Sabotage

A term borrowed from French syndicalists by American labor organizations at the turn of the century, sabotage means the hampering of productivity and efficiency of a factory, company, or organization by internal operatives. Often sabotage involves the destruction of property or machines by the workers who use them. In the United States, sabotage was seen first as a direct-action tactic for labor radicals against oppressive employers

Church Burnings

On 15 September 1963 a bomb exploded in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. The ensuing fire and death of four little girls placed the violence of white supremacy on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers. It also entered the 16th Street Church into a long history of attacks against houses of worship in the American South. Though churches burn for any number of reasons, including accident and insurance fraud, church arson in southern culture has frequently been associated with a symbolic assault on a community’s core institution

‘Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall of the National Afro-American Council,’ by Benjamin R. Justesen

The dominance of Booker T. Washington and the loyalty of most African Americans to the Republican Party are often mistaken as markers of black political unanimity at the turn of the twentieth century. Even worse, they are assumed to stand for the whole of African American political life. Benjamin R. Justesen’s story of the struggles to establish and sustain the National Afro-American Council should serve as an important reminder of the tensions, diversity, and energy within black politics in this period. The reminder is so important, and so potential productive, that one wishes that Broken Brotherhood: The Rise and Fall of the National Afro-American Council were a more broadly imagined work

It Was Still No South to Us : African American Civil Servants at the Fin de Siècle

If Washingtonians know anything about black civil servants of the early twentieth century, it is that they faced discrimination under President Woodrow Wilson. Beginning in 1913, Wilson’s Democratic administration dismantled a biracial, Republican-led coalition that had struggled since Reconstruction to make government offices places of racial egalitarianism. During Wilson\u27s presidency, federal officials imposed segregation (actually exclusion), rearranged the political patronage system, and undercut black ambition. The Wilson administration\u27s policies were a disaster for black civil servants, who responded with one of the first national civil rights campaigns in U.S. history. But to fully grapple with the meaning of federal segregation, we need a richer understanding of life a richer understanding of life and work in black Washington before Wilson

Racism in the Nation\u27s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson\u27s America

Between the 1880s and 1910s, thousands of African Americans passed civil service exams and became employed in the executive offices of the federal government. However, by 1920, promotions to well-paying federal jobs had nearly vanished for black workers. Eric S. Yellin argues that the Wilson administration\u27s successful 1913 drive to segregate the federal government was a pivotal episode in the age of progressive politics. Yellin investigates how the enactment of this policy, based on Progressives\u27 demands for whiteness in government, imposed a color line on American opportunity and implicated Washington in the economic limitation of African Americans for decades to come. Using vivid accounts of the struggles and protests of African American government employees, Yellin reveals the racism at the heart of the era\u27s reform politics. He illuminates the nineteenth-century world of black professional labor and social mobility in Washington, D.C., and uncovers the Wilson administration\u27s progressive justifications for unraveling that world. From the hopeful days following emancipation to the white-supremacist normalcy of the 1920s, Yellin traces the competing political ideas, politicians, and ordinary government workers who created federal segregation.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1059/thumbnail.jp

\u27The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America\u27s First Black Dynasty,\u27 by Lawrence Otis Graham

Lawrence Otis Graham attempts to tell the important story of the Bruces and their legacy in The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty. Starting his story before the Civil War, Graham follows the “First Black Dynasty” through its ultimate fall from grace in mid-twentieth-century New York City. As with his previous bestseller, Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class (1999), Graham takes on the ambitious task of capturing the meaning and importance of an underappreciated group of American’s

Operation Rescue

Operation Rescue, founded in 1986, became known as one of the most militant groups opposing a woman’s right to abortion as established in the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe vs. Wade

Teapot Dome Oil Scandal

In October 1929, Albert B. Fall, the former Secretary of the Interior under President Warren G. Harding, was convicted of accepting bribes in the leasing of U.S. Naval Oil Reserves in Elk Hills, California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming

Delaney Amendment

In 1958, U.S. Representative James Delaney of New York added a proviso to the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act declaring that the Food and Drug Administration cannot approve any food additive found to induce cancer in a person or animal

Riots

Though they usually involve spontaneous, wanton violence or disorder by an anonymous crowd, riots have also served as a noteworthy form of social protest in American history. While the American Revolution made popular revolt a “quasi-legitimate” aspect of American culture, the ideals of democracy privilege debate and representation over mob rule. Nevertheless, Americans have frequently brought disorder to the nation’s streets to express opinions and demands. Crowds have sought to limit the rights of others as often as they have demanded equal rights. Riots are not by definition part of organized rebellions, but they sometimes occur when public demonstrations turn to physical violence