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After the Civil War, congressional Republicans used sweeping powers to expand and enforce civil rights for African Americans. Though the electoral benefits of African American suffrage were clear, Republicans had to overcome party divisions and racist voters. This paper argues that the war imbued Northern veterans with the belief that true victory required renewing the Union by abolishing slavery and establishing (imperfect) legal equality. This made veterans more receptive to Radical Reconstruction and ignited activism for it from below. Using difference-in-differences, I show that greater enlistment increased Republican vote share, particularly in pivotal postwar elections. Moreover, "as-if" random exposure to combat deaths increased Republican partisanship among soldiers after the war. Finally, I show that veterans became more likely to vote for African American suffrage. The paper concludes that Union veterans, through their votes and their activism, were a decisive part of the white coalition that backed America's "Second Revolution." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Chapter 2, "Black Time, Black Geography: The Free Southern Theater", Fleming focuses on The Free Southern Theater's inaugural year. Fleming reminds us to center Afro-presentism - on- and offstage - to unearth forms that confront Black patience and champion freedom for Black people now. In I Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation i , Julius B. Fleming Jr. theorizes the practice of making Black people wait for progress, full citizenship, and humanity. [Extracted from the article]

Nevertheless, Amanda Brown makes an important contribution to both fields with I The Fellowship Church i , a four-chapter intellectual history of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples and its remarkable founder, the African American theologian, mystic and social thinker Howard Thurman (1899-1981). Although other historians, notably Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt, have examined Thurman's Indian sojourn in detail, Brown might have expanded her analysis here to embed Thurman more thoroughly within this transnational history. Brown next returns to the US, where Thurman co-founded the Fellowship Church in San Francisco with the Presbyterian minister Alfred Fisk. [Extracted from the article]

The authors argue the Republican Party generally and congressional Republicans in particular were instrumental in advancing civil rights early in the period, and that their retreat from these issues in the late 1800s and early 1900s allowed new (or renewed) abuses of Black citizens to take root. First, it provides an accessible catalog of important reconstruction and civil rights legislation passed in the period from the start of the Civil War through the First World War. As the authors note, this allows us to imagine some of the "what ifs" or counterfactuals in the story of civil rights in the United States (p. 311). [Extracted from the article]

Discusses the relations between Jews and Afro-Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Views of Martin Luther King Jr. on the reactions of the Jews regarding the fight of Afro-Americans for civil rights equality; Examination on the nature of the relationship between Afro-Americans and Jews.

This article examines how Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement with which he is often synonymous are taught in UK schools, as well as the consequences of that teaching for twenty-first-century understandings of Britain's racial past and present. The UK's King-centric approach to teaching the civil rights movement has much in common with that in the US, including an inattention to its transnational coordinates. However, these shared (mis)representations have different histories, are deployed to different ends, and have different consequences. In the UK, study of the African American freedom struggle often happens in the absence of, and almost as a surrogate for, engagement with the histories of Britain's own racial minorities and imperial past. In short, emphasis on the apparent singularity of US race relations and the achievements of the mid-twentieth-century African American freedom struggle facilitates cultural amnesia regarding the historic and continuing significance of race and racism in the UK. In light of the Windrush scandal and the damning 2018 Royal Historical Society report on "Race, Ethnicity and Equality in UK History," this article argues both for better, more nuanced and more relevant teaching of King and the freedom struggle in British schools, and for much greater attention to black British history in its own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do stigmatized minorities advance agendas when confronted with hostile majorities? Elite theories of influence posit marginal groups exert little power. I propose the concept of agenda seeding to describe how activists use methods like disruption to capture the attention of media and overcome political asymmetries. Further, I hypothesize protest tactics influence how news organizations frame demands. Evaluating black-led protests between 1960 and 1972, I find nonviolent activism, particularly when met with state or vigilante repression, drove media coverage, framing, congressional speech, and public opinion on civil rights. Counties proximate to nonviolent protests saw presidential Democratic vote share increase 1.6–2.5%. Protester-initiated violence, by contrast, helped move news agendas, frames, elite discourse, and public concern toward "social control." In 1968, using rainfall as an instrument, I find violent protests likely caused a 1.5–7.9% shift among whites toward Republicans and tipped the election. Elites may dominate political communication but hold no monopoly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]