Browsing by Author "Chafe, William H"

Between 1890 and 1965, the ideology of government responsibility for maternal and child health represented a continuous and central goal that fueled programs and institutional networks of progressive and liberal social policy advocates. Beginning in the settlement houses of the 1890s, a cadre of female bureaucrats, social reformers, and their political allies developed an array of federally based programs. Conservative stakeholders--among them anti-feminists, representatives of the medical industry, anti-communists, and white supremacists--strenuously opposed this vision of health justice, arguing that health was a personal responsibility in which government should play no part. Despite the achievements of government-based progressive reformers in instituting their vision in urban settlement houses, under the Sheppard-Towner Act of the mid-1920s and during the years of the New Deal and World War II, the Cold War's approach to domestic social policy after 1947 clamped down on their vision. After this conservative turn against social democratic solutions to welfare needs, these progressive advocates shifted their attention to the international health rights movement and to community-based maternal and child health activities.

My dissertation introduces the concept of health justice as an interpretive lens to trace the history of health policy progressives and their institutional networks. On the one hand, health justice reflects the communitarian premise that the health of all members of society is essential for the common good. On the other hand, health justice implies that health and health care are individual rights that government ought to protect. While communitarian arguments were often on the tip of the tongues of social reformers, a passionate belief in citizenship-based rights and redistributive and humanitarian ideas of social justice undergirded their policy ideas and became a more explicitly stated position during the New Deal and World War II. This justice-based approach to maternal and child health policy was consistently undermined by the prevailing counter-ideologies of individual responsibility for health, local control of public services, racial segregation in health services, and the commodification of health care.

My work relies on primary evidence collected from the personal papers of key protagonists, the administrative records of the Children's Bureau housed at the National Archives, oral histories, and the presidential papers of Harry S. Truman. Published primary materials have been culled from memoirs, professional public health and medical journals, as well as the popular press. I also draw from a body of historical and political science scholarship of the past twenty-five years to contextualize the narrative.

The US Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was an organization of the Black Power Movement, a cultural and a political nationalist movement central to the history of the African-American Freedom Struggle. The Black Panthers' anti-imperialist politics, militant visual style, grassroots strategies, and community programs appealed within and beyond the United States. Between 1967 and 1972, people of color struggling under class and ethnic oppression in six countries outside the United States formed Black Panther Parties inspired by the US Panthers. In the United Kingdom, West Indians, West Africans, and South Asians formed a Black Panther Movement in 1968 and in Israel, a group of Mizrahi (Arab) Jews founded a Black Panther Party in in Jerusalem in 1971. This dissertation examines these two movements with reference to the US Black Panthers in order to place local, national, and global histories in dialogue.

This study adopts a transnational framework that conceives of Black Power as a movement of global migrants. From 1948 to 1967, over two million people from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean migrated to the UK and Israel. These migrants' overlapping experiences of displacement and class- and ethnic-based oppression led them to establish Black Panther groups in their new home countries in order to raise their political concerns under a collective banner. These people chose to become Black Panthers specifically because the US Black Panther Party offered a name and style that connected their global brothers and sisters to a range of grassroots strategies promoting interethnic solidarity and the collective advancement of black communities against the social structures that fostered racism. Through the examination of oral histories, photographs, letters, fliers, passport stamps, films, court cases, and surveillance files, this study focuses on how these global Panther activists represented themselves and their politics in the public sphere.

Both the British and Israeli Panther movements first organized in response to the city police's harassment of youth in their neighborhoods. Their respective critiques expanded from an opposition to police brutality to systemic goals of improving housing, education, welfare, and employment for blacks. Both of the nation-states in which these groups emerged relied upon the US for military stability and economic support during this period, such that the British and Israeli Panthers saw confrontations with their respective governments as acts of resistance to American Empire.

This dissertation, then, is at once a community study of two branches of a transnational social movement as well as a larger story. The broader narrative reveals how everyday people responded to the American Empire in the 1960s and 1970s, how the US Black Panthers translated black internationalist politics into urban neighborhoods, and how people outside the US constructed narratives about African-Americans as a way of making sense of racial formations at home. This work also demonstrates how foreign governments and media producers appropriated African-American history for a variety of in political purposes during this period. This examination enables a deeper understanding of the transnational black freedom struggle, as it centers the role that people of color outside the United States played in creating and sustaining Black Panther Movements that confronted American and British Empires from the grassroots.

In Selma, Alabama in 1965, local African Americans partnered with civil rights organizations to stage a movement for voting rights. The beating of peaceful black marchers by white state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that March catapulted the city and black demands for the ballot into the national spotlight. When the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed five months later, it cemented Selma as a symbol of voting rights. Since then, Selma has become a triumphal moment in the grand narrative of American democracy and citizenship. However, the years after the voting rights movement failed to bring economic opportunities and justice for black citizens in Selma. At the end of the twentieth century, numbing unemployment, gutted houses, and government transfer payments attested to barriers left unbroken by the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. How, then, did Selma become the site of a nationally-geared campaign for voting rights, and why was the right to vote not enough to bring economic justice for African Americans?

This dissertation is a local study that spans the course of century, one that looks at Selma and Dallas County as a place with a long history shaped by white supremacy and agricultural transformation, as well as local relationships and national developments. It begins in 1901, the year that the newly-passed Alabama constitution took the ballot away from nearly every African American in the state, and ends in 2000, when Selma's residents elected their first black mayor. Using newspapers and magazines, personal papers, organizational records, municipal records, federal publications, and oral histories, it examines how municipal, state, and national politics, as well as enormous economic shifts, intersected with and altered the lives of black and white residents in Dallas County, Alabama.

The multifaceted struggle of African Americans for freedom in Dallas County unfolded within the context of a century-long agricultural revolution in the Black Belt. African Americans' overlapping demands for economic opportunity, self-sufficiency, quality education, and meaningful political representation reflected and responded to local economic shifts from cotton to cattle to industry. The semi-autonomous community black Dallas County residents forged through farmers' organizations, schools, and societies under segregation later helped them mount a frontal challenge to the ramparts of white supremacy. The civil rights movement, however, grew to maturity at exactly the moment when cattle had usurped cotton's reign over the fields, altering the Black Belt's economic and social fabric.

Political rights for African Americans in Dallas County did not solve the postwar economic challenges of vanishing farms and the rise of low-wage industry. Meanwhile, local white officials vigorously fought to maintain political control in the wake of the civil rights movement. Their calculated intransigence delayed the meaningful participation of black residents in the economic and political life of Selma. The rise of the Sunbelt South and globalization further siphoned resources away from the struggling Black Belt. As the federal government retracted and nearby military bases closed in the late 1970s and 1980s, rural areas like Dallas County were left without resources in a new economy that favored high-skilled workers in urban centers. Examining black freedom struggles and economic transformation side-by-side illuminates how voting rights alone did not alter the regional network that concentrated both resources and poverty in an uneven process of development.

The vote brought political power, but it did not bring the economic justice, security, or quality education that made up the other half of African Americans' demands for freedom. By singularly focusing on the securing of voting rights, Selma became a pivotal moment in the story of American democracy, but black Dallas County residents' parallel demands for equal economic opportunities remained long after African Americans had won the vote. The triumphal narrative ignores the economic transformation that fundamentally altered the Black Belt. From cotton to cattle, industry to unemployment checks, black citizens perpetually found themselves on the losing end of economic change. At the end of the century, nearly four decades of federal divestment and globalization had sapped Dallas County of jobs, and the government's presence was felt mainly in the form of disability checks and food assistance. The political rights black Dallas County citizens had shed blood for in 1965 could not alone undo this legacy of economic inequality.

What happens when the dominant binary categories used to describe American race relations--either "black and white," or "Anglo and Mexican"--are examined contemporaneously, not comparatively, but in relation to one another? How do the long African American and Chicano/a struggles for racial equality and economic opportunity look different? And what role did ordinary people play in shaping these movements? Using oral history interviews, the Texas Labor Archives, and the papers of dozens of black, brown, and white activists, this dissertation follows diverse labor, civil rights, and political organizers from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s.

Tracing their movements revealed a startling story. Beginning in the mid-1930s, African American and ethnic Mexican working people across Texas quietly and tentatively approached one another as well as white laborers for support in their efforts to counter discrimination at work, in their unions, and in the cities in which they lived. Such efforts evolved in different ways due to the repression of the early Cold War, but most organizers simply redirected their activism into new channels. By the close of the 1950s, new forms of multiracial alliances were beginning to take hold. Mutual suspicion slowly gave way to mutual trust, especially in San Antonio. There, and increasingly statewide, black and brown activists separately developed robust civil rights movements that encompassed demands not only for integration but also equal economic opportunities and the quest for independent political power.

The distinct civil rights and labor movements overlapped, especially in the realm of electoral politics. By the mid-1960s, what began as inchoate collaboration at the local level had gradually expanded from its origins in the barrios, ghettos, union halls, and shop floors to become a broad-based, state-wide coalition in support of liberal politicians and an expansive civil rights agenda. At the same time, African American and ethnic Mexican activists were engaged in new waves of organizing for both political power and civil rights, but they encountered opposition from members of their own ethnic groups. Thus the activists' efforts to forge inter-ethnic coalitions coexisted with protracted intra-ethnic conflict. In many cases distinctions of class and political philosophy and tactics mattered at least as much as did ties of ethnicity. Activists learned this lesson experientially: in the trenches, through countless small conflicts over several decades, they slowly separated themselves from their more conservative counterparts and looked to multiracial coalitions as their primary strategy for outflanking their intra-ethnic opponents. Meanwhile, organized labor and white liberals had been searching for allies in their efforts to wrest control of the Democratic Party away from its conservative wing. In the early 1960s, they reached the conclusion that black and brown voters would prove key to their own success, so they gradually transitioned toward civil rights organizing in order to build a coalition with the black and brown civil rights movements.

After decades of fighting separately and dabbling in experimental partnerships, veteran ethnic Mexican, African American, and white labor and liberal activists finally came together into a powerful statewide Democratic Coalition. Between 1962 and 1964, their collaborative campaign for civil rights, economic opportunity, and political power reached a fever pitch, resulting in the state's largest ever direct action protests, massive door-to-door electoral initiatives, and an ever-deepening commitment by labor to putting boots on the ground for community organizing. In the late 1960s the statewide multiracial coalition reached its apex and began to lose steam. At the same time, local multiracial coalitions continued to thrive, underpinning both the African American and Chicano/a urban electoral mobilizations and the rising Black and Brown Power movements. At the local level and in the short term, black, brown, and white working-class civil rights activists won--they achieved a degree of economic and political democracy in Texas that was scarcely imaginable in the age of Jim Crow just a few decades earlier. But as they won local battles they also lost the larger war.

Working-class civil rights organizers thus failed in the end to democratize Texas and America. Their goals remain distant to this day. Yet they were themselves transformed by their experiences in the struggle. Most transitioned from near-complete political and economic exclusion to having a voice. Their collective story indicates that scholars have much to gain from studying organized labor, electoral politics, and the African American and ethnic Mexican civil rights movements simultaneously. Doing so not only adds to the emerging historical sub-field of black-brown relations but also makes each of the individual movements look different. It reconnects class to the black freedom struggle, militancy to the ethnic Mexican civil rights movement, organized labor to community activism, and all three movements to the creation of today's urban politics.

In the century and a half since Emancipation, slavery has remained a central topic at Somerset Place, a plantation-turned-state historic site in northeastern North Carolina, and programmers and audiences have thought about and interpreted it in many different ways. When North Carolina's Department of Archives and History first adopted the former plantation into its Historic Sites System in 1967, Somerset was dedicated to memorializing the planter, Josiah Collins III; the enslaved rarely made it into the site's narrative at all, and if they did it was as objects rather than subjects. In the final decades of the twentieth century, Somerset Place began to celebrate the lives of the 850 slaves who lived and worked at the plantation during the antebellum era, framing their history as a story about kinship, triumph and reconciliation. Both versions of the story--as well as the many other stories that the site has told since the end of slavery in 1865--require careful historical analysis and critique.

This dissertation considers Somerset's history and varying interpretations since the end of Reconstruction. It examines the gradual invention of Somerset Place State Historic Site in order to explore the nature and implications of representations of slavery, and the development of Americans' historical consciousness of slavery during their nation's long transition into freedom. It employs manuscript sources; oral histories and interviews; public documents, records and reports; and material artifacts in order to trace Somerset's gradual shift from a site of agricultural production to one of cultural representation, situated within North Carolina's developing public history programming and tourism industry. This research joins a rich body of literature that addresses southern history, epistemology, memory, and politics. It is comparative: it sets two centuries side by side, excavating literal cause-and-effect--the ways in which the events of the nineteenth century led to those of the twentieth--and their figurative relationship, the dialectical play between the ante- and post-bellum worlds. By examining the ways twentieth-century Americans employed the antebellum era as an intellectual and cultural category, this dissertation sheds light on slavery's diverse legacies and the complexity of living with collective historical traumas.