History Commons^™

Drive Toward Freedom: African American: The Story Of Black Automobility In The Fight For Civil Rights, Xavier Macy

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Looking across the 20^th century, this thesis seeks to understand the relationship African Americans developed between automobility and the fight for civil rights, filling a gap left in the historiography of both the automobile and the Civil Rights Movement. Historians of the automobile have almost exclusively focused their lens on white suburbia and the “autotopias” that Americans created, while historians of the Civil Rights Movement ignored the automobile entirely. This thesis hopes to begin to fill that void by explaining how African Americans exploited the technological system of the automobile to create forms of transportation accessible to African American …

To "Plant Our Trees On American Soil, And Repose Beneath Their Shade": Africa, Colonization, And The Evolution Of A Black Identity Narrative In The United States, 1808-1861, Edward Jason Vickers

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work explores the role that ideas about Africa played in the development of a specifically American identity among free blacks in the United States, from the early nineteenth century to the Civil War. Previous studies of the writings of free blacks in the Revolutionary period, and of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which was devoted to removing them back to an African homeland, have suggested that black discussions of Africa virtually disappeared after 1816, when the colonization movement began. However, as this work illustrates, the letters, books, newspapers, and organizational records produced by free blacks in the antebellum era …

Presentation Notes, Grady Johnson

Saffy Collection - All Textual Materials

Presentation notes about Edna Saffy by Grady Johnson delivered at the UNF Library Dean's Council Gratitude Reception, November 2015.

The "Unfinished Work:" The Civil War Centennial And The Civil Rights Movement, Megan A. Sutter

Student Publications

The Civil War Centennial celebrations fell short of a great opportunity in which Americans could reflect on the legacy of the Civil War through the racial crisis erupting in their nation. Different groups exploited the Centennial for their own purposes, but only the African Americans and civil rights activists tried to emphasize the importance of emancipation and slavery to the memory of the war. Southerners asserted states’ rights in resistance to what they saw as a black rebellion in their area. Northerners reflected back on the theme of reconciliation, prevalent in the seventy-fifth anniversary of the war. Unfortunately, those who …

Eisenhower: Champion Of Federal Activism, Shirley Anne Warshaw

Political Science Faculty Publications

As we watch the cast of characters vying for the Republican presidential nomination in this not-so-invisible primary season, there appears to be a common thread to their conversations: keep the government out of my life and my business. But this call for out-of-my-life government is contrary to the federal activism that one of the Republican Party’s most admired presidents advocated. [excerpt]

Interview Of John Mackin, John Mackin, Alex Palma

All Oral Histories

John Mackin was born in 1943 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He moved to Longbeach, New York when his father returned home from WWII. Soon after his family moved there, they moved again to Collingswood, New Jersey. Finally, his family moved to Cherry Hill, New Jersey when John was 16. John attended public and Catholic school growing up and attended Boston College for his higher education. John hit a rough page after college during which he struggled with alcoholism. At the time of the interview, he worked at the La Salle University Connelly Library. A position he got in 1984 while the …

Lancastrians Marched With Dr. King In Selma, Michael J. Birkner

History Faculty Publications

Fifty years after he addressed a crowd in Lancaster’s Penn Square about “the idea that all men are one,” Wayne Glick remembers that moment as if it happened yesterday. Glick’s speech, inviting Lancastrians to participate in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, on behalf of African-American voting rights, is a footnote to Lancaster County history. But the march itself, featured in the popular film “Selma,” helped to change America. [excerpt]

Link Racial Past To The Present, Jill Ogline Titus

Civil War Institute Faculty Publications

Americans have been putting a great deal of energy into commemorating the 50th anniversary of some of the key moments of the civil rights movement. This burst of memorialization has inspired one new museum in Atlanta and the redesign of another in Memphis. The Smithsonian and Library of Congress are launching a new oral-history initiative, and films like Selma bring the movement to life for those who rarely read a history book or visit a museum.

This year brings more anniversaries: the Selma-to-Montgomery March, the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and the Watts rebellion. And the commemorative stakes are …

Keeping His Faith: A. Philip Randolph And Working-Class Religion, Cynthia Taylor

Cynthia Taylor

Muckraking And C.O.B.Y (Cry Of Black Youth): Uncovering A History Of Organizing In Belle Glade, Raymond A. Hamilton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines a local activist group in the rural town of Belle Glade, Florida during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This research falls in line with many New Black Power studies. These New Black Power studies challenge existing notions of the Black Power and Civil Rights eras and their relationship to one another. It challenges the time frames, geography and ideology of both of the eras. This case study of a the group in Belle Glade is not the first to examine the similarities of the Black Power and Civil Rights eras, where many groups who affiliated with …