bayless

Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2011

Author Stephanie Bayless examines why this Southern aristocratic matron, the daughter of a Confederate soldier, tirelessly devoted herself to improving the lives of others and, in so doing, became a model for activism across the South. It is the first work of its kind to consider Terry's lifelong commitment to social causes and is written for both traditional scholars and all those interested in history, civil rights, and the ability of women to create change within the gender limits of the time. Adolphine Fletcher Terry died in Little Rock, Arkansas, in July of 1976, at the age of ninety-three. Her life was a monument to progress in the South, particularly in her native state of Arkansas, a place she once described as "holy ground."

[more]

Occupy

Three Inquiries in Disobedience

W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Mic check! Mic check! Lacking amplification in Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street protestors addressed one another by repeating and echoing speeches throughout the crowd. In Occupy, W. J. T. Mitchell, Bernard E. Harcourt, and Michael Taussig take the protestors’ lead and perform their own resonant call-and-response, playing off of each other in three essays that engage the extraordinary Occupy movement that has swept across the world, examining everything from self-immolations in the Middle East to the G8 crackdown in Chicago to the many protest signs still visible worldwide.

“You break through the screen like Alice in Wonderland,” Taussig writes in the opening essay, “and now you can’t leave or do without it.” Following Taussig’s artful blend of participatory ethnography and poetic meditation on Zuccotti Park, political and legal scholar Harcourt examines the crucial difference between civil and political disobedience. He shows how by effecting the latter—by rejecting the very discourse and strategy of politics—Occupy Wall Street protestors enacted a radical new form of protest. Finally, media critic and theorist Mitchell surveys the global circulation of Occupy images across mass and social media and looks at contemporary works by artists such as Antony Gormley and how they engage the body politic, ultimately examining the use of empty space itself as a revolutionary monument.

Occupy stands not as a primer on or an authoritative account of 2011’s revolutions, but as a snapshot, a second draft of history, beyond journalism and the polemics of the moment—an occupation itself.

[more]

Old South, New South, or Down South?

Florida and the Modern Civil Rights Movement

Edited by Irvin D. S. Winsboro

West Virginia University Press, 2009

How does a state, tarnished with a racist, violent history, emerge from the modern civil rights movement with a reputation for tolerance and progression? Old South, New South, or Down South?: Florida and the Modern Civil Rights Movement exposes the image, illusion, and reality behind Florida’s hidden story of racial discrimination and violence. By exploring multiple perspectives on racially motivated events, such as black agency, political stonewalling, and racist assaults, this collection of nine essays reconceptualizes the civil rights legacy of the Sunshine State. Its dissection of local, isolated acts of rebellion reveals a strategic, political concealment of the once dominant, often overlooked, old south attitude towards race in Florida.

[more]

On Transits and Transitions

Trans Migrants and U.S. Immigration Law

Tristan Josephson

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Celebrations of the “transgender tipping point” in the second decade of the twenty-first century occurred at the same time of heightened debates and anxieties about immigration in the United States. On Transits and Transitions explores what the increased visibility of trans people in the public sphere means for trans migrants and provides a counter-narrative to the dominant discourse that the inclusion of transgender issues in law and policy represents the progression of legal equality for trans communities. Focusing on the intersection of immigration and trans rights, Josephson presents a careful and innovative examination of the processes by which the category of transgender is produced through and incorporated into the key areas of asylum law, marriage and immigration law, and immigration detention policies. Using mobility as a critical lens, On Transits and Transitions captures the insecurity and precarity created by U.S. immigration control and related processes of racialization to show how im/mobility conditions citizenship and national belonging for trans migrants in the United States.

[more]

On the Margins of Citizenship

Intellectual Disability and Civil Rights in Twentieth-Century America

Allison C. Carey

Temple University Press, 2010

On the Margins of Citizenship provides a comprehensive, sociological history of the fight for civil rights for people with intellectual disabilities. Allison Carey, who has been active in disability advocacy and politics her entire life, draws upon a broad range of historical and legal documents as well as the literature of citizenship studies to develop a “relational practice” approach to the issues of intellectual disability and civil rights. She examines how and why parents, self-advocates, and professionals have fought for different visions of rights for this population throughout the twentieth century and how things have changed over that time.

Carey addresses the segregation of people with intellectual disabilities in schools and institutions along with the controversies over forced sterilization, eugenics, marriage and procreation, and protection from the death penalty. She chronicles the rise of the parents’ movement and the influence of the Kennedy family, as well as current debates that were generated by the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990.

Presenting the shifting constitutional and legal restrictions for this marginalized group, Carey argues that policies tend to sustain an ambiguity that simultaneously promises rights yet also allows their retraction.

[more]

Open Wound

The Long View of Race in America

William McKee Evans

University of Illinois Press, 2009

In this boldly interpretive narrative, William McKee Evans tells the story of America's paradox of democracy entangled with a centuries-old system of racial oppression. This racial system of interacting practices and ideas first justified black slavery, then, after the Civil War, other forms of coerced black labor and, today, black poverty and unemployment. At three historical moments, a crisis in the larger society opened political space for idealists to challenge the racial system: during the American Revolution, then during the "irrepressible conflict" ending in the Civil War, and, finally, during the Cold War and the colonial liberation movements. Each challenge resulted in an historic advance. But none swept clean. Many African Americans remain segregated in jobless ghettoes with dilapidated schools and dismal prospects in an increasingly polarized class society. Evans sees a new crisis looming in a convergence of environmental disaster, endless wars, and economic collapse, which may again open space for a challenge to the racial system. African Americans, with their memory of their centuries-old struggle against oppressors, appear uniquely placed to play a central role.

[more]

Operation Mind

A Brief Documentary Account of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. And Why It Matters Now.

Natalie Zemon Davis and Elizabeth Douvan

Disobedience Press, 2025

Natalie Zemon Davis and Elizabeth Douvan’s Operation Mind is a body of evidence, a prophetic warning, and a call to action about the urgency of doing all we can to prevent thought control in America. In 1952, this meticulously researched pamphlet documented the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ attacks and impact. The HUAC abused its charge to intimidate and silence academics, union members, social critics, scientists, artists, teachers, political opponents, rabbis and other religious leaders, to make them appear suspect and “un-American” in the eyes of the American people.

The 2025 reprint of Operation Mind offers a foreword by comparatist Silke-Maria Weineck, an essay by historian Alan Wald connecting Operation Mind’s history of McCarthyism with present-day attacks on academic freedom, and a new (2023) introduction to the text by Natalie Zemon Davis.

[more]

Outside Agitator

Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama

Charles Eagles

University of Alabama Press, 2000

WINNER OF THE LILLIAN SMITH BOOK AWARD

The story of faith, sacrifice, and moral courage in Alabama's fight for civil rights.

Outside Agitator tells the powerful, largely forgotten story of Jonathan Daniels—a white Episcopal seminarian from New England who answered the call of the civil rights movement and paid for that commitment with his life. In 1965, Daniels left the safety of Harvard and Cambridge for Selma and Alabama’s Black Belt, where he worked alongside Black activists to challenge segregation, register voters, and confront the moral failures of church and state. His murder by a white segregationist shocked the nation and exposed the deadly cost of racial injustice—and of moral courage.

More than a biography, this book asks urgent questions that still resonate: What does it mean to act on conscience in a society structured by inequality? What responsibilities do faith, citizenship, and privilege impose? Historian Charles W. Eagles places Daniels’s life within the turbulent final phase of the southern civil rights movement, revealing the everyday fears, ethical dilemmas, and racial tensions behind the iconic events of Selma and Lowndes County.

Outside Agitator will appeal to readers interested in civil rights history, religious activism, Southern history, and the moral dimensions of political struggle. It is essential reading for students, scholars, clergy, and general readers seeking to understand how individual lives can illuminate—and challenge—the ongoing fight for justice and equality.

[more]

Outside the Magic Circle

The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr

Hollinger F. Barnard

University of Alabama Press, 1990

Winner of the Alabama Library Author Award

Outside the Magic Circle tells the remarkable story of Virginia Foster Durr, a southern white woman born into privilige who (along with her husband Clifford Durr, a lawyer best known for defending Rosa Parks), nonetheless devoted her life to Civil Rights activism.

Outside the Magic Circle is the powerful and deeply personal autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr, a Southern woman who defied the expectations of her privileged upbringing to become one of the most courageous voices for civil rights and social justice in 20th-century America. Born into a wealthy, white Alabama family, Durr was raised in a world steeped in segregation and conservative values. Yet through a journey marked by moral reckoning, intellectual awakening, and political activism, she stepped outside the “magic circle” of Southern gentility to confront the injustices that shaped her world.

With a foreword by renowned oral historian Studs Terkel, this memoir captures Durr’s transformation from reluctant conformist to outspoken advocate. Her story spans decades of American history—from the Great Depression and New Deal politics to the McCarthy era and the Civil Rights Movement. Alongside her husband, attorney Clifford Durr, Virginia became a key figure in progressive circles, working to abolish the poll tax, defend civil liberties, and support Black activists in the segregated South.

Told in Durr’s own voice, the narrative is rich with anecdotes, reflections, and encounters with historical figures such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr. It is both a personal reckoning and a political document, offering rare insight into the inner conflicts of white Southern liberals and the cost of dissent in a deeply divided society.

Outside the Magic Circle is more than a memoir—it is a testament to the power of conscience, the courage of transformation, and the enduring fight for justice. It remains a vital resource for readers interested in civil rights history, feminist thought, and the complexities of Southern identity.

[more]