Academic literature on the topic 'Civil rights - african american history'

Two new works document the history of African-American struggle for equal rights in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finklebine's work, Sources of the African-American Past: Primary Sources in American History, is a welcome addition to the primary source literature on the perpuity of, and challenges to, the social positions African Americans inhabited from the slave trade through recent times. Organized chronologically along topical lines, the book covers the slave trade, the colonial experience, the Revolution, free blacks, slavery, black abolitionism, emancipation, Reconstruction, segregation, progressivism, the New Deal, the two World Wars, migration, school segregation, the civil rights movement, black nationalism, and African Americans since 1968.

The Black Power Movement was largely a youth-led effort that broke from past thinking and methods of confronting American society and marked an important evolution in how African Americans continued their struggle in the wake of hard-fought landmark legislation such as the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. There is no shortage of reference works on the Civil Rights Movement and African American history in general that include entries on facets of the Black Power Movement.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a small group of antiapartheid activists, led by the American Committee on Africa and chair of the House Subcommittee on Africa Rep. Charles Diggs Jr., launched a campaign against South African Airways' new flights into the United States. Using the legal and political strategies of the American civil rights movement, and the fragmentation of power within the American political system, activists tried to turn South African apartheid into an American civil rights problem that American government institutions could address. The strategy was indebted to the political and legal strategies of the civil rights movement, but framing demands around existing civil rights law necessarily limited what activists could ask for and what domestic institutions could provide. In practice, the campaign's successes were limited and legalistic; where domestic civil rights law directly conflicted with apartheid law, airlines could comply with the former without really challenging the latter. And the foreign policy context meant more failures than successes, as domestic legal institutions were reluctant to involve themselves with foreign policy concerns. Their successes and failures nonetheless tell us much about legal mobilization and institutional behavior in a period of globalization where sovereignty and jurisdictional lines were overlapping and conflicting.

This article analyzes African Americans’ protest against the movie The Birth of a Nation in Denver in 1915 and the protest’s impact on the May 1916 municipal election, in which African Americans shifted their support from the Republican to the Democratic mayoral candidate. This essay contributes to the scholarship on African American activism during “the long civil rights movement” and the role of the idea of respectability in that activism. This essay first argues that protests against this film had political as well as cultural significance. African Americans’ political activism in the West furthers our knowledge of black activism in the early twentieth century. Finally, this essay contributes to understanding the local roots of African Americans’ shift from the Republican to the Democratic Party during the early twentieth century.

The New Deal marked a critical conjuncture of civil rights and welfare policy in American political development. During the Progressive Era, civil rights policy and social policy developed independently and often antithetically. While the American state expanded its reach in economic regulation and social welfare, laying the institutional and intellectual groundwork for the New Deal, policies aimed at protecting the rights of minorities progressed barely at all (McDonagh 1993). But with the Great Depression, the welfare and civil rights agendas came together powerfully. For African Americans, who had already been relegated to the bottom of the political economy, the Depression created even more desperate conditions, and issues of economic opportunity and relief became paramount. The African American political community pursued an agenda that linked advances in civil rights to expansions of the state's role in social welfare (Hamilton and Hamilton 1992).

Several recent historical works have challenged interpretations of the civil rights movement in the United States as a strictly domestic story by considering its connections to anti-racist struggles around the world. Adding a Canadian dimension to this approach, this article considers linkages between African Canadian anti-discrimination activism in the 1950s and early 1960s and African American civil rights organizing. It argues that Canadian anti-discrimination activists were interested in and influenced by the American movement. They followed American civil rights campaigns, adapted relevant ideas, and leveraged the prominent American example when pressing for change in their own country. African Canadian activists and organizations also impacted the American movement through financial and moral support. This article contributes to the study of African Canadian history, Canadian human rights history, and the American civil rights movement by emphasizing the local origins of anti-discrimination activism in Canada, while also arguing that such efforts are best understood when contextualized within a broader period of intensive global anti-racist activism that transcended national borders.

This article examines the Japanese American Citizens League’s (JACL) postwar campaign to secure U.S. citizenship eligibility for first-generation Japanese (Issei) as a civil rights effort that brought Japanese Americans into contention with African American and Afro-Caribbean community leaders during the height of the U.S. Cold War in East Asia. At the same time, JACL’s disagreements with Chinese Americans and Japanese American liberals precluded any coherent Japanese or Asian American position on postwar immigration policy. The resulting 1952 McCarran-Walter Act formally ended Asians’ exclusion from U.S. immigration and naturalization, even as a colonial quota in the law severely restricted black immigration from the Caribbean and galvanized black protest. This episode of black-Japanese tension complicates scholarly understandings of the liberalization of U.S. immigration and naturalization laws toward Asian peoples as analogous with or complementary to black civil rights gains in the postwar years. In so doing, it suggests the need to think more critically and historically about the cleavages between immigration and civil rights law, and between immigrant rights and civil rights.

The landmark 1954 decisionBrown v. Board of Educationhas shaped trial lawyers' approaches to litigating civil rights claims and law professors' approaches to teaching the law's powers and limitations. The court-ordered desegregation of the nation's schools, moreover, inspired subsequent lawsuits by African Americans aimed variously at ending racial distinctions in housing, employment, and voting rights. Litigation to enforce theBrowndecision and similar mandates brought slow but steady progress and inspired members of various other minorities to appropriate the rhetoric, organizing methods, and legal strategy of the African American civil rights struggle.

This article explores African American and Mexican American struggles for equal employment in Los Angeles after 1965. It argues that activists and workers used the mechanisms set up by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to attack the barriers that restricted blacks and Mexican Americans to poor job prospects. It shows that implementation of fair employment law was part of a dialectic between policymakers and regulatory officials, on one hand, and grass-roots individuals and civil rights organizations, on the other. The bureaucratic mechanisms created by Title VII shaped who would benefit from the implementation of the law. Moreover, blacks and Mexican Americans mixed ethnic power and civil rights frameworks to make the bureaucratic system more capacious and race-conscious, which challenged the intentions of the original legislation.

This dissertation explores the activities of middle- and working-class African American women during and immediately after World War II in Detroit and Richmond, Virginia, in order to examine how World War II enabled African American women to negotiate new state structures in order to articulate citizenship in a way that located them within the state as contributors to the war effort and legitimated their calls for equality. This study provides a new understanding of the groundwork that lay behind the civil rights activism of the 1950s and 1960s. By looking at African American women's wartime protest and exploring how those women created templates for activism and networks for the dissemination of new discourses about citizenship, it reveals the gendered roots of the civil rights movement. This study uses a cross-class analysis within a cross-regional analysis in order to understand how African American women of different socioeconomic levels transformed their relationship with the state in order to use state structures to gain equality in diverse regions of the country. Class and region framed African American women's possibilities for activism. In both Detroit and Richmond, women's class positions and local government structures affected how African American women constructed claims to citizenship and maintained activist strategies to promote equality. This study finds that the new discourse and programs of middle-class African American women, linked with the attempts of working-class women to gain and retain jobs and better living conditions, contributed to a new sense of militancy and urgency within the civil rights movement of the 1940s and 1950s. By attempting to claim their rights based solely on their status as citizens within the state, African American women greatly contributed to the groundwork and the ideology of the more aggressive civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. African American women's initial forays into desegregating restaurants, jobs, transportation, and housing created the momentum for the entire African American community's struggle for equality.

History
M.A.
This paper examines the way that history and the archive interact with an examination of the civil rights movement in Philadelphia in the 1960s. Lack of accessibility may detrimentally affect historians' analyses. This paper is an assessment of what both writers and archivists can do to help diminish oversights. Included is an investigation of the short-lived Black Coalition and the way the organization is represented in scholarship. How do the representations differ from the story the primary sources tell? Also examined is the relationship between Cecil B. Moore and Martin Luther King, Jr. What primary sources exist that illuminate their friendship? How has their friendship been portrayed in secondary works? The paper outlines the discovery of video footage of the two men and how this footage complicates widely-held perceptions of their association. Lastly, this thesis offers remedies to allow for greater accessibility of primary source documents, most notably the role of digitization within the archive. Included in these suggestions are analyses of existing digital initiatives and suggestions for future projects. Digitization initiatives may be the means by which to bridge the gap currently facing archivists and historians today.
Temple University--Theses

This thesis explores the relationship between black gospel music and the African American freedom struggle of the post-WWII era. More specifically, it addresses the paradoxical suggestion that black gospel artists themselves were typically escapist, apathetic, and politically uninvolved—like the black church and black masses in general—despite the “classical” Southern movement music being largely gospel-based. This thesis argues that gospel was in fact a critical component of the civil rights movement. In ways open and veiled, black gospel music always spoke to the issue of freedom. Topics include: grassroots gospel communities; African American sacred song and coded resistance; black church culture and social action; freedom songs and local movements; socially conscious or activist gospel figures; gospel records with civil rights themes.

This thesis examines labor organizing in the U.S. South, specifically the Piedmont and eastern regions of North Carolina in the mid-twentieth century. It aims to uncover an often overlooked local history of civil rights labor organizing which challenged the southern status quo before America's 'mainstream' civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. This study argues that through labor organizing, African American tobacco workers challenged the class, gender, and race hierarchy of North Carolina's very profitable tobacco industry during the first half of the twentieth century. In doing so, the thesis contributes to the historiography of black working class protest, and the ever-expanding field of local civil rights histories and the long civil rights movement.

This research explores the role of returning African American veterans in the Civil Rights Movement in Jacksonville from 1945-1960. Black World War II veterans not only faced the typical challenges of returning to civilian life, but took up the fight for equality as well. While this work acknowledges existing arguments about black veterans in the Civil Rights Movement, it emphasizes and analyzes the importance of their military benefits and experience. The mechanizing revolution that occurred in the United States military in this era had a lasting impact on the soldiers fighting as well as communities back home, Jacksonville included. This changing military dynamic necessitated an increase in support positions, meaning African American soldiers received training in various fields like combat, supply, and intelligence. This training translated into useful skills in the postwar period. The experiences of black soldiers while overseas also played a pivotal role, especially their interaction with foreign cultures. Often foreigners referred to black soldiers as "American" leaving off any racial distinction. Additionally, black veterans were able to attend college in unprecedented numbers because of their GI Bill benefits. Ernest Jackson earned undergraduate and legal degrees, and led the attack on segregation in Jacksonville. Elcee Lucas also went to school after exiting the service but used his military skills to orchestrate voter registration drives, and organize political campaigns. With their new skills and education, these men were not only able to organize and lead others but were equipped with the tools necessary to challenge the institutions that subverted their equality, greatly influencing the path of the Civil Rights Movement. Through their efforts, black veterans helped expose inadequacies with the existing structures and laws, thus adding to the justification for the later civil rights tactics that intentionally challenged and broke Jim Crow laws.

This dissertation considers the extensive and multifaceted efforts by civil rights activists to fight racial discrimination and promote social and economic equality in the nation's capital city. It examines the prolonged battles District of Columbia activists waged to end segregation and discrimination and encourage integration and equality in public accommodations, schools, employment, housing, and voting rights over the course of the mid-twentieth century. As the nation's capital and seat of the federal government, Washington, D.C. represented a significant symbolic and strategic location for nationally-focused institutional campaigns; however, the District of Columbia's pervasive Jim Crow policies and significant black population meant the city also served as an important site for local grassroots activism. Civil rights groups, often comprised of interracial coalitions of residents, pioneered complex strategies that employed direct action protest, espoused political rhetoric, and engaged the federal establishment to challenge discrimination and promote justice. While federal officials expressed various positions on civil rights, from supportive to antagonistic, the complex, overlapping, and often competing jurisdictions of the federal state made deep-seated and long-lasting progress difficult.

This project also explores the complicated role of the state in promoting, obstructing, and institutionalizing civil rights programs in the city. Additionally, this dissertation analyzes these civil rights campaigns within the context of shifting social and political circumstances within the city and nation. As the city underwent massive demographic shifts with rural African Americans moving into the city and white residents moving out to the suburbs, civil rights activists responded with more aggressive campaigns focused on economic and political issues. While leaders of the burgeoning Southern civil rights movement concentrated on legal freedoms and individual rights, local efforts emphasized fairness and collective equality. Civil rights activists employed more aggressive rhetoric and more assertively demanded justice. Despite the turn toward a more militant tone, the men and women in Washington remained committed to the liberal ideal of making the city truly democratic. It was not their dedication to liberal ideals and solutions that impeded progress in the city, but rather the convoluted federal power structure in the city that impeded meaningful progress and hindered the movement toward full equality. As in most places, the legacy of the civil rights movement in Washington, D.C. remains ambiguous.

Abstract Fundamentalists have had and continue to have a difficult relationship with the concept of race. As initially a group of predominantly white Protestant ministers, they racialized their definition of fundamentalist to exclude African Americans from fellowship. Instead, white fundamentalist leaders consistently tried to speak for and at African Americans, often couching their discourse as a necessary safeguard against presumed black naiveté. This chapter charts that discourse, provides background on the historic segregation of American churches, and explores the ways in which African Americans responded to fundamentalist tenets. Moreover, it discusses the history of fundamentalists and the American civil rights movement, notes the continued presence of racial division among evangelicals today, and offers potential avenues for further discussion.

Abstract This chapter surveys the shifting political terrain from the late 1960s to the very recent past. The history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) demonstrates how the political landscape moved as that group transformed from embracing respectability politics to radical revolutionary ideologies. The federal government took notice and became committed to disrupting SNCC’s activism as well as that expressed by other groups like the Black Panthers. These groups espoused Black Power, but black women activists often criticized them for their failures to acknowledge black women’s work and black feminism, more generally. This chapter also moves from the political pragmatism of Lyndon B. Johnson to Barack Obama’s rise and subsequent election.

Abstract This chapter charts the rise of the modern civil rights movement—a term that expands beyond the idea that the movement began in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus. The chapter follows the emergence of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and its legal strategies to eliminate racial segregation. Other political movements are examined as counterweights to the NAACP’s efforts to convince the Supreme Court to take on evermore civil rights cases. The chapter details the emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, respectively, taking care to add important nuances to their evolving activism.

Abstract This chapter explores the tensions that undergird the South’s secession from the Union and then the outbreak of the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln is often referred to as “the Great Emancipator,” but his journey toward the Emancipation Proclamation was not straight. Political pragmatism, military manpower shortages, as well as philosophical wrestling with what freedom would mean for African Americans all affected Lincoln’s decision to move toward emancipation. Upon the war’s conclusion important issues had to be resolved regarding African American labor, education, and citizenship rights. Reconstruction marked a marked a high-water mark for post-emancipation black rights, some of which were not seen again until the emergence of the modern civil rights movement.

The Peacock Tract in Montgomery, Alabama is one of Montgomery, Alabama’s first African-American neighborhoods. Originally a plantation where enslaved people worked the land, the rise of this community included the city’s first African-American churches which helped change the course of American history by becoming one of Montgomery’s centers of civil rights activity. The churches of the Peacock Tract were the places that witnessed the election of Martin Luther King as leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association, the vote to extend the city bus boycott, and the final rest stop on the Selma to Montgomery March.Later, the community was the site of racially and politically motivated retributive urbanism when the city’s African-American social infrastructure was intentionally targeted by Interstates. The effects of this massive disruption are still evident. The interstates quartered the community and severed it from the rest of the city, and at first look, this retaliatory urban maneuver may appear successful. However, the Peacock Tract has endured despite the immense piece of critical infrastructure positioned to intentionally disrupt it.This paper proposes that due to the strength and history of the enduring pieces of social infrastructure, specifically the historic churches, the area has yet to be overridden or abandoned, and supports the argument that the resilience of a place is inextricably tied to the strength of the social infrastructure within it. The paper highlights several interdisciplinary interventions proposed by undergraduate environmental design students. It presents a design research course where students are asked to consider infrastructure as an agent of connection, inclusion, or restoration. as opposed to division. Students worked with community partners to develop proposals providing a suture, between the quadrants left in the interstate’s aftermath. While each project proposes a unique programmatic solution, the intersection of social and critical infrastructure in pursuit of resilience is present throughout.

In 1955, Emmett Till was 14-year-old when he was kidnaped and brutally murdered by two white men in the Mississippi Delta. This racist incident was one of the key events that galvanized the Civil Rights Movement’s work. Through a com¬munity engagement project to design a memorial dedicated to Emmett Till, this essay explores a studio pedagogy that aimed to introduce social justice in architecture studios. The “Emmett Till Memorial” community engaged project took place in Spring 2020 in the first-year architecture studio of the School of Architecture at Mississippi State University. In this project, we partnered with the Emmett Till Memorial Commission (ETMC) to design a memorial at the Graball Landing site where it is believed Emmett’s body was found. Since April 2008, the ETMC attempts to commemorate this site and it has become a nationally recognized memory site. Unfortunately, the site has been subjected to repeated vandalism. This paper describes the different stages of this community engaged project in a contested site that aimed to embrace transformative service-learning ideas and critical reflection. The service-learning design project integrated field experiences, including visits to historic sites related to Emmett Till’s history and an immer¬sive experience with activists and community organizers from the ETMC. Using critical reflection as a pedagogical approach, discussions among students and community members cen¬tered on how the design outcome of this community engaged project would contribute to community conversations about the future development of the Graball Landing site as well as design vision and values that could be included in the new memorial and its restorative narrative. Students’ design proposals exhibited a wide range of design intentions and sources of inspiration. Employing symbolic and educational features, the diverse design proposals responded to specific environmental conditions of the place and explored how to engage visitors with Emmett Till’s history, the civil rights movement, and the future of racial reconciliation. Finally, this paper discusses how African-American historical sites have intentionally been ignored and marginalized and how architecture educators, students, and community members can partner to preserve sites of memory and to dismantle systematic racism in urban design and architecture.

The community of Idlewild, located in Yates Township, Michigan, possesses a significant history as the largest historic African American resort community established during the Jim Crow Era. Established in 1912, it thrived for more than fifty years but declined with the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. However, Idlewild has begun to revitalize, with new full-time residents seeking work-life balance in a rural context and, most importantly, residency in a safe community. However, Idlewild was originally designated for seasonal residents, resulting in a new set of needs for community sustainment.A special focus on research that engages with community visioning to develop planning that realigns community, township, and county goals for Idlewild is a significant driver in this exercise. The use of community visioning will be coupled with the township master planning process with focus on sustain-ability; the implementation of social solidarity economics, as well as open book management, will solidify the continued success of the community in the spirit of “co-opetition”. The application of these theories and their effect on the sustain-ability of Idlewild will be of particular interest. In addition to the environment, sustainability will include concern for people and economy to develop a balanced community structure. Social solidarity economic principles refer to a set of values and practices aimed at promoting economic systems that prioritize cooperation, social justice, and sustainability. It is an alternative model to the mainstream capitalist system and seeks to address the inequalities and environmental challenges created by traditional market economies. The principles of solidarity economy emphasize the well-being of individuals and communities over profit maximization. Key Principles that will be addressed in this paper are: 1. Solidarity and Cooperation 2. Social Justice and Equity 3. Democratic Governance 4. Sustainable Development5. Localization and Autonomy 6. Diverse Economic Forms 7. Ethical Consumption 8. Education and Awareness A critical factor in the planning process is preserving historical community values while not stifling progress that will allow for a continued longevity. Embracing the African American heritage of Idlewild makes this instance of cooperative community living a unique example, amplified by its resort identity. Extensive literature review, community engagement, and active group communication will serve as the basis for planning.The strategic conversation of the Idlewild community members will be formulated through the lens of social solidarity economic principles and community theory, leading to documentation of solutions for the future of Idlewild. The aspiration for this process is to create a successful case study for other rural communities to begin planning and applying cooperative community modeling.

Our recent book, "The City Creative: The Rise of Urban Placemaking in Contemporary America" (University of Chicago Press, 2021), details how participatory design and community engagement can lead to democratically planned, inclusive urban communities. After visiting more than two hundred projects in more than forty cities, we have come to understand that planning, policy, and architectural design should be oriented by local communities and deep engagement with intervention sites. Of course, we are not the first to reach such a conclusion. In many ways, our work builds off contributions made by individuals, including Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, and Christopher Alexander, and such movements as Team 10 and the advocacy architecture movement of the 1960s. Nevertheless, we need to broaden this significant conversation. Importantly, our classroom work has allowed us to better understand how histories often left out of such discussions can inform this new approach. To that end, we have developed community-student partnerships in underserved neighborhoods in cities like Milwaukee and Detroit. Through these connections and their related design-build projects, we have seen how the civil rights movement, immigration narratives, hip-hop culture, and alternative redevelopment histories, such as in urban agriculture, can inform the theory and practice of design. We want to bring these perspectives into dialogue with the mainstream approach to development and design. How does this look and work? Using a case study from the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) University Scholars Honors Program curriculum, we highlight the redevelopment of Milwaukee’s Fondy Park, an effort to create community-centered spaces and programming in an underserved African American community. Lessons include those essential for pedagogy and education, as well as for how these issues are theorized and professionally practiced, with implications for institutions, programs, and individuals.

Aim/Purpose: This paper provides the results of the preliminary analysis of the findings of an ongoing study that seeks to examine the social media use, cultural and political awareness, civic engagement, issue prioritization, and social activism of Gen Z students enrolled at four different institutional types located in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The aim of this study is to look at the group as a whole as well as compare findings across populations. The institutional types under consideration include a mid-sized majority serving or otherwise referred to as a traditionally white institution (TWI) located in a small coastal city on the Atlantic Ocean, a small Historically Black University (HBCU) located in a rural area, a large community college located in a county that is a mixture of rural and suburban and which sits on the border of Maryland and Pennsylvania, and graduating high school students enrolled in career and technical education (CTE) programs in a large urban area. This exploration is purposed to examine the behaviors and expectations of Gen Z students within a representative American region during a time of tremendous turmoil and civil unrest in the United States. Background: Over 74 million strong, Gen Z makes up almost one-quarter of the U.S. population. They already outnumber any current living generation and are the first true digital natives. Born after 1996 and through 2012, they are known for their short attention spans and heightened ability to multi-task. Raised in the age of the smart phone, they have been tethered to digital devices from a young age with most having the preponderance of their childhood milestones commemorated online. Often called Zoomers, they are more racially and ethnically diverse than any previous generation and are on track to be the most well-educated generation in history. Gen Zers in the United States have been found in the research to be progressive and pro-government and viewing increasing racial and ethnic diversity as positive change. Finally, they are less likely to hold xenophobic beliefs such as the notion of American exceptionalism and superiority that have been popular with by prior generations. The United States has been in a period of social and civil unrest in recent years with concerns over systematic racism, rampant inequalities, political polarization, xenophobia, police violence, sexual assault and harassment, and the growing epidemic of gun violence. Anxieties stirred by the COVID-19 pandemic further compounded these issues resulting in a powder keg explosion occurring throughout the summer of 2020 and leading well into 2021. As a result, the United States has deteriorated significantly in the Civil Unrest Index falling from 91st to 34th. The vitriol, polarization, protests, murders, and shootings have all occurred during Gen Z’s formative years, and the limited research available indicates that it has shaped their values and political views. Methodology: The Mid-Atlantic region is a portion of the United States that exists as the overlap between the northeastern and southeastern portions of the country. It includes the nation’s capital, as well as large urban centers, small cities, suburbs, and rural enclaves. It is one of the most socially, economically, racially, and culturally diverse parts of the United States and is often referred to as the “typically American region.” An electronic survey was administered to students from 2019 through 2021 attending a high school dual enrollment program, a minority serving institution, a majority serving institution, and a community college all located within the larger mid-Atlantic region. The survey included a combination of multiple response, Likert scaled, dichotomous, open ended, and ordinal questions. It was developed in the Survey Monkey system and reviewed by several content and methodological experts in order to examine bias, vagueness, or potential semantic problems. Finally, the survey was pilot tested prior to implementation in order to explore the efficacy of the research methodology. It was then modified accordingly prior to widespread distribution to potential participants. The surveys were administered to students enrolled in classes taught by the authors all of whom are educators. Participation was voluntary, optional, and anonymous. Over 800 individuals completed the survey with just over 700 usable results, after partial completes and the responses of individuals outside of the 18-24 age range were removed. Findings: Participants in this study overwhelmingly were users of social media. In descending order, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Tik Tok were the most popular social media services reported as being used. When volume of use was considered, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and Twitter were the most cited with most participants reporting using Instagram and Snapchat multiple times a day. When asked to select which social media service they would use if forced to choose just one, the number one choice was YouTube followed by Instagram and Snapchat. Additionally, more than half of participants responded that they have uploaded a video to a video sharing site such as YouTube or Tik Tok. When asked about their familiarity with different technologies, participants overwhelmingly responded that they are “very familiar” with smart phones, searching the Web, social media, and email. About half the respondents said that they were “very familiar” with common computer applications such as the Microsoft Office Suite or Google Suite with another third saying that they were “somewhat familiar.” When asked about Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Blackboard, Course Compass, Canvas, Edmodo, Moodle, Course Sites, Google Classroom, Mindtap, Schoology, Absorb, D2L, itslearning, Otus, PowerSchool, or WizIQ, only 43% said they were “very familiar” with 31% responding that they were “somewhat familiar.” Finally, about half the students were either “very” or “somewhat” familiar with operating systems such as Windows. A few preferences with respect to technology in the teaching and learning process were explored in the survey. Most students (85%) responded that they want course announcements and reminders sent to their phones, 76% expect their courses to incorporate the use of technology, 71% want their courses to have course websites, and 71% said that they would rather watch a video than read a book chapter. When asked to consider the future, over 81% or respondents reported that technology will play a major role in their future career. Most participants considered themselves “informed” or “well informed” about current events although few considered themselves “very informed” or “well informed” about politics. When asked how they get their news, the most common forum reported for getting news and information about current events and politics was social media with 81% of respondents reporting. Gen Z is known to be an engaged generation and the participants in this study were not an exception. As such, it came as no surprise to discover that, in the past year more than 78% of respondents had educated friends or family about an important social or political issue, about half (48%) had donated to a cause of importance to them, more than a quarter (26%) had participated in a march or rally, and a quarter (26%) had actively boycotted a product or company. Further, about 37% consider themselves to be a social activist with another 41% responding that aren’t sure if they would consider themselves an activist and only 22% saying that they would not consider themselves an activist. When asked what issues were important to them, the most frequently cited were Black Lives Matter (75%), human trafficking (68%), sexual assault/harassment/Me Too (66.49%), gun violence (65.82%), women’s rights (65.15%), climate change (55.4%), immigration reform/deferred action for childhood arrivals (DACA) (48.8%), and LGBTQ+ rights (47.39%). When the schools were compared, there were only minor differences in social media use with the high school students indicating slightly more use of Tik Tok than the other participants. All groups were virtually equal when it came to how informed they perceived themselves about current events and politics. Consensus among groups existed with respect to how they get their news, and the community college and high school students were slightly more likely to have participated in a march, protest, or rally in the last 12 months than the university students. The community college and high school students were also slightly more likely to consider themselves social activists than the participants from either of the universities. When the importance of the issues was considered, significant differences based on institutional type were noted. Black Lives Matter (BLM) was identified as important by the largest portion of students attending the HBCU followed by the community college students and high school students. Less than half of the students attending the TWI considered BLM an important issue. Human trafficking was cited as important by a higher percentage of students attending the HBCU and urban high school than at the suburban and rural community college or the TWI. Sexual assault was considered important by the majority of students at all the schools with the percentage a bit smaller from the majority serving institution. About two thirds of the students at the high school, community college, and HBCU considered gun violence important versus about half the students at the majority serving institution. Women’s rights were reported as being important by more of the high school and HBCU participants than the community college or TWI. Climate change was considered important by about half the students at all schools with a slightly smaller portion reporting out the HBCU. Immigration reform/DACA was reported as important by half the high school, community college, and HBCU participants with only a third of the students from the majority serving institution citing it as an important issue. With respect to LGBTQ rights approximately half of the high school and community college participants cited it as important, 44.53% of the HBCU students, and only about a quarter of the students attending the majority serving institution. Contribution and Conclusion: This paper provides a timely investigation into the mindset of generation Z students living in the United States during a period of heightened civic unrest. This insight is useful to educators who should be informed about the generation of students that is currently populating higher education. The findings of this study are consistent with public opinion polls by Pew Research Center. According to the findings, the Gen Z students participating in this study are heavy users of multiple social media, expect technology to be integrated into teaching and learning, anticipate a future career where technology will play an important role, informed about current and political events, use social media as their main source for getting news and information, and fairly engaged in social activism. When institutional type was compared the students from the university with the more affluent and less diverse population were less likely to find social justice issues important than the other groups. Recommendations for Practitioners: During disruptive and contentious times, it is negligent to think that the abounding issues plaguing society are not important to our students. Gauging the issues of importance and levels of civic engagement provides us crucial information towards understanding the attitudes of students. Further, knowing how our students gain information, their social media usage, as well as how informed they are about current events and political issues can be used to more effectively communicate and educate. Recommendations for Researchers: As social media continues to proliferate daily life and become a vital means of news and information gathering, additional studies such as the one presented here are needed. Additionally, in other countries facing similarly turbulent times, measuring student interest, awareness, and engagement is highly informative. Impact on Society: During a highly contentious period replete with a large volume of civil unrest and compounded by a global pandemic, understanding the behaviors and attitudes of students can help us as higher education faculty be more attuned when it comes to the design and delivery of curriculum. Future Research This presentation presents preliminary findings. Data is still being collected and much more extensive statistical analyses will be performed.

In the decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, African Americans made historic gains in accessing employment opportunities in racially integrated workplaces in U.S. business firms and government agencies. In the previous working papers in this series, we have shown that in the 1960s and 1970s, Blacks without college degrees were gaining access to the American middle class by moving into well-paid unionized jobs in capital-intensive mass production industries. At that time, major U.S. companies paid these blue-collar workers middle-class wages, offered stable employment, and provided employees with health and retirement benefits. Of particular importance to Blacks was the opening up to them of unionized semiskilled operative and skilled craft jobs, for which in a number of industries, and particularly those in the automobile and electronic manufacturing sectors, there was strong demand. In addition, by the end of the 1970s, buoyed by affirmative action and the growth of public-service employment, Blacks were experiencing upward mobility through employment in government agencies at local, state, and federal levels as well as in civil-society organizations, largely funded by government, to operate social and community development programs aimed at urban areas where Blacks lived. By the end of the 1970s, there was an emergent blue-collar Black middle class in the United States. Most of these workers had no more than high-school educations but had sufficient earnings and benefits to provide their families with economic security, including realistic expectations that their children would have the opportunity to move up the economic ladder to join the ranks of the college-educated white-collar middle class. That is what had happened for whites in the post-World War II decades, and given the momentum provided by the dominant position of the United States in global manufacturing and the nation’s equal employment opportunity legislation, there was every reason to believe that Blacks would experience intergenerational upward mobility along a similar education-and-employment career path. That did not happen. Overall, the 1980s and 1990s were decades of economic growth in the United States. For the emerging blue-collar Black middle class, however, the experience was of job loss, economic insecurity, and downward mobility. As the twentieth century ended and the twenty-first century began, moreover, it became apparent that this downward spiral was not confined to Blacks. Whites with only high-school educations also saw their blue-collar employment opportunities disappear, accompanied by lower wages, fewer benefits, and less security for those who continued to find employment in these jobs. The distress experienced by white Americans with the decline of the blue-collar middle class follows the downward trajectory that has adversely affected the socioeconomic positions of the much more vulnerable blue-collar Black middle class from the early 1980s. In this paper, we document when, how, and why the unmaking of the blue-collar Black middle class occurred and intergenerational upward mobility of Blacks to the college-educated middle class was stifled. We focus on blue-collar layoffs and manufacturing-plant closings in an important sector for Black employment, the automobile industry from the early 1980s. We then document the adverse impact on Blacks that has occurred in government-sector employment in a financialized economy in which the dominant ideology is that concentration of income among the richest households promotes productive investment, with government spending only impeding that objective. Reduction of taxes primarily on the wealthy and the corporate sector, the ascendancy of political and economic beliefs that celebrate the efficiency and dynamism of “free market” business enterprise, and the denigration of the idea that government can solve social problems all combined to shrink government budgets, diminish regulatory enforcement, and scuttle initiatives that previously provided greater opportunity for African Americans in the government and civil-society sectors.

Turkey, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia span one of the longest continuously inhabited regions of the world. Centuries of cultural infusion have ensured these societies are highly heterogeneous. As plural polities, they are ripe for the kind of freedoms that liberal democracy can guarantee. However, despite having multi-party electoral systems, these countries have recently moved toward populist authoritarianism. Populism —once considered a distinctively Latin American problem that only seldom reared its head in other parts of the world— has now found a home in almost every corner of the planet. Moreover, it has latched on to religion, which, as history reminds us, has an unparalleled power to mobilize crowds. This report explores the unique nexus between faith and populism in our era and offers an insight into how cyberspace and offline politics have become highly intertwined to create a hyper-reality in which socio-political events are taking place. The report focuses, in particular, on the role of religious populism in digital space as a catalyst for undemocratic politics in the five Asian countries we have selected as our case studies. The focus on the West Asian and South Asian cases is an opportunity to examine authoritarian religious populists in power, whereas the East Asian countries showcase powerful authoritarian religious populist forces outside parliament. This report compares internet governance in each of these countries under three categories: obstacles to access, limits on content, and violations of user rights. These are the digital toolkits that authorities use to govern digital space. Our case selection and research focus have allowed us to undertake a comparative analysis of different types of online restrictions in these countries that constrain space foropposition and democratic voices while simultaneously making room for authoritarian religious populist narratives to arise and flourish. The report finds that surveillance, censorship, disinformation campaigns, internet shutdowns, and cyber-attacks—along with targeted arrests and violence spreading from digital space—are common features of digital authoritarianism. In each case, it is also found that religious populist forces co-opt political actors in their control of cyberspace. The situational analysis from five countries indicates that religion’s role in digital authoritarianism is quite evident, adding to the layer of nationalism. Most of the leaders in power use religious justifications for curbs on the internet. Religious leaders support these laws as a means to restrict “moral ills” such as blasphemy, pornography, and the like. This evident “religious populism” seems to be a major driver of policy changes that are limiting civil liberties in the name of “the people.” In the end, the reasons for restricting digital space are not purely religious but draw on religious themes with populist language in a mixed and hybrid fashion. Some common themes found in all the case studies shed light on the role of digital space in shaping politics and society offline and vice versa. The key findings of our survey are as follows: The future of (especially) fragile democracies is highly intertwined with digital space. There is an undeniable nexus between faith and populism which offers an insight into how cyberspace and politics offline have become highly intertwined. Religion and politics have merged in these five countries to shape cyber governance. The cyber governance policies of populist rulers mirror their undemocratic, repressive, populist, and authoritarian policies offline. As a result, populist authoritarianism in the non-digital world has increasingly come to colonize cyberspace, and events online are more and more playing a role in shaping politics offline. “Morality” is a common theme used to justify the need for increasingly draconian digital laws and the active monopolization of cyberspace by government actors. Islamist and Hindutva trolls feel an unprecedented sense of cyber empowerment, hurling abuse without physically seeing the consequences or experiencing the emotional and psychological damage inflicted on their victims.

Turkey, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia span one of the longest continuously inhabited regions of the world. Centuries of cultural infusion have ensured these societies are highly heterogeneous. As plural polities, they are ripe for the kind of freedoms that liberal democracy can guarantee. However, despite having multi-party electoral systems, these countries have recently moved toward populist authoritarianism. Populism —once considered a distinctively Latin American problem that only seldom reared its head in other parts of the world— has now found a home in almost every corner of the planet. Moreover, it has latched on to religion, which, as history reminds us, has an unparalleled power to mobilize crowds. This report explores the unique nexus between faith and populism in our era and offers an insight into how cyberspace and offline politics have become highly intertwined to create a hyper-reality in which socio-political events are taking place. The report focuses, in particular, on the role of religious populism in digital space as a catalyst for undemocratic politics in the five Asian countries we have selected as our case studies. The focus on the West Asian and South Asian cases is an opportunity to examine authoritarian religious populists in power, whereas the East Asian countries showcase powerful authoritarian religious populist forces outside parliament. This report compares internet governance in each of these countries under three categories: obstacles to access, limits on content, and violations of user rights. These are the digital toolkits that authorities use to govern digital space. Our case selection and research focus have allowed us to undertake a comparative analysis of different types of online restrictions in these countries that constrain space foropposition and democratic voices while simultaneously making room for authoritarian religious populist narratives to arise and flourish. The report finds that surveillance, censorship, disinformation campaigns, internet shutdowns, and cyber-attacks—along with targeted arrests and violence spreading from digital space—are common features of digital authoritarianism. In each case, it is also found that religious populist forces co-opt political actors in their control of cyberspace. The situational analysis from five countries indicates that religion’s role in digital authoritarianism is quite evident, adding to the layer of nationalism. Most of the leaders in power use religious justifications for curbs on the internet. Religious leaders support these laws as a means to restrict “moral ills” such as blasphemy, pornography, and the like. This evident “religious populism” seems to be a major driver of policy changes that are limiting civil liberties in the name of “the people.” In the end, the reasons for restricting digital space are not purely religious but draw on religious themes with populist language in a mixed and hybrid fashion. Some common themes found in all the case studies shed light on the role of digital space in shaping politics and society offline and vice versa. The key findings of our survey are as follows: The future of (especially) fragile democracies is highly intertwined with digital space. There is an undeniable nexus between faith and populism which offers an insight into how cyberspace and politics offline have become highly intertwined. Religion and politics have merged in these five countries to shape cyber governance. The cyber governance policies of populist rulers mirror their undemocratic, repressive, populist, and authoritarian policies offline. As a result, populist authoritarianism in the non-digital world has increasingly come to colonize cyberspace, and events online are more and more playing a role in shaping politics offline. “Morality” is a common theme used to justify the need for increasingly draconian digital laws and the active monopolization of cyberspace by government actors. Islamist and Hindutva trolls feel an unprecedented sense of cyber empowerment, hurling abuse without physically seeing the consequences or experiencing the emotional and psychological damage inflicted on their victims.