African Americans in North Carolina: Civil Rights
Digital and Archival Resources
Daniel H. Pollitt Papers, 1935-2009
Daniel Hubbard Pollitt (1921-2010) was a law professor, civil liberties lawyer, progressive activist, and staunch advocate and defender of civil liberties and civil rights. The collection documents Daniel H. Pollitt's legal career and his scholarly and public service interests and activities. The bulk of the collection consists of Pollitt's subject files.
John Kenyon Chapman Papers, 1969-2009
John Kenyon Chapman was a life-long social justice activist, organizer, and historian who focused his academic and social efforts on workers rights and African American empowerment in central North Carolina. In the 1990s and 2000s, Chapman was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he focused his activism and academic work on historical accuracy, African American empowerment, and civil rights education in and around Chapel Hill. During this time, Chapman founded and directed two racial and social justice organizations: the Freedom Legacy Project in 1995 and the Campaign for Historical Accuracy and Truth in 2005.
Arthur Franklin Raper (1899-1979) was a rural sociologist, civil rights activist, and social science analyst both in the United States and in other countries. Born in Davidson County, N.C., Raper's early career focused on analysis of rural problems and racial discrimination in the South.
North Carolina Fund Records, 1962-1971
The North Carolina Fund, an independent, non-profit, charitable corporation, sought and dispensed funds to fight poverty in North Carolina, 1963-1968. Governor Terry Sanford and other North Carolinians convinced the Ford Foundation to grant $7 million initial funding for a statewide anti- poverty effort aimed at rural and urban communities. This money--plus additional funding from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation; the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation; the U.S. Dept. of Labor; U.S. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare; U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development; and the Office of Economic Opportunity--enabled the Fund to support a broad program of education, community action, manpower development, research and planning, and other efforts to fight poverty.
Provides access to archival resources documenting the modern civil rights era in Greensboro, North Carolina, from the 1940s to the early 1980s, including the Sit-In Movement and the Greensboro Massacre. This is a project of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Books
Ervin, Paul R. Civil Rights and the South : a Symposium. New York: Da Capo Press, 1971. C326 N87u1
Published in 1963, this compilation of essays from The North Carolina Law Review provides essential insight into civil rights issues such as school desegregation, employment, and property rights. Authors include Robert F. Kennedy, Sam J. Ervin Jr., and Marion A. Wright.
Redding, Evangeline Grant. Nothing : the Mentality of the Black Woman. Tillery, N.C.: Heritage of Hope, 1976. C326 R313n
Self-published collection of poetry and statements about racism and sexism from a North Carolina author. One chapter is about Joan Little, a black North Carolina prisoner who fights back against sexual assault and kills her white jailer.
Unah, Isaac. Race and the Death Penalty in North Carolina : an Empirical Analysis, 1993-1997. S.l.: s.n., 2001. C343.2 U54r
The conclusions of this study, published in 2001, find that the race of the homicide victim in particular had an impact on whether the accused received the death penalty. The study was the most comprehensive of NC's capital sentencing in the state's history, plus the first of substance anywhere in the south since the mid-'80s.
United States Commission on Civil Rights. North Carolina Advisory Committee. Equal Protection of the Laws in North Carolina : Report of the North Carolina Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O., 1962. C326 N87a
This compiles the report of the North Carolina Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights 1959-62. This committee was established in accordance with the Civil Rights Act of 1957 as a fact-finding organization. Members included McNeill Smith (Chairman) and A.T. Spaulding (Vice Chairman). The report covers violations of civil rights concerning voting, education, and housing, among others.
Sisters in the Struggle by ISBN: 0814716024Publication Date: 2001-08-01Women were at the forefront of the civil rights struggle, but their indvidiual stories were rarely heard. Only recently have historians begun to recognize the central role women played in the battle for racial equality. In Sisters in the Struggle, we hear about the unsung heroes of the civil rights movements such as Ella Baker, who helped found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper who took on segregation in the Democratic party (and won), and Septima Clark, who created a network of "Citizenship Schools" to teach poor Black men and women to read and write and help them to register to vote. We learn of Black women's activism in the Black Panther Party where they fought the police, as well as the entrenched male leadership, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where the behind-the-scenes work of women kept the organization afloat when it was under siege. It also includes first-person testimonials from the women who made headlines with their courageous resistance to segregation--Rosa Parks, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, and Dorothy Height. This collection represents the coming of age of African-American women's history and presents new stories that point the way to future study. Contributors: Bettye Collier-Thomas, Vicki Crawford, Cynthia Griggs Fleming, V. P. Franklin, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Duchess Harris, Sharon Harley, Dorothy I. Height, Chana Kai Lee, Tracye Matthews, Genna Rae McNeil, Rosa Parks, Barbara Ransby, Jacqueline A. Rouse, Elaine Moore Smith, and Linda Faye Williams.
The Williamston Freedom Movement by ISBN: 9780786476367Publication Date: 2014-06-18During the summer of 1963 civil rights movements were taking place all over the South. In northeastern North Carolina the struggle for freedom focused on the small town of Williamston, where a legacy of voting rights advocacy and a history of violence caught the attention of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The Massachusetts chapter of the SCLC sent fifteen white ministers to Williamston in November in an attempt to increase media coverage. Just as the movement was gaining traction, John F. Kennedy was assassinated and the nation lost interest in Williamston. So far the Williamston Freedom Movement has remained little known, though its impact was significant locally. This book details the events and those who participated, and includes 19 interviews with members of both the black and white community. By studying local movements, historians can better understand how ordinary people contributed to the Civil Rights Movement.
Greater Freedom by ISBN: 9780761852308Publication Date: 2010-09-23Greater Freedom offers a groundbreaking long-term community study of Wilson County, North Carolina. Charting the evolution of Wilson's civil rights movement, Charles McKinney argues that African Americans in Wilson created an expansive notion of freedom that influenced every aspect of life in the region and directly confronted the state's reputation for moderation. Through exhaustive research and a compelling narrative, McKinney chronicles the approaches and perspectives that blacks in this eastern North Carolina county utilized to confront white supremacy. In the face of violence, intimidation, and marginalization, voting rights activists, educational reformers, the collaboration of union members, students, and working class black women activists in Wilson built a grassroots movement that helped shape the course of the national civil rights movement in America.
To Right These Wrongs by ISBN: 9780807833797Publication Date: 2010-05-30When Governor Terry Sanford established the North Carolina Fund in 1963, he saw it as a way to provide a better life for the "tens of thousands whose family income is so low that daily subsistence is always in doubt." Illustrated with evocative photographs by Billy Barnes, To Right These Wrongs offers a lively account of this pioneering effort in America's War on Poverty. Robert Korstad and James Leloudis describe how the Fund's initial successes grew out of its reliance on private philanthropy and federal dollars and its commitment to the democratic mobilization of the poor. Both were calculated tactics designed to outflank conservative state lawmakers and entrenched local interests that nourished Jim Crow, perpetuated one-party politics, and protected an economy built on cheap labor. By late 1968, when the Fund closed its doors, a resurgent politics of race had gained the advantage, led by a Republican Party that had reorganized itself around opposition to civil rights and aid to the poor. The North Carolina Fund came up short in its battle against poverty, but its story continues to be a source of inspiration and instruction for new generations of Americans.
Race Becomes Tomorrow by ISBN: 9780822360087Publication Date: 2015-11-13In Race Becomes Tomorrow Gerald M. Sider weaves together stories from his civil rights activism, his youth, and his experiences as an anthropologist to investigate the dynamic ways race has been constructed and lived in America since the 1960s. Tacking between past and present, Sider describes how political power, economic control, and racism inject chaos into the lives of ordinary people, especially African Americans, with surprising consequences. In addition to recounting his years working on voter registration in rural North Carolina, Sider makes connections between numerous issues, from sharecropping and deindustrialization to the recessions of the 1970s and 2008, the rise of migrant farm labor, and contemporary living-wage campaigns. Sider's stories--whether about cockroach races in immigrant homes, degrading labor conditions, or the claims and failures of police violence--provide numerous entry points into gaining a deeper understanding of how race and power both are and cannot be lived. They demonstrate that race is produced and exists in unpredictability, and that the transition from yesterday to tomorrow is anything but certain.
Color-Blind Justice by ISBN: 9780195181395Publication Date: 2006-12-04Civil War officer, Reconstruction "carpetbagger," best-selling novelist, and relentless champion of equal rights, Albion Tourgee battled his entire life for racial justice. Now, in this engaging biography, Mark Elliott offers an insightful portrait of a fearless lawyer, jurist, and writer, who fought for equality long after most Americans had abandoned the ideals of Reconstruction. Elliott provides a fascinating account of Tourgee's life, from his childhood in the Western Reserve region of Ohio (then a hotbed of abolitionism), to his years as a North Carolina judge during Reconstruction, to his memorable role as lead plaintiff's counsel in the landmark Supreme Court casePlessy v. Ferguson. Tourgee's brief coined the phrase that justice should be "color-blind," and his career was one long campaign to made good on that belief. A redoubtable lawyer and an accomplished jurist, Tourgee wrote fifteen political novels, eight books of historical and social criticism, andseveral hundred newspaper and magazine articles that all told represent a mountain of dissent against the prevailing tide of racial oppression. Through the lens of Tourgee's life, Elliott illuminates the war of ideas about race that raged through the United States in the nineteenth century, from the heated debate over slavery before the Civil War, through the conflict over aid to freedmen during Reconstruction, to the backlashtoward the end of the century, when Tourgee saw his country retreat from the goals of equality and freedom and utterly repudiate the work of Reconstruction. A poignant and inspiring study in courage and conviction, Color Blind Justice offers us an unforgettable portrayal of Albion Tourgee and the principles to which he dedicated his life.
Our Separate Ways by ISBN: 0807829382Publication Date: 2005-04-25In an in-depth community study of women in the civil rights movement, Christina Greene examines how several generations of black and white women, low-income as well as more affluent, shaped the struggle for black freedom in Durham, North Carolina. In the city long known as "the capital of the black middle class," Greene finds that, in fact, low-income African American women were the sustaining force for change. Greene demonstrates that women activists frequently were more organized, more militant, and more numerous than their male counterparts. They brought new approaches and strategies to protest, leadership, and racial politics. Arguing that race was not automatically a unifying force, Greene sheds new light on the class and gender fault lines within Durham's black community. While middle-class black leaders cautiously negotiated with whites in the boardroom, low-income black women were coordinating direct action in hair salons and neighborhood meetings. Greene's analysis challenges scholars and activists to rethink the contours of grassroots activism in the struggle for racial and economic justice in postwar America. She provides fresh insight into the changing nature of southern white liberalism and interracial alliances, the desegregation of schools and public accommodations, and the battle to end employment discrimination and urban poverty.
Theses and Dissertations
- The black struggle for equality in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1947-1977 byCall Number: C326 D92bPublication Date: 1981
- Black freedom and the University of North Carolina, 1793-1960 byCall Number: C378 UO2 2006 CHAPMAN, J.K.Publication Date: 2006
Recommended subjects for further research
Civil rights -- North Carolina
African Americans -- Civil Rights (restricted to North Carolina Collection)
Civil rights movements -- Southern States -- History (restricted to North Carolina Collection)
