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It would be difficult to overstate the centrality of 'Brown v Board of Education' to American law and life. Legal scholars from across the ideological spectrum have lavished more attention on that Supreme Court decision than any other issued during the last century. In recent decades, the standard account of 'Brown' has placed that most-scrutinized opinion in a geopolitical context. 'Brown', the standard account maintains, must be viewed as a product of the Cold War era. By the 1950s, the persistence of laws codifying racial subordination had become an embarrassment for the US on the global stage. The US effort to defeat communism around the world thus rendered the recognition of civil rights for Black Americans a Cold War imperative. This article complicates and challenges that account by exploring the central role that anti-communism played in segregationists' opposition to Brown and civil rights. Throughout most of the twentieth century, a broad array of Americans contended that preserving Jim Crow was a Cold War imperative in its own right. For this group, anti-communism and segregation were not just compatible, but inextricably intertwined. Their ranks included northerners and southerners alike: politicians, jurists, columnists, and ordinary citizens. White supremacists did not invoke anti-communism merely as a disingenuous ploy to combat 'Brown'. Both long before and long after 1954, anti-communism helped to shape the contours of segregationist thought. The defenders of Jim Crow assailed integration as a product of communistic central government authority. They insisted that racial equality would create discord within the US, just as the Soviets desired, and that civil rights activists were tainted by communist affiliations. Many segregationists viewed themselves as committed Cold Warriors, undertaking closely connected fights against both a foreign ideological threat and a domestic social one. As such, the Cold War represented not only a divide between the US and the Soviet Union; it also reflected a debate within the United States over the relationship between racial justice, national security, and foreign policy. Understanding that segregationists viewed their cause as a Cold War imperative recasts dominant views within legal academia, where this essential component of 'Brown's' geopolitical context remains under-appreciated. While it is tempting to dismiss every segregationist invocation of anti-communism as the product of either irrationality or opportunism, it would be a mistake to do so. Linking segregation with anti-communism transformed the defense of Jim Crow from a regional priority into a national one. Anti-communism also helped resolve a core tension in the segregationist belief that Black citizens did not actually want integration, allowing civil rights lawsuits to be attributed to communist agitation. Reckoning with this significant element of the civil rights era, this article thus illuminates the logic of a racist worldview. In so doing, it provides a fuller, more accurate portrait of a critical period in constitutional history, of the complex dynamics undergirding legal change, and of the malleable, tenacious character of racism in modern America.

Why have American policies failed to reduce the racial inequalities still pervasive throughout the nation? Has President Barack Obama defined new political approaches to race that might spur unity and progress? Still a House Divided examines the enduring divisions of American racial politics and how these conflicts have been shaped by distinct political alliances and their competing race policies. Combining deep historical knowledge with a detailed exploration of such issues as housing, employment, criminal justice, multiracial census categories, immigration, voting in majority-minority districts, and school vouchers, Desmond King and Rogers Smith assess the significance of President Obama's election to the White House and the prospects for achieving constructive racial policies for America's future.

Now more than ever, activists are using media to document injustice and promote social and political change. Yet with so many media platforms available, activists sometimes fail to have a coherent media and communication strategy. Drawing from his experiences as a documentary filmmaker with Black Lives Matter 5280 and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 105 in Denver, Colorado, Gino Canella argues that activist media create opportunities for activists to navigate conflict and embrace their political and ideological differences. Canella details how activist media practices-interviewing organizers, script writing, video editing, posting on social media, and hosting community screenings-foster solidarity among grassroots organizers. Informed by media theory, this book explores how activists are using media to mobilize supporters, communicate their values, and reject anti-union rhetoric. Furthermore, it demonstrates how collaborative media projects can help activists build broad-based coalitions and amplify their vision for a more equitable and just society.

Paul Bontemps decided to move his family to Los Angeles from Louisiana in 1906 on the day he finally submitted to a strictly enforced Southern custom—he stepped off the sidewalk to allow white men who had just insulted him to pass by. Friends of the Bontemps family, like many others beckoning their loved ones West, had written that Los Angeles was \"a city called heaven\" for people of color. But just how free was Southern California for African Americans? This splendid history, at once sweeping in its historical reach and intimate in its evocation of everyday life, is the first full account of Los Angeles's black community in the half century before World War II. Filled with moving human drama, it brings alive a time and place largely ignored by historians until now, detailing African American community life and political activism during the city's transformation from small town to sprawling metropolis. Writing with a novelist's sensitivity to language and drawing from fresh historical research, Douglas Flamming takes us from Reconstruction to the Jim Crow era, through the Great Migration, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the build-up to World War II. Along the way, he offers rich descriptions of the community and its middle-class leadership, the women who were front and center with men in the battle against racism in the American West. In addition to drawing a vivid portrait of a little-known era, Flamming shows that the history of race in Los Angeles is crucial for our understanding of race in America. The civil rights activism in Los Angeles laid the foundation for critical developments in the second half of the century that continue to influence us to this day.

This article derives from my 2021 ASA presidential address. I examine how sociologists including Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and white American sociologists have omitted key determinants of modernity in their accounts of this pivotal development in world history. Those determinants are white supremacy, western empires, racial hierarchies, colonization, slavery, Jim Crow, patriarchy, and resistance movements. This article demonstrates that any accounts omitting these determinants will only produce an anemic and misleading analysis of modernity. The central argument maintains that the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois developed a superior analysis of modernity by analytically centering these determinants. I conclude by making a case for the development of an emancipatory sociology in the tradition of Du Boisian critical sociological thought.

African Americans had access to only a small number of state parks in the Jim Crow South. Between the end of World War II and the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, however, state park officials oversaw a relative expansion in the construction of facilities available to southern blacks. Emphasizing developments leading up to that landmark court ruling, I note that this trend did not indicate waning support for segregation among whites. Rather, this relative expansion was part of a strategy to protect Jim Crow by demonstrating that the \"separate-but-equal\" principle was being successfully achieved by southern park agencies. This intensified construction was largely a reaction to increasingly successful legal action in federal courts by the naacp generally; and officials in the state agencies hoped-unsuccessfully-to avoid challenges to state park segregation. After the Brown decision, several border states integrated their park systems, but most agencies displayed the reactionary defiance that characterized most white Southerners as the civil rights movement grew.

Purpose It is unknown whether Jim Crow—i.e., legal racial discrimination practiced by 21 US states and the District of Columbia and outlawed by the US Civil Rights Act in 1964—affects US cancer outcomes. We hypothesized that Jim Crow birthplace would be associated with higher risk of estrogen-receptor-negative (ER−) breast tumors among US black, but not white, women and also a higher black versus white risk for ER− tumors. Methods We analyzed data from the SEER 13 registry group (excluding Alaska) for 47,157 US-born black non-Hispanic and 348,514 US-born white non-Hispanic women, aged 25–84 inclusive, diagnosed with primary invasive breast cancer between 1 January 1992 and 31 December 2012. Results Jim Crow birthplace was associated with increased odds of ER− breast cancer only among the black, not white women, with the effect strongest for women born before 1965. Among black women, the odds ratio (OR) for an ER− tumor, comparing women born in a Jim Crow versus not Jim Crow state, equaled 1.09 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.06, 1.13), on par with the OR comparing women in the worst versus best census tract socioeconomic quintiles (1.15; 95% CI 1.07, 1.23). The black versus white OR for ER− was higher among women born in Jim Crow versus non-Jim Crow states (1.41 [95% CI 1.13, 1.46] vs. 1.27 [95% CI 1.24, 1.31]). Conclusions The unique Jim Crow effect for US black women for breast cancer ER status underscores why analysis of racial/ethnic inequities must be historically contextualized.

Today’s Black Lives Matter movement has drawn attention to racial violence, especially lethal police violence, and compared it to the “Jim Crow” U.S. South. However, this comparison requires more specific information about racial violence during this period. Uncovering and organizing this information are the main objectives of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive. It documents racial killings in the American South, 1930–1954. Racial killings refer to killings where racial animus, or perceived infraction of Jim Crow norms, are documented or reasonably inferred from newspaper reports or U.S. government and civil rights organization documents. This research note discusses how the Archive contributes to basic comparative politics topics of democratic governance and subnational authoritarianism and methodological concerns, including the creation of databases used in the comparative study of collective vigilantism.

Today’s Black Lives Matter movement has drawn attention to racial violence, especially lethal police violence, and compared it to the “Jim Crow” U.S. South. However, this comparison requires more specific information about racial violence during this period. Uncovering and organizing this information are the main objectives of the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive. It documents racial killings in the American South, 1930–1954. Racial killings refer to killings where racial animus, or perceived infraction of Jim Crow norms, are documented or reasonably inferred from newspaper reports or U.S. government and civil rights organization documents. This research note discusses how the Archive contributes to basic comparative politics topics of democratic governance and subnational authoritarianism and methodological concerns, including the creation of databases used in the comparative study of collective vigilantism.