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Dissertation Information for Larissa M. Smith

NAME:
- Larissa M. Smith

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (2001)

ADVISORS:
- Dan T. Carter

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Leroy Davis Jr
- Patricia Sullivan

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Where the South begins: Black politics and civil rights activism in Virginia, 1930--1951

Abstract: This study of Virginia provides a window onto the vitality of reform movements and civil rights activism during the 1930s and 1940s. The first chapter examines how, at the beginning of the twentieth century, white Virginians passed laws to segregate and disfranchise African Americans. African Americans forcefully resisted the imposition of these laws, but these efforts were sporadic and often unsuccessful. In the late 1920s, a series of legal challenges to residential segregation and to African Americans' exclusion from the white primary provided the impetus to organize NAACP branches in Virginia. The second chapter explores how the Great Depression and New Deal stimulated black activism in a variety of ways. Through organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC), African Americans challenged discrimination and sought to improve their local communities, while also linking up with national efforts to gain their citizenship rights. The third chapter focuses on how the SNYC and the NAACP organized local black communities. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, NAACP lawyers launched a litigation campaign challenging inequalities in segregated education that would profoundly shape the trajectory of civil rights activism in the state. In Virginia, the 1930s was the significant decade for building a network of activists that would sustain civil rights protest into the 1960s.

With the "Double V" campaign during World War II, African Americans vowed to fight racism at home, while also fighting racism abroad. The fourth chapter investigates how in Virginia, NAACP activists focused on increasing the black vote. NAACP lawyers expanded the litigation campaign to include challenges to segregation in public transportation. After the war, this statewide network of activists intersected with the biracial, regional movement to salvage the reform efforts of the New Deal. The fifth chapter explores how, in Virginia, black and white activists challenged the power of the Democratic political machine of Senator Harry F. Byrd. The sixth chapter focuses on how the rapidly changing political context of the late 1940s altered the shape of civil rights activism in Virginia.

MPACT Scores for Larissa M. Smith

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-02-03 00:14:06

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Students under Larissa M. Smith

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None