Browsing by Subject "Civil rights"

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A case study of the Franklin Lindsay Student Aid Fund and its intersection with Black college student access to higher education in Texas from the post-Civil War era to the present
(2016-05) Do, Gigi Diem-Uyen; Reddick, Richard, 1972-; Somers, Patricia; Saenz, Victor; Carter, William
The case study of the Franklin Lindsay Student Aid Fund is an historical examination of a sixty-two year-old private foundation originally created to help White Texas students pursue post-secondary education in the State of Texas. At the present time, the Fund is a thriving, $23 million student loan trust for all qualified young Texans. For this study, a qualitative research method was applied for an in-depth examination of the Franklin Lindsay Student Aid Fund and how it became accessible for Black students in Texas. Research also focused on the impact changes in Texas higher educational policy had on the outcome of the Franklin Lindsay probate court cases from 1954-1957, and the Fund’s reformation stages beginning in 1957. The results indicated three key findings: (1) The Tax Reform Act of 1969 (TRA69) ended the exclusion of Black students from the Franklin Lindsay Student Aid Fund, (2) Black students were still banned from the program for twenty-two years after the Brown V. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) decision and seven years after the TRA69, and, (3) Current committee members lacked knowledge about the history of the Fund.
Accommodating disability : barriers and burdens of a movement toward equity in an equality-based justice system
(2019-02-06) Bird, Christine Catherine; Sparrow, Bartholomew H., 1959-; Tulis, Jeffrey K
Social movements can choose between emphasizing a sameness-based equality narrative or alternatively, a difference-based equity narrative. The sameness narrative emphasizes how the marginalized group represented by the social movement is not different from mainstream society and deserves equal treatment. The difference narrative allows the movement to leverage its different attributes to seek accommodation within mainstream society by asserting principles of equity. This narrative, by contrast, emphasizes how the marginalized group represented by the social movement is deserving of inclusion in society, but nonetheless requires affirmative accommodation for their differences. The disability rights movement is an equity-based movement because it requires an affirmative accommodation provision. If a group requiring accommodation seeks only to be treated equally to their counterparts, the unique experiences and needs of the individuals requiring accommodation cannot be met. In order to demonstrate this point, I look to the difficulties of obtain reasonable accommodation under disability policy in the United States.
El Quetzal (English edition)
(0000-00-00) Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA
El Quetzal (Spanish edition)
(0000-00-00) Comisión de Derechos Humanos de Guatemala en Washington, EE.UU
Free association : Libertas, metaphor and the politics of Cicero
(2007-05) Lundy, Steven James; Riggsby, Andrew M.
Libertas is a notion central to the politics and culture of the Roman Republic, yet commentators have found difficulty in interpreting the word and giving a coherent and cohesive account of its semantic and rhetorical content. This report attempts to throw further light on the discussion by examining the conceptual and rhetorical content of libertas, incorporating a substantial study of its metaphorical structures following the linguistic and cognitive work of George Lakoff. The central texts under discussion are: the comic plays of Plautus, which offer an insight into libertas in its "source domain"; the epistolary corpus of Cicero, which is used as a basis to study libertas in its political context and as a contrast to the final text under analysis: Cicero's De Lege Agraria 2.
From the campus to the globe : race, internationalism and student activism in the postwar South, 1945-1962
(2012-05) Whittington, Erica Layne; Jones, Jacqueline, 1948-; Oshinsky, David M., 1944-; Brands, Henry W; Abzug, Robert H; Lawrence, Mark A; Mickenberg, Julia L
What drew southern college students into the struggle for civil rights? To help answer that question, this project examines student challenges to existing social practices in the South, and traces changes in their attitudes toward race and social justice from World War II through the early 1960s. Over that time, thousands of college students committed themselves to the idea that “keeping the peace” was intertwined with individual human rights at home and abroad. An internationalist outlook shaped interest in race relations, citizenship, and gender roles. Southern youth were central to this development, pushing for social change at home in accordance with their concerns about national security and world peace. This history traces networks of southern college students, focusing on the cities of Austin, TX and Chapel Hill, NC, both of which produced vibrant progressive student organizations and national student leaders during the early postwar period. It uncovers an important yet understudied tributary of the larger Civil Rights Movement, and helps contextualize the interracial, “Beloved Community” activism of the early 1960s. As black students linked internationalism with civil rights as part of the “Double V Campaign” following World War II, many white students also began advocating for domestic desegregation, inspired by their experiences of traveling abroad and interactions with visiting international students. Integrated conferences sponsored by University YMCA/YWCAs and the National Student Association created a progressive, interracial student network. Through these organizations, many postwar students began redefining their own societal roles, and to explore their potential as political actors. Interracial encounters empowered southern students to envision new social relations between blacks and whites, women and men, and American and international citizens. Under the banner of “human relations,” they began to break down personal barriers and to consciously relate to one another on the basis of shared humanity. This dissertation is the first historical work to closely examine organized efforts to change individual attitudes toward race among both white and black southern students during the 1940s and 1950s. It recaptures the early postwar dynamism of southern campuses, where students took action, in both their schools and their hometowns, to better their world.
The gospel of justice : community, faith, and the integration of St. Andrew's Episcopal School
(2014-05) Pinkston, Caroline Booth; Mickenberg, Julia L.
This study focuses on the struggle to integrate St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, a small private school in Austin, Texas. A close examination of the history of this community sheds light on how privileged whites navigated questions of integration, especially in Christian communities. Pro-integration whites in these communities utilized their faith, understanding of community, and a rhetoric of respectability to move the school towards desegregation, forging a “middle way” through Civil Rights that achieved the goal of integration without damaging white interests in the community. Following St. Andrew’s through the 1970’s and 1980’s, this study moves beyond the implementation of official integration policies to trace how the school wrestled with questions of minority enrollment, white flight, and the relationship between private communities and the public sphere. Over the course of three decades, St. Andrew’s increased minority enrollment but adopted a narrower and more inward-focused understanding of community, becoming a more diverse space but not fundamentally questioning the nature of a private school in times of public crisis.
"He ran his business like a white man" : race, entrepreneurship, and the early National Negro Business League in the New South
(2006-12) Garrett-Scott, Shennette Monique; Walker, Juliet E. K., 1940-
Booker T. Washington organized the National Negro Business League (NNBL) in 1900, and it became the largest and most influential black business organization for much of the twentieth century. Enterprising black men and women in the NNBL linked their entrepreneurial activities to a modern, progressive social and political agenda. They relied on discourses of race, nation, and business that were both modern, radical, and progressive and traditional, conservative, and reactionary. The thesis moves beyond prosaic debates about the efficacy of black business and black economic nationalism to consider how black entrepreneurs in the NNBL interacted with the material and cultural dimensions of the political economy. A disconnect often existed between the grand ambitions of the executive leadership and the intrigues of the local league membership. Race and entrepreneurship drew attention to lapses in the rhetoric of progress and change in the New South. Finally, it looks at interracial cooperation and conflict in the NNBL. By privileging blacks' struggles for liberation, the thesis enhances understanding about the many ways blacks struggled to strike a tenable balance between personal agency and structural constraints.
“Jive That Anybody Can Dig :” Lavada “Dr. Hepcat” Durst and the desegregation of radio in Central Texas, 1948-1963
(2012-08) Weiss, Peter Okie; Miller, Karl Hagstrom, 1968-
Lavada “Dr. Hepcat” Durst was the first African American popular music disc jockey in Texas. His radio program The Rosewood Ramble was broadcast on Austin station KVET-1300 AM from 1948 until 1963. KVET’s white owners, who included future Texas politicians John Connally and J. J. “Jake” Pickle, were not outspoken advocates for the rights of African Americans under Jim Crow, but they hired Durst in a concentrated effort to expand KVET’s African American listening audience. The Rosewood Ramble became a cultural, economic, and psychological resource for black radio listeners in segregated central Texas while also becoming the region’s most popular radio show among white listeners. This paper uses a mixture of oral history and archival sources to argue that Durst’s fifteen-year career at KVET was only the best-known part of a lifetime spent as an information broker to Austin’s embattled black community.
Mainline Protestants, La Raza protestors : Jorge Lara-Braud and the Hispanic-American Institute, 1965-1969
(2018-05-30) Bongiovanni, Brice Alfred; Garrard, Virginia, 1957-; Seales, Chad E
The Hispanic-American Institute (HAI) was an ecumenical Protestnat agency operated out of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary between 1965 and 1976. Under its first director, Jorge Lara-Braud, HAI became closely involved with the “Raza Unida” mass meetings and other early expressions of the Chicano Movement. This study examines the development of HAI during its first three years, focusing on how it became involved with radical activism, and how Lara-Braud defended that decision to Anglo Protestant leaders. It points to the way in which Lara-Braud linked Civil Rights concepts of integration accepted by liberal “mainline” Protestants to newer, more radical racial politics by invoking the mixed racial heritage of Hispanic peoples – la raza – as an example of the possibility of racial reconciliation in a Christian society.
Power moves : Houston, Texas and the politics of mobility, 1950-1985
(2014-05) Shelton, Kyle Krumdieck; Green, Laurie B. (Laurie Beth); Jones, Jacqueline; Bsumek, Erika M.; Hoelscher, Steven D.; Melosi, Martin V.
This dissertation argues that between 1950 and 1985 a diverse collection of residents from the Houston, Texas metropolitan area used debates about the planning, construction, and meaning of transportation structures—primarily highways and mass transit systems—as opportunities to claim political power and to influence the future of their neighborhoods and city. As they contested these systems, Houstonians articulated competing notions of the politics of mobility. In addition to concrete political decisions about transportation, this term also encompasses the daily transportation decisions of Houstonians and the meanings those residents ascribed to the infrastructure that carried them across the city. The politics of mobility uniquely illuminates the intersection of politics, culture, and urban development in Houston. Who wielded the power to make choices about Houston’s transportation networks and how the balance of that power changed over time are central questions of this dissertation. Until the late 1950s and early 1960s, a collection of nearly all white and male elected officials, professional planners, and private developers held immense power over the city’s decision-making process, but never completely controlled it. The actions of citizens outside that group forced leaders to acknowledge, if rarely embrace, the perspectives that citizens held about transportation and the politics of mobility. By the mid-1970s, aided by changes in federal oversight and citizen participation regulations, as well as by their own assertions of political power, an increasingly diverse set of Houstonians—African American, ethnic Mexican, and white, urban and suburban, rich and poor—possessed more influence over the city’s transportation choices. By engaging in these debates, Houstonians challenged the city’s racial, economic, and decision-making status quo. The choices made in Houston’s struggle over the placement of highways and the creation of a public transit authority sheds light onto the foundations of Houston’s unique built environment and offers a model for understanding similar forces at work in other auto-centric southern and western, “Sunbelt” cities, such as Los Angeles and Atlanta. Further, these conflicts illuminate why older cities in the Northeast and Midwest and younger ones in the West and the South developed such divergent urbanization patterns and transportation practices.
Radical dismissal : Stokely Carmichael and the problem of inclusion in public deliberation
(2020-08-13) Hatch, Justin Dean; Roberts-Miller, Patricia, 1959-; Longaker, Mark G.; Sackey, Donnie; Gilyard, Keith; Joseph, Peniel
“Radical Dismissal: Stokely Carmichael and the Problem of Inclusion in Public Deliberation” has two interrelated goals—first, to lay bare the rhetorical mechanisms by which those in power silence dissent, and, second, to view with greater clarity Stokely Carmichael’s rhetorical strategies and legacies. Toward those goals, I examine Carmichael’s words in the year following SNCC’s release of the slogan “Black Power,” and I look closely at the almost universally negative responses to them during the same period. While the terms—angry, hateful, demagogue, racist, etc.—that Carmichael’s critics use to dismiss him vary, they all direct attention away from his institutional critique toward his relationship to subjective norms of discourse. I open the dissertation by introducing Carmichael and relevant context and by developing the dissertation’s overarching theoretical framework. I borrow from scholars writing on “civility” to develop “civility policing” as rhetorical action that preserves unjust harmonies (Roberts-Miller, Deliberate Conflict 154), displaces blame from oppressor to oppressed (Welch 110), and silences dissent (Lozano-Reich and Cloud 223). Chapter One finds that Carmichael’s critics shaped his image and longer legacy by amplifying a distorted version of his message. An exploration of Carmichael’s words especially within a set of letters to Lorna Smith offers a corrective. Chapter Two explores the utility of two definitions of the term “demagogue” for distinguishing anti-racist rhetoric. While critics accuse Carmichael of being a “demagogue,” his words in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America not only contradict the claim, but also return the charge. Chapter Three builds on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s “dissociation of concepts” and Janice Fernheimer’s “dissociative disruption” to better understand the adaptive rhetorical strategies Carmichael used in his most famous speech given at Berkeley. I offer the term “subversive dissociation” as a charge to discover the dissociative foundations of dominant racial narratives.
Sticks and stones : analyzing the Museum of Modern Art’s values through language
(2017-05) Tisher, Kelcie Katharine; Bolin, Paul Erik, 1954-
This historical study investigated portrayals of non-Western objects, culture, and people in two museum catalogs. Performing content analysis on The Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) exhibition catalogs from African Negro Art (1935) and “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art (1984), the researcher found a presence of Western bias and racist language directed toward African makers and their art. The language used in the African Negro Art (1935) catalog isolates Africa from Western culture and art by describing African objects and culture as being of less value and different from traditional art in the West. Analysis of language seen in African Negro Art (1935) revealed a trend of utilizing language that belittled African objects, people, and culture. Through a consideration of language used in the “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art (1984) catalog, the researcher found examples of embedded racist and oppressive language. Yet, a comparison of these two catalogs from MoMA revealed less evidence of derogatory words and terminology in the more recent publication than seen in the exhibition catalog from fifty years earlier. In analyzing the changes seen in language evident in these two museum catalogs, the researcher explored civil rights events that took place in and around New York City which may have influenced the writer of the latter MoMA catalog. Historical research uncovered actions such as anti-discrimination protests, which helped to alter the cultural climate of New York City between 1935 and 1984. It is argued here that these historical events and changes that occurred in New York City’s cultural arts society may have affected the shift seen in MoMA’s use of language to discuss African objects, culture, and people. The researcher concludes that museum generated texts may likely impact how visitors perceive non-Western cultures, and thus strongly encourages museum personnel to be thoughtfully aware of how language is used in their publications.