"The Civil Rights Movement of the 1990s?": The anti-abortion movement and the struggle for racial justice

In 1964, Claude and Jeanne Nolen, who were white, joined an interracial NAACP team intent on desegregating local restaurants in Austin, Texas as a test of the recently passed Civil Rights ACt. Twenty-five years later, the Nolens pleaded "no contest" in a courtroom for their continued social activism. This time the issue was not racial segregation, but rather criminal trespassing for blockading abortion clinics with Operation Rescue. The Nolens served prison sentences for direct action protests that they believe stemmed from the same commitment to Christianity and social justice as the civil rights movements.Despite its relationship to political and cultural conservatism, the anti-abortion movement since Roe v. Wade (1973) was also a product of the progressive social movements of the turbulent sixties. Utilizing oral history interviews and organizational literature, the article explores the historical context of the anti-abortion movement, specifically how the lengthy struggle for racial justice shaped the rhetoric, tactics, and ideology of the anti-abortion activists. Even after political conservatives dominated the movement in the 1980s, the successes and failures of the sixties provided a cultural lens through which grassroots anti-abortion activists forged what was arguably the largest movement of civil disobedience in American history.     

(Why) Did Reconstruction Fail? Legislating and Constitutionalizing Civil Rights

Abstract

The Thirty-ninth Congress, which was elected in November 1864 and began its first session in December 1865, undertook three tasks: to restore the Union after the Civil War, to amend the Constitution to ensure citizenship to the freedmen, and to legislate federal guarantees for their civil rights. Considering the political constraints of their situation—a hostile President and intransigence in many of the states of the former Confederacy—this essay aims to catalogue and assess the achievements of that Congress. While the Fourteenth Amendment in the long run served its intended purpose and the Civil Rights and Reconstruction Acts secured for a while the integration of the freedmen into the polity, Reconstruction failed to win widespread consent and proved impossible, at least politically, to continuously enforce.     

S. Weir Mitchell’s Prose and Poetry on the American Civil War

The prose and poetry of S. Weir Mitchell (1829–1914) – related to the American Civil War – encompass a very significant portion of his non-medical writings. The Civil War, more than any other single event, shaped his future career as one of the founders of American neurology. Indeed, it should not be surprising how the war was also such a driving force in his non-medical writings. His novels, once widely read, now are scarcely noted. His accounts of the social, political and economic events of the Civil War are of historical interest to students of the period. Neuroscientists as a group, like others, are apt to be unfamiliar with these writings, with the possible exception of “The Case of George Dedlow.” A major purpose of this essay is to introduce readers, especially neuroscientists, to Weir Mitchell’s fictional works in which neurological cases so often appear. One appreciates more the medical aspects of his novels, written as they were by a first-hand observer. His non-medical writings, poetry and prose, are to a large extent timeless and can be appreciated by today’s readers.     

“Charcoal scribblings of the most rascally character”: conflict,identity, and testimony in American Civil War graffiti

Civil War soldiers’ graffiti survive at more than 60 sites, predominantly in Virginia, including churches, court houses, caves, and houses. Although often terse and fragmentary, they provide an intriguing insight into soldiers’ experiences. This essay offers a tentative framework for analyzing how the graffiti functioned: as informal commemoration of wartime experiences; as a social activity, displaying the loyalties, frustrations, and humor of army life; and as an invasive act, vandalizing southern property.     

“Stuck In-Between”: Placing the Underdocumented Youth Movement in Georgia

This paper draws on participant-observation and a series of focus group interviews with TPS and DACA youth in Northeast Georgia to understand youth activism emerging from their positionality of being “stuck in-between”. “Stuck in-between” captures the liminal legal status of DACA and TPS, denotes the feeling of “stuckness” in mixed-status multigenerational families, and foregrounds the profound ways in which place and race intersect with legal, social, and ideological practices of inclusion/exclusion. Underdocumented youth form multiracial coalitions, guided by Black geographies of the region, to challenge imperial borders that criminalise and (re)produce categories of vulnerability. This place in-between shapes underdocumented youth understanding of the world, informed by, rather than in competition with, Black radical visions of themselves and of the place of the US South.