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"Social justice -- History -- 20th century"
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Working for Peace and Justice
A longtime agitator against war and social injustice,
Lawrence Wittner has been tear-gassed, threatened by police
with drawn guns, charged by soldiers with fixed bayonets, spied
upon by the U.S. government, arrested, and purged from his job
for political -reasons. To say that this
teacher-historian-activist has led an interesting life is a
considerable understatement. In this absorbing memoir, Wittner
traces the dramatic course of a life and career that took him
from a Brooklyn boyhood in the 1940s and ’50s to an
education at Columbia University and the University of
Wisconsin to the front lines of peace activism, the fight for
racial equality, and the struggles of the labor movement. He
details his family background, which included the bloody
anti-Semitic pogroms of late-nineteenth-century Eastern Europe,
and chronicles his long teaching career, which comprised
positions at a small black college in Virginia, an elite
women’s liberal arts college north of New York City, and
finally a permanent home at the Albany campus of the State
University of New York. Throughout, he packs the narrative with
colorful vignettes describing such activities as fighting
racism in Louisiana and Mississippi during the early 1960s,
collaborating with peace-oriented intellectuals in
Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, and leading thousands of
antinuclear demonstrators through the streets of Hiroshima. As
the book also reveals, Wittner’s work as an activist was
matched by scholarly achievements that made him one of the
world’s foremost authorities on the history of the peace
and nuclear disarmament movements—a research specialty
that led to revealing encounters with such diverse figures as
Norman Thomas, the Unabomber, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Caspar
Weinberger, and David Horowitz. A tenured professor and
renowned author who has nevertheless lived in tension with the
broader currents of his society, Lawrence Wittner tells an
engaging personal story that includes some of the most
turbulent and significant events of recent history. Lawrence S.
Wittner, emeritus professor of history at the University at
Albany, SUNY, is the author of numerous scholarly works,
including the award-winning three-volume
Struggle Against the Bomb . Among other awards and
honors, he has received major grants or fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of
Learned Societies, the Aspen Institute, the United States
Institute of Peace, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation.
eBook
Power to the Poor
The Poor People's Campaign of 1968 has long been overshadowed by the assassination of its architect, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the political turmoil of that year. In a major reinterpretation of civil rights and Chicano movement history, Gordon K. Mantler demonstrates how King's unfinished crusade became the era's most high-profile attempt at multiracial collaboration and sheds light on the interdependent relationship between racial identity and political coalition among African Americans and Mexican Americans. Mantler argues that while the fight against poverty held great potential for black-brown cooperation, such efforts also exposed the complex dynamics between the nation's two largest minority groups.Drawing on oral histories, archives, periodicals, and FBI surveillance files, Mantler paints a rich portrait of the campaign and the larger antipoverty work from which it emerged, including the labor activism of Cesar Chavez, opposition of Black and Chicano Power to state violence in Chicago and Denver, and advocacy for Mexican American land-grant rights in New Mexico. Ultimately, Mantler challenges readers to rethink the multiracial history of the long civil rights movement and the difficulty of sustaining political coalitions.
eBook
Crime and punishment in the Jim Crow South
\"In recent years, there has been renewed attention to problems pervading the criminal justice system in the United States. The prison population has grown exponentially since 1970 due to the war on drugs, minimum sentencing laws, and other crime control measures instituted in the 1980s and 1990s. The U.S. now incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world, over 2 million in 2016. African Americans constitute nearly half of those prisoners. This volume contributes to current debates on the criminal justice system by filling a crucial gap in scholarship with ten original essays by both established and up-and-coming historians on the topics of crime and state punishment in the Jim Crow era. In particular, these essays address the relationship between the modern state, crime control, and white supremacy. Essays in the collection show that the development of the modern penal system was part and parcel of Jim Crow, and so are the racial injustices endemic to it. The essays that Wood and Ring have curated enrich our understanding of how the penal system impacted the New South; demonstrate the centrality of the carceral regime in producing racial, gender, and legal categories in the New South; provide insightful analysis of intellectual work around the U.S. prison regime; use the penal system to make a case for Southern exceptionalism; and extend conversations about the penal system's restriction of African American political and civil rights. As a whole, the volume provides a nuanced portrait of the dynamic between state power and white supremacy in the South beyond a story of top-down social control\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Health Rights Are Civil Rights
Health Rights Are Civil Rightstells the story of the important place of health in struggles for social change in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Jenna M. Loyd describes how Black freedom, antiwar, welfare rights, and women's movement activists formed alliances to battle oppressive health systems and structural violence, working to establish the principle that health is a right. For a time-with President Nixon, big business, and organized labor in agreement on national health insurance-even universal health care seemed a real possibility.
Health Rights Are Civil Rightsdocuments what many Los Angeles activists recognized: that militarization was in part responsible for the inequalities in American cities. This challenging new reading of suburban white flight explores how racial conflicts transpired across a Southland landscape shaped by defense spending. While the war in Vietnam constrained social spending, the New Right gained strength by seizing on the racialized and gendered politics of urban crisis to resist urban reinvestment and social programs. Recapturing a little-known current of the era's activism, Loyd uses an intersectional approach to show why this diverse group of activists believed that democratic health care and ending war making were essential to create cities of freedom, peace, and social justice-a vision that goes unanswered still today.
eBook
Relocating Authority : Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration
\"Relocating Authority examines the ways Japanese Americans have continually used writing to respond to the circumstances of their community's mass imprisonment during World War II. Using both Nikkei cultural frameworks and community-specific history for methodological inspiration and guidance, Mira Shimabukuro shows how writing was used privately and publicly to individually survive and collectively resist the conditions of incarceration. Examining a wide range of diverse texts and literacy practices such as diary entries, note-taking, manifestos, and multiple drafts of single documents, Relocating Authority draws upon community archives, visual histories, and Asian American history and theory to reveal the ways writing has served as a critical tool for incarcerees and their descendants. Incarcerees not only used writing to redress the 'internment' in the moment but also created pieces of text that enabled and inspired further redress long after the camps had closed. Relocating Authority highlights literacy's enduring potential to participate in social change and assist an imprisoned people in relocating authority away from their captors and back to their community and themselves. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of ethnic and Asian American rhetorics, American studies, and anyone interested in the relationship between literacy and social justice\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The International Labour Organization and the quest for social justice, 1919-2009
This book tells the story of the International Labour Organization, founded in 1919 in the belief that universal and lasting peace goes hand in hand with social justice. Since then the ILO has contributed to the protection of the vulnerable, the fight against unemployment, the promotion of human rights, the development of democratic institutions and the improvement of working lives everywhere. It has sometimes suffered setbacks but has survived to pursue its goals through the last 90 years.
eBook
Nisei Radicals
Demanding liberation, advocating for the oppressed, and
organizing for justice, siblings Mitsuye Yamada (1923-) and Michael
Yasutake (1920-2001) rebelled against respectability and
assimilation, charting their own paths for what it means to be
Nisei. Raised in Seattle and then forcibly removed and detained in
the Minidoka concentration camp, their early lives mirrored those
of many second-generation Japanese Americans. Yasutake's pacifism
endured even with immense pressure to enlist during his confinement
and in the years following World War II. His faith-based activism
guided him in condemning imperialism and inequality, and he worked
tirelessly to free political prisoners and defend human rights.
Yamada became an internationally acclaimed feminist poet,
professor, and activist who continues to speak out against racism
and patriarchy.
Weaving together the stories of two distinct but intrinsically
connected political lives, Nisei Radicals examines the
siblings' half century of dedication to global movements, including
multicultural feminism, Puerto Rican independence, Japanese
American redress, Indigenous sovereignty, and more. From
displacement and invisibility to insurgent mobilization, Yamada and
Yasutake rejected stereotypes and fought to dismantle systems of
injustice.
eBook