Dissertation Information for Larissa M. SmithNAME:
DEGREE:
DISCIPLINE:
SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: 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. |
MPACT Scores for Larissa M. SmithA = 0 Advisors and Advisees Graphgenerating graph, please reload |
Students under Larissa M. Smith
ADVISEES:
- None
COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None