Table of Contents
1 Postwar Prelude: 1945-1949 1
2 America Becomes the World's Policeman: 1950 45
3 The Cold War Settles In: 1951 91
4 "I Like Ike": 1952 129
5 New Leadership in Washington and Moscow: 1953 174
6 Separate Is Not Equal: 1954 206
7 Disneyland and Cold War Angst: 1955 242
8 Ike and Elvis, Budapest and Suez: 1956 277
9 Sputnik and Little Rock: 1957 312
10 America Enters Outer Space: 1958 348
11 America Expands into the Pacific: 1959 382
Epilogue: Final Thoughts on the Decade 414

In treating the complexities of an often stereotyped era that encompassed both American optimism and the Cold War's birth, writers affiliated with Lynchburg College, VA, survey postwar trends that influenced later decades: e.g., consumerism, family togetherness values, the emerging civil rights movement, and abstract expressionism.

Written for high school level, but has useful information.

Well organized and easy to navigate. Individual chapters on World Events, Arts, Business and the Economy, Education, Fashion, Government and Politics, Law, Lifestyles and Social Trends, Media, Medicine and Health, Religion, Science and Technology, and Sports.

From the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the Montgomery bus boycott, and the inventions of color TV and the birth control pill, the 1940s and 1950s were a time of tumultuous change in the United States. Kaledin, a scholar of American studies (affiliation not cited), presents a collection of connected essays about the details of people's lives during two very different decades. Includes 25 pages of photos. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Arranged chronologically. Addresses significant people, events and trends for each year of the decade. Highly pictorial.

Encyclopedia

The set is meant to be "comprehensive coverage of the history of African Americans in the U.S., from the arrival of the first African immigrants in British North America in 1619 through the first years of the twenty-first century." Emphasis is on rights issues (56 articles on civil rights, 26 on voting rights, 71 on Supreme Court decisions). There are no biographies among the A-Z articles; instead, brief profiles are collected in the last volume under "Notable Figures in African American History." Also in the last volume are a categorized bibliography, a list of entries by broad topic, a "Personages Index," and a subject index.
Susan Gooden
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved (Excerpted from "Booklist")

See:
Part VI - The Black Revolution (p. 510)
Chapter 21 - The Freedom Movement, 1954 1965 (p. 512)

See chapter:
Rise!: a people emergent, 1940-1968

Gates takes us from the sixteenth century through the ordeal of slavery, from the Civil War and Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era and the Great Migration; from the civil rights and black nationalist movements through the age of hip-hop to the Joshua generation. By documenting and illuminating the sheer diversity of African American involvement in American history, society, politics, and culture, Gates bracingly disabuses us of the presumption of a single “black experience.” (Publisher)

Two chapters on Chicago - p.59 and p.223.

Booklist Review: Using the well-traveled route from Clarksdale, Mississippi, to Chicago, Illinois, Lemann describes the progress of blacks from the rural South to the promise of a new life in the urban North in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The author focuses on the experiences of individuals in his study, but he also expresses larger matters of more social, historical, and economic concern as he shows how the dreams of escaping from poverty and racism soon soured as hardship and prejudice reasserted themselves at the immigrants' new destination. The book's chapters on the conditions in Chicago in the post-World War II years potently illustrate the challenges these people faced as they became mired in political battles, institutional neglect, and the welfare spiral. The efforts to address--or often to confine--these problems are also analyzed as the writer describes why the war on poverty did not succeed and why the civil rights movement yielded only partial victories in trying to win improvements. While Lemann's interviews establish the human drama of this process, his assessment of the consequences of this great movement both for African Americans and for the entire country raises substantial questions of justice and equality that cut to the heart of the social situation of the impoverished and oppressed today. Notes. ~--John Brosnahan

This book chronicles significant events, figures, and movements in the lives of African Americans from 1492 to 1992. ...The work is arranged by year; under each date events are listed across the page under such categories as Education; Laws and Legal Actions; Religion; Arts; Science, Technology, and Medicine; and Sports. Nonblack persons are identified by an asterisk except when their racial or ethnic designation is obvious. A few black-and-white portraits of prominent African Americans illustrate the volume. The detailed index notes not only the page number but also the column under which topics are found. (Booklist)

"...an extensive collection of primary and secondary documents of the American Civil Rights movement. These documents are complemented by analytical and interpretive essays by the editor, setting these documents in their historical, social, and political context."

Provides a detailed discussion of the racism that accompanied slavery in America and thereafter consigned African-Americans to an inferior position
Addresses the actions of racists, liberals, and reformers and radicals
Discusses local reformers who laboured for years to get the movement off the ground
Provides documents covering the most important aspects of the modern civil rights movement
Contains Maps and Photographs, as well as a Glossary, Chronology, a Who's Who list of key figures, and a Guide to Further Reading.
-From the back cover.

"Covering all the momentous events that helped push forward America's Civil Rights policies-from Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.-this is the first fully illustrated chronicle of the complete history of the African-American civil rights struggle." Publisher

"Eyes on the Prize traces the movement from the landmark Brown v. the Board of Education case in 1954 to the march on Selma and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. This is a companion volume to the first part of the acclaimed PBS series." Publisher

"...a collection of over 100 court decisions, speeches, interviews, and other documents on the civil rights movement from 1954 to 1990. Included in the collection are the Brown v. Board of Education decision of the Supreme Court that declared legally segregated schools to be unconstitutional, Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham City Jail," Harold Washington's inaugural speech after being elected mayor of Chicago, and the speech delivered by Nelson Mandela in Atlanta in June 1990." Library Journal

"Freedom's Daughters includes portraits of more than sixty women -- many until now forgotten and some never before written about -- from the key figures (Ida B. Wells, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ella Baker, and Septima Clark, among others) to some of the smaller players who represent the hundreds of women who each came forth to do her own small part and who together ultimately formed the mass movements that made the difference. Freedom's Daughters puts a human face on the civil rights struggle -- and shows that that face was often female." Publisher

"Morris tells the complete story behind the ten years that transformed America, tracing the essential role of the black community organizations that was the real power behind the civil rights movement. Drawing on interviews with more than fifty key leaders, original documents, and other moving firsthand material, he brings to life the people behind the scenes who led the fight to end segregation, providing a critical new understanding of the dynamics of social change." From the Boston Globe.

History of life under "Jim Crow" laws.

Covers the chain of events that led to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Historic footage.

See the appendix for useful charts:
-Comparison of Occupational Pyramids of Negro and White Employees in Midwest Metropolis, 1940 and 1950. p.811
-Distribution of Negro Population by Family Income Level, 1950 and 1956. p.816
-Expansion of Negro Residential Areas in Chicago: 1950-1958. p.817
-Negro Residential Areas in Relation to Incidents of Racial Violence in Chicago: 1956-1957. p.818.
-Major Ethnic and Racial Concentrations in Chicago: 1957. p.821.

Oral histories with Chicagoans from Lena's (Mama's) generation.

A collection of interviews with African Americans who came to Chicago from the South. In their first great migration to Chicago that began during World War I,

Oral histories with Chicagoans from Walter Lee's generation.
This is a collection of interviews with black Chicagoans affected by the great migration of southern blacks to the North during World War II.

Look up "Hansberry" in the index.
Following on the heels of the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Renaissance was a resonant flourishing of African American arts, literature, theatre, music, and intellectualism, from 1930 to 1955.

See chapter 4, "The Great Northern Drive." The newspaper played a significant role in the Great Migration. Its editorials convinced many African-American southerners to relocate to Chicago and other northern cities for better living conditions and civil rights.

See section on 1950's.

From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.

Social scientist Grimshaw (Illinois Institute of Technology), who served as political and policy adviser to the late Mayor Harold Washington and played a leading role in numerous antimachine political campaigns, presents an account of the long and tangled relationship between the black community and the Chicago Democratic machine from its Great Depression origins to the present. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Look up "South Side," "Bronzeville," and "Washington Park" in index.

Look up Lee v. Hansberry in the index.

The whole book is useful, but see chapter 3 for rich information about Lorraine Hansberry and her family's experience with housing covenants.

Photographic historical study of the African American community in Chicago.

Pre-dates the 1950's by 7-8 years, but gives a good visual idea of Chicago's south-side leading up to the period of the play.

Another good photo-essay of Chicago's south-side. Dates form the late 1940's but it shows what the south-side was like just 2-4 years prior to 1950.

See chapter 8, "Local Tactics."

Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago-and cities across the nation The "promised land" for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation's worst ghettos and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.'s first campaign beyond the South.

See Chapter 6, "Divided we stand: white unity and the color line at midcentury."
Look up "covenants" and "Lee v. Hansberry" in the index.

See Chapter 3, "Shelley vs. Kraemer and the Rise of Blockbusting 1940-1959.

See Essay 1. Pregnancy and Power before Roe vs Wade 1950-1970.
See Essay 8. African-American women and abortion.

Abortion Wars, edited by historian Rickie Solinger, is a collection of 18 essays, all written by abortion-rights supporters. Ranging from physicians who provide abortions to journalists who scrutinize the current political and social trends regarding the issue, these essays present a variety of experiences and opinions across the pro-choice spectrum. Readers who thought the legality of abortion was settled once and for all by the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision might want to think again after reading William Saletan's essay about the ramifications of the Court's ruling in Pennsylvania v. Casey. Those interested in what it's like to be on the frontlines of the abortion war will find the essays by doctors illuminating.

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"This book provides a stimulating account of the dominant cultural forms of 1950s America: fiction and poetry; theatre and performance; film and television; music and radio; and the visual arts. ...the book examines the way in which modernism and the cold war offer two frames of reference for understanding the trajectory of postwar culture."
From Amazon description.

1950's back-issues available through Google Books. Excellent source for current events and cultural reporting. Great picture source.

Another publication from black-owned Johnson Publishing Co. Bigger format than Jet and more along the model of Life Magazine. Google Books only has it back to 1959, but still may be useful for late 1950s transition into early 1960's culture. Note, the May 1960 issue features Claudia McNeil on the cover for her role as Lena Younger (Mama).

1950's back-issues available through Google Books. Jet is a perfect resource for a national overview of popular culture, arts and politics from the perspective of a 100% black owned publication (Johnson Publishing Co.). It is also published in Chicago and includes Chicago news and commentary.

Also available in print through the library catalog

Marling captures a visual culture reflecting and reflected in the new medium of television in the 1950s. She looks at instances in which the principles of design dominated the public arena, such as Mamie Eisenhower's new look, Disneyland, America's love affair with the car, Betty Crocker's cook book, and Nixon in Moscow. Includes b&w photos. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

See the section entitled "Rise! (1940-1968)" on the 2nd disc.

This is available for streaming on Kanopy and Amazon Prime

"Explore with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the evolution of the African-American people, as well as the multiplicity of cultural institutions, political strategies, and religious and social perspectives they developed forging their own history, culture and society against unimaginable odds." From publisher.

Blu-Ray available for check out.

Item is available for streaming on Netflix and Kanopy
This item is also available as a book

Making Black History takes an expansive view of the historical enterprise, covering not just the production of black history but also its circulation, reception, and performance.

This volume's contributors expand the chronology and geography of the black freedom struggle beyond the traditional emphasis on the Jim Crow South and the years between 1954 and 1968. Beginning as far back as the nineteenth century, and analyzing case studies from southern, northern, and border states, the essays in The Seedtime, the Work, and the Harvest incorporate communities and topics not usually linked to the African American civil rights movement.

This moving homage to black life and culture and its sharp economic and historical critique are more important than ever, resonating with today's unequivocal demand that Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first century.

American political thought has been shaped by those who fought back against social inequality, economic exclusion, the denial of political representation, and slavery, the country's original sin. Yet too often the voices of African American resistance have been neglected, silenced, or forgotten. In this timely book, Alex Zamalin considers key moments of resistance to demonstrate its current and future necessity.

Seeing through Race is a boldly original reinterpretation of the iconic photographs of the black civil rights struggle.

Illustrated overview of the Civil Rights Movement

In civil-rights-era Chicago, a dedicated group of black activists, educators, and organizations employed black public history as more than cultural activism. Their work and vision energized a black public history movement that promoted political progress in the crucial time between World War II and the onset of the Cold War.

Six months after the Selma to Montgomery marches and just weeks after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a group from Martin Luther King Jr.'s staff arrived in Chicago, eager to apply his nonviolent approach to social change in a northern city.

See Disc 1
-- "Awakenings, 1954-1956" - Emmett Till; Rosa Parks; Martin Luther King, Jr.; school segregation.
-- "Fighting back, 1957-1962" - Little Rock, Arkansas; James Meredith.

Available for free streaming via Kanopy

Raised on the city s South Side and employed for a time in the stockyards, Pacyga gives voice to the city s steelyard workers and kill floor operators, and maps the neighborhoods distinguished not by Louis Sullivan masterworks, but by bungalows and corner taverns. Filled with the city s one-of-a-kind characters and all of its defining moments, Chicago: A Biography is as big and boisterous as its namesake and as ambitious as the men and women who built it.

Chicago Whispers illuminates a colorful and vibrant record of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people who lived and loved in Chicago from the city's beginnings in the 1670s as a fur-trading post to the end of the 1960s. Journalist St. Sukie de la Croix, drawing on years of archival research and personal interviews, reclaims Chicago's LGBT past that had been forgotten, suppressed, or overlooked. Included here are Jane Addams, the pioneer of American social work; blues legend Ma Rainey, who recorded “Sissy Blues” in Chicago in 1926; commercial artist J. C. Leyendecker, who used his lover as the model for “The Arrow Collar Man” advertisements; and celebrated playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun. Here, too, are accounts of vice dens during the Civil War and classy gentlemen's clubs; the wild and gaudy First Ward Ball that was held annually from 1896 to 1908; gender-crossing performers in cabarets and at carnival sideshows; rights activists like Henry Gerber in the 1920s; authors of lesbian pulp novels and publishers of “physique magazines”; and evidence of thousands of nameless queer Chicagoans who worked as artists and musicians, in the factories, offices, and shops, at theaters and in hotels. Chicago Whispers offers a diverse collection of alternately hip and heart-wrenching accounts that crackle with vitality.

Known variously as “‘the Windy City,”'“‘the City of Big Shoulders,”'or “‘Chi-Raq,”'Chicago is one of the most widely celebrated, routinely demonized, and thoroughly contested cities in the world.Chicago is the city of Gwendolyn Brooks and Chief Keef, Al Capone and Richard Wright, Lucy Parsons and Nelson Algren, Harold Washington and Studs Terkel. It is the city of Fred Hampton, House Music, and the Haymarket Martyrs. Writing in the tradition of Howard Zinn, Kevin Coval's A People's History of Chicago celebrates the history of this great American city from the perspective of those on the margins, whose stories often go untold. These seventy-seven poems (for the city's seventy-seven neighborhoods) honor the everyday lives and enduring resistance of the city's workers, poor people, and people of color, whose cultural and political revolutions continue to shape the social landscape.

SEE ALSO: ELECTRONIC BOOK VERSION

During World War I nearly half a million black Americans abandoned their homes in the South and streamed into northern industrial centers. One million more would follow in the 1920s. Placing this "Great Migration" within the context of labor, urban, and Afro- American history, Grossman (history, U. of Chicago) analyzes how and why black southerners uprooted themselves and how they subsequently adapted their way of life to an urban, industrial environment. This study is a revision of the author's thesis.

From Smithsonian magazine September 2016.

A wonderfully concise article that highlights central themes from Wilkerson's book on the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns. It discusses the challenges Lorraine Hansberry's family experienced living in the all-white Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago. [The Warmth of Other Suns is also available in the library - E 185.6 W685 2010, Class Reserve (Overnight)]

In the 1920s, the South Side was looked on as the new Black Metropolis, but by the turn of the decade that vision was already in decline—a victim of the Depression. In this timely book, Christopher Robert Reed explores early Depression-era politics on Chicago's South Side. The economic crisis caused diverse responses from groups in the black community, distinguished by their political ideologies and stated goals. Some favored government intervention, others reform of social services. Some found expression in mass street demonstrations, militant advocacy of expanded civil rights, or revolutionary calls for a complete overhaul of the capitalist economic system. Reed examines the complex interactions among these various groups as they played out within the community as it sought to find common ground to address the economic stresses that threatened to tear the Black Metropolis apart.

Mary Helen Washington recovers the vital role of 1950s leftist politics in the works and lives of modern African American writers and artists. While most histories of McCarthyism focus on the devastation of the blacklist and the intersection of leftist politics and American culture, few include the activities of radical writers and artists from the Black Popular Front. Washington's work incorporates these black intellectuals back into our understanding of mid-twentieth-century African American literature and art and expands our understanding of the creative ferment energizing all of America during this period.Mary Helen Washington reads four representative writers—Lloyd Brown, Frank London Brown, Alice Childress, and Gwendolyn Brooks—and surveys the work of the visual artist Charles White. She traces resonances of leftist ideas and activism in their artistic achievements and follows their balanced critique of the mainstream liberal and conservative political and literary spheres. Her study recounts the targeting of African American as well as white writers during the McCarthy era, reconstructs the events of the 1959 Black Writers'Conference in New York, and argues for the ongoing influence of the Black Popular Front decades after it folded. Defining the contours of a distinctly black modernism and its far-ranging radicalization of American politics and culture, Washington fundamentally reorients scholarship on African American and Cold War literature and life.

In this important volume, an eminent team of scholars and activists offer an alternative assessment of the Chicago Freedom Movement's impact on race relations and social justice, both in the city and across the nation. Building upon recent works, the contributors reexamine the movement and illuminate its lasting contributions in order to challenge conventional perceptions that have underestimated its impressive legacy.

See chapter 5, "Driving a Wedge of Opportunity: Black Suburbanization in the North and West, 1940–1960."

...as this pioneering work demonstrates, the suburbs have provided a home to black residents in increasing numbers for the past hundred years—in the last two decades alone, the numbers have nearly doubled to just under twelve million. Places of Their Own begins a hundred years ago, painting an austere portrait of the conditions that early black residents found in isolated, poor suburbs. Andrew Wiese insists, however, that they moved there by choice, withstanding racism and poverty through efforts to shape the landscape to their own needs. Turning then to the 1950s, Wiese illuminates key differences between black suburbanization in the North and South. He considers how African Americans in the South bargained for separate areas where they could develop their own neighborhoods, while many of their northern counterparts transgressed racial boundaries, settling in historically white communities. Ultimately, Wiese explores how the civil rights movement emboldened black families to purchase homes in the suburbs with increased vigor, and how the passage of civil rights legislation helped pave the way for today's black middle class.

SEE ALSO: ELECTRONIC VERSION

See:
Chapter 5: The Calculus of Covenants
Chapter 6: Emergence of the Norm Breakers.
Look up "Hansberry" in the index.

The early 1900s saw an unprecedented migration of African Americans leaving the rural South in search of better work and equal citizenship. In reaction, many white communities instituted property agreements—covenants—designed to limit ownership and residency according to race. Restrictive covenants quickly became a powerful legal guarantor of segregation, their authority facing serious challenge only in 1948, when the Supreme Court declared them legally unenforceable in Shelley v. Kraemer. Although the ruling was a shock to courts that had upheld covenants for decades, it failed to end their influence. In this incisive study, Richard Brooks and Carol Rose unpack why. From publisher.

SEE ALSO: ELECTRONIC BOOK VERSION

"Examines the entire period during which abortion was illegal in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and ending with Roe v. Wade in 1973." Publisher.