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Fannie Lou Hamer: The Unquenchable Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement
Janice Hamlet
Journal of Black Studies (1996) 26, p. 560 (15 pages)

This article is a brief biography of the life and work of Fannie Lou Hamer – one of the most influential women in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.

Race and the "I Have a Dream" Legacy: Exploring Predictors of Positive Civil Rights Attitudes
Antwan Jones
Journal of Black Studies (2006) 37, p. 193 (12 pages)

In this study, the author looks at the relationship between racial attitudes towards blacks and attitudes towards civil rights.

Class formations : Competing forms of black middle-class identity
Kesha S. Moore
Ethnicities 2008 8: 492 (27 pages)

This article uses the perspective that race and class stratification are interlocking systems, examining the importance of culture in understanding the relationships between a racialized class structure and identity.  Thus, the author presents a cogent account of the ways in which class shapes the articulation of black racial identity.

Moving Out but Not Up: Economic Outcomes in the Great Migration
Suzanne C. Eichenlaub, Stewart E. Tolnay and J. Trent Alexander
American Sociological Review 2010 75: 101 (27 pages)

Between 1910 and 1970 millions of Black southerners migrated out of the South, intent on garnering better work and life opportunities.  This article reviews a study of upward mobility using data from the US Census to compare migrants who left the South with their southern contemporaries who remained.  The study found that migrants who left the South did not benefit appreciably in terms of employment status, income, or occupational status.  These findings, according to the authors, demand a reconfiguration of the conventional wisdom that suggests migrants, particularly Blacks, found substantial opportunity and prosperity as a result of migration.

Black Community, Media, and Intellectual Paranoia-as-Politics
Anthony C. Cooke
Journal of Black Studies 2011 42: 609 (19 pages)

This article begins by discussing a particularly contested moment in Black history: the extreme disparity in federal funding of  the Apollo 11 moon launch and federal funding for civil rights issues, citing that “in the early 1960s, despite all the nonviolent protests and other activist measures, nothing in the way of education, employment, living conditions, or law enforcement–community relations altered for Blacks” (611).  Looking at literary, psychological, cultural, and scientific/technological perspectives, both historical and contemporary, the author explores the issue of “of the post–civil rights “death” of the utility of appeals for full enfranchisement from the federal government and its subsequent impact on Black community life and cultural production” (610).  These events led to the rise of sociocultural paranoia as a cultural and political survival tool among Blacks in America, according to the author.