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- All Subjects: Civil rights
- Creators: Miller, Keith
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ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the literate practices of women reading and writing in the press during the civil rights movement in the 1950s/60s. Through a textual analysis of literacy events (Heath) in the memoirs of Sarah Patton Boyle (The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in Time of Transition), Anne Braden (The Wall Between), Daisy Bates (The Long Shadow of Little Rock) and Melba Pattillo Beals (Warriors Don't Cry), this dissertation highlights the participatory roles women played in the movement, including their ability to act publicly in a movement remembered mostly for its male leaders. Contributing to scholarship focused on the literate lives of women, this study focuses on the uses of literacy in the lives of four women with particular emphasis on the women's experiences with the literacy they practice. Drawing on ideological views of literacy (Gee, Street) and research focused on the social, cultural and economic influences of such practices (Brandt), the women's memoirs served as the site for collecting and analyzing the women's responses and reactions to literacy events with the press. Through an application of Deborah Brandt's notion of sponsor, literacy events between the women and the press were recorded and the data analyzed to understand the relationship the women had with the literacy available and the role the sponsor (the press) played in shaping the practice and the literate identities of the women. Situated in the racist climate of the Jim Crow South in the 1950s/60s and the secondary role women played in the movement, the women's memoirs and the data analyzed revealed the role the women's perception of the practice, shaped by personal history and lived experiences, played in how the women experienced and used their literacy. This dissertation argues that their responses to literacy events and their perceptions of the power of their reading and writing highlight the significant public role women played in the movement and argues that, although the women remain relatively unremembered participants of the movement, their memoirs act as artifacts of that time and proof of the meaningful public contributions women made to the movement.
ContributorsAdams, Kelly R (Author) / Goggin, Peter (Thesis advisor) / Boyd, Patricia (Committee member) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
From 1962-1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was the target of an FBI surveillance campaign, led by then-director, J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI claimed that this campaign was necessary, to expose the communist influence within the civil rights movement, but this was a lie. I argue that, instead, the purpose of the surveillance was so that the Bureau could attempt to ruin Dr. King's reputation by collecting incriminating evidence about his personal life. I believe that the Bureau embarked on this campaign against Dr. King in order to maintain the United States' white supremacist racial hierarchy by neutralizing a prominent black activist. Further, I believe that today, there is the potential for the FBI to take. In order to argue this, I analyze different aspects of the Bureau's campaign against Dr. King. First, I discuss Hoover's fascination with and hatred of Dr. King. Throughout the six years this thesis focuses on, Hoover repeatedly took actions against King that went far beyond what was necessary or appropriate for an anti-Communism campaign. I argue that this is because Hoover's true goal was to damage King's reputation as much as possible, not discover if he was a communist. Second, I examine the Bureau's surveillance of Stanley Levison, one of King's closest aides. Levison was, for a time, a suspected communist. This gave the Bureau's campaign some initial legitimacy, and eventually led to the Bureau's official spy campaign against Dr. King. Next, I analyze the FBI's use of technological surveillance methods against King. The Bureau's patterns of microphone and wiretap use in their campaign against King further suggest that the intent of such actions was merely to gather information to injure King's reputation with the public. Fourth, I discuss the Bureau's use of informants to keep tabs on King's actions and plan. More specifically, I discuss Ernest Columbus Withers, a black photographer who served as an FBI informant. Finally, I argue that there is potential for the FBI to take similar actions against today's black activists. To make this point, I analyze the wording of an FBI memo made public last year. In this memo, the FBI warns of a domestic terror threat known as "Black Identity Extremists." I argue that the FBI's definition of these extremists is purposely vague, and could feasibly be applied to any black activist. Because of this, I believe there is potential for modern activists to be subjected to the same kind of harassment Dr. King endured in the 1960's. Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, and this thesis serves as a reminder that there are forces who would stifle the First Amendment to maintain the status quo.
ContributorsWilson, Bryan (Author) / Davis, T. J. (Thesis director) / Miller, Keith (Committee member) / Lauderdale, Pat (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12
Description
This study provides a rhetorical analysis of how Black nationalist protest rhetors have employed apocalyptic discourse in order to call into question the ideological underpinnings of the hegemonic white American nation building project and to imagine new alternatives to replace them. Previous studies by Howard-Pitney (2005), Harrell (2011), and Murphy (2009) have explored how African American abolitionist and civil rights jeremiahs such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. have employed appeals to American civil religion in order to mobilize their audiences to seek liberal reforms to racial injustices by appealing to established values and institutions. While apocalyptic rhetoric also constructs its audience as a chosen people, it tends to take a much more skeptical stance toward the established social order. African American apocalypticists such as David Walker, Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party rejected the notion of American chosenness that underpins much Black and white American jeremiadic speech, and employed a Burkean perspective by incongruity in order to draw attention to the inaccuracy of white supremacist and American exceptionalist representations of the social world. The end result of this history is the nation's imminent destruction, which has been envisioned as a divine intervention in the case of traditional sacred apocalyptics, such as David Walker or the early Malcolm X, or as a revolutionary uprising of the oppressed, as in the secular apocalyptics of the later Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party. African American apocalyptic rhetoric is prophetic in that it invokes a vision of the national past, present, and future defined by a set of values that are at odds with those of the established social order. African American apocalypticism invites its audience to disidentify themselves from hegemonic white American formulations of Black and white identities and to identify themselves instead with radical alternatives. To the extent that an audience is persuaded by apocalyptic narratives of the American nation, new possibilities for action become available to their consciousness, typically involving either withdrawal from a corrupt society or militant resistance involving measures more radical than the nonviolent direct action and moral suasion advocated by liberal African American jeremiahs.
ContributorsEstabrooks, Samuel (Author) / Miller, Keith (Thesis advisor) / Ore, Ersula (Committee member) / Anokye, Duku (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016