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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
First held in Providence, Rhode Island, in October 1993, Extreme Games were promoted by the sports cable company ESPN to highlight rising sports (many of them noted for their danger) that networks had previously neglected. Featuring such sports as street luge, skateboarding, skiboarding, bungy jumping, downhill in-line skating, skysurfing, wakeboarding and bicycle stunts, they emphasize daredevil acts rather than races against time. Planned as biannual events, the first games were so successful (watched by over 220 million domestic viewers and carried in over 150 countries) that organizers decided to hold the games every year. The US Post Office offered a 1999 stamp series honoring them.
Industry:Culture
First officially used in 1961 by President John Kennedy, who issued an executive order requiring employers who had contracts with the federal government to take “affirmative action” to ensure they did not discriminate against African Americans. Simultaneously with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in employment, President Lyndon Johnson, by executive orders, extended affirmative action to other minorities and required federal contractors to actively recruit and set longterm goals to increase minority employment. By the late 1970s, the concept had expanded to cover women, and its scope embraced all levels of public employment, educational institutions and many private businesses.
Initially, it was widely accepted as a natural concomitant to the Civil Rights movement and the War on Poverty. It was viewed as an effective remedy to compensate for the accumulated impact of past discrimination as a means to apportion equitably government employment and publicly financed education, and as a method to endure racially, ethnically and multiculturally diverse student populations. It was also an instrument to insure that the racial and ethnic composition and life experiences of urban public employees, especially police officers and fire fighters, more closely mirrored the increasingly minority communities they served.
Affirmative action quickly became an extremely controversial national lightning rod for racial and social tensions. The conservative electorate responsible for the Reagan presidency, criticism spearheaded by a small group of black conservatives such as Clarence Thomas and increased competition for ever scarcer government employment and places at elite public universities coalesced in opposition. Affirmative action was labeled “reverse discrimination,” “racial preference programs” and “discriminatory quota systems.” In upholding the general principle of affirmative action in Bakke v. University of California (1978), the Supreme Court ruled that race could be considered along with other factors in university admissions, but fixed racial quotas could not be utilized. In Fullilove v. Klutnick (1980), the Court upheld the requirement that ten percent of federal funds for public works be allotted to qualified minority contractors. But, in 1989, the Court outlawed the use of similar set-aside programs by states unless precise evidence of racial discrimina tion existed. Finally, in 1995, the Rehnquist Court limited federal setaside programs to those justified by a “compelling government interest.” Anti-affirmative action sentiment solidified in successful referenda in California and Washington. Immediately, there were drastic declines in the number of African Americans and Latinos at the prestigious campuses of the California state system.
While many voluntary private sector employment and university admissions programs remain intact, affirmative action, a crucial factor in raising minority educational levels and middle-class membership, is rapidly becoming a victim of the changing social agenda of a conservative era.
Industry:Culture
First organized by CORE in 1961, integrated groups would travel on Greyhound buses from Washington, DC down through Alabama and Mississippi, and would refuse to conform to the segregationist practices in the bus stations regarding washroom facilities.
Such practices had been outlawed for terminal accommodations associated with interstate travel by the Supreme Court in the 1960 decision of Boynton v. Virginia.
After one bus was fire bombed in Anniston, and another was attacked in Birmingham, students fresh from the lunch-counter sit-ins joined the rides and insisted that they continue, against the opposition of Attorney-General Robert Kennedy. Kennedy agreed to protect the riders with National Guardsmen, but many were arrested on arrival in Jackson, Mississippi.
Industry:Culture
Folk medicine is usually defined as those medical beliefs and practices that come from “indigenous” cultures (for example, Native Americans), or treatments and therapies learned from parents and grandparents in the guise of home remedies. Herbalists offer plant medicines often thought to be milder and safer than chemical pharmaceuticals. The increasing interest in folk medicine and medicinal herbs and plants (phytopharmaceuticals) represents not only widespread displeasure with “biomedicine” in the United States, but also a heightened concern over the health consequences of life in a modern, technological society. Folk medicine and herbalists are seen as medical practices that reproduce healing processes found in nature.
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Following Fidel Castro’s efforts to nationalize American property in Cuba, President Eisenhower determined that he would have to be removed, and ordered the CIA to start training Cuban exiles in Honduras in preparation for an invasion. Before this plan could be carried out, Eisenhower’s presidency ended and Kennedy was inaugurated. After being briefed by Eisenhower, Kennedy decided to move forward with the plan.
Backed by American air cover, the Cuban exiles were to land at the Bay of Pigs, and then quickly foment an uprising against Castro. However, Kennedy recalled the American aircraft at the last minute, leaving the invaders exposed, who, because the Bay of Pigs was a secluded section of the island away from major population centers, were either captured or killed without making any impact on the Cuban people.
The significance of the invasion was great. Embarrassed by its failure to act, the Kennedy administration forthwith felt that it could not afford any similar misfortunes in international affairs, leading to almost catastrophic results in the ensuing Cuban missile crisis, and setting the stage for the quagmire in Vietnam.
Industry:Culture
Following the Gulf War in 1991, many veterans experienced unexplained neurological conditions. Initially veterans and their advocates in the media and Congress claimed this “syndrome” was caused by chemical warfare by Saddam Hussein, by widespread oil fires, or by radiation from US weapons. A number of “blue-ribbon panels” set up by the US Government each came back with reports that contradicted most of the veterans’ claims. The most controversial of these, the Presidential Advisory Committee, suggested that stress was the most likely cause, thereby linking complaints to the older wartime “shell shock.” Nevertheless, the Pentagon has developed an anthrax vaccine for all military personnel, suggesting that fears about biochemical warfare have been heightened by this activism. Ironically many National Guard personnel and Reservists have opted not to take the vaccine, citing distrust of the Pentagon’s handling of claims about the Gulf War.
Industry:Culture
Following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, Congress began to enact legislation to protect the civil and voting rights of African Americans.
The first piece of such legislation to be enacted since Reconstruction was the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which made it a federal crime to interfere with a citizen’s right to vote. It also established the Civil Rights Commission to investigate any violations of the new law. In 1964 in the aftermath of the March on Washington and the assassination of President Kennedy, Johnson passed a more far-reaching civil-rights bill designed to end discrimination in employment “based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” “Sex” was added by Southern opponents of the bill in the hopes of killing it, but to their chagrin it was passed anyway The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was established at this time to enforce the Act.
To bolster the 1957 law protecting voting rights the 24th Amendment was ratified in 1964, banning the levying of poll taxes in federal elections. Johnson followed this up with a Voting Rights Act in the next year, after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, which had dramatized the voting issue. Banning poll taxes and literacy tests, the Act authorized the Attorney-General to send federal examiners to register black voters whenever necessary. Within a year a quarter of a million new black voters had been registered. The Voting Rights Act was readopted and strengthened in 1970, 1975 and 1982.
In 1991, in the face of several reverses and a weakening of the civil-rights laws at the hands of Reagan and Bush Supreme Court appointees, Democrats deemed it essential to enact another civil-rights bill, which would make the language relating to discrimination more explicit. More recently, gays and lesbians have been advocating for extension of civil-rights law to include sexual preference, while in 2000 laws protecting against age discrimination have been under assault.
Industry:Culture
Food defined by speed of service, responding to the needs of a population on the go—by automobile, between errands, or in fragmented family visits. Food combinations stressing meat, carbohydrates and sugar provide rapid satisfaction (with attendant dangers of obesity and other health problems). Franchises mean food is also standardized, familiar and relatively cheap. Toys lure children, while teenagers (and the elderly) find part-time jobs in fast-food outlets. Whether offering hamburgers, pizza, tacos, French fries, sodas, icecream, or even salads, chains like McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Kentucky Fried Chicken and many others have also become symbols—albeit incomplete—of American food and eating abroad.
Industry:Culture
For at least 150 years, Americans have used the adjective “homeless” to describe those without a domicile and to indicate an absence of ties to family or to a place and the people settled there. Understood in this broad sense of uprootedness, homelessness has been a recurrent (if not defining) feature of American life, particularly as the coincidence of livelihood, family and place declined with the rise of the market, the extension of the frontier and relentless urbanization. Indeed, by the 1870s, intermittent migration and precarious housing circumstances were such common hardships of working-class life that they warranted scarce comment. But note, too, an exotic, romantic strain in the understanding of homelessness in the tramp, at once a figure of menace and colorful resistance to industrial discipline, or legendary folk heroes who were homeless men like the Maine logger Paul Bunyan or the southwestern cowboy Pecos Bill. The term could encompass even the unmarried women who moved to the city for work in increasing numbers after the Civil War, or, during the Great Depression, families who, though housed, failed to meet state settlement (residency) requirements for public aid and thus were conveniently made federal charges. “Homeless” covered a big territory including routine hardship, defiance, adventure and even bureaucratic expedience This diffuse understanding of the term persists in popular culture; it is traced easily enough in the annals of labor, American bohemia, or the survivalist right. It is used now more than ever to define a bureaucratic category. During the 1980s, with a renaissance of shelterless poverty unlike any seen since the 1930s, the word was given a technical cast by scholars and policy-makers needing to bound survey samples and target eligibility for special services and housing benefits. They constructed a narrow, operational definition that counted as homeless only people living in shelters, out of doors, or in places not meant for human habitation. Whatever injustice it does to history, however it scants the subtle cultural work of ambiguous words, this definition has the stamp of authority.
Numbers Estimates of the size of America’s homeless population came to be based on this literal notion of houselessness. These estimates, some as low as 250,000, rapidly became controversial because they were based on one-night surveys and seemed to many to minimize the extent of homelessness, even when narrowly defined. However, by the early 1990s, the development of computerized data systems in some US jurisdictions made it possible to amass unduplicated counts of shelter users over stretches of time, thus providing a dynamic enumeration of this population. Data from big cities like New York City and Philadelphia, PA and smaller cities and counties in New England, the Midwest and California showed that between 4.4 percent and 13 percent of the local poor made use of public shelter annually during the late 1980s and early 1990s. A national telephone survey found that between 2.4 percent and 3.1 percent of the adult population—that is, between 4.4 million and 5.7 million adults—had been homeless at some time between 1985 and 1990. There is no longer any reasonable doubt that homelessness grew rapidly during the 1980s and had assumed massive proportions by 1990. No evidence suggests that the situation has changed in subsequent years. As in previous generations, periodic displacement and resort to a public bed has become a common feature of life for poor Americans.
Causes The homelessness that became so visible in the early 1980s resulted, at bottom, from the increasing numbers of individuals and families who could no longer afford to purchase housing. In large part, this was a consequence of a precipitous decline after 1974 in real wages, work opportunities and employment levels for a growing pool of baby-boomgeneration workers, particularly poorly educated people of minority status. Similarly the real value of most income maintenance benefits plummeted after 1974. In the 1980s many states or local jurisdictions dramatically curtailed or eliminated altogether General Assistance, the only welfare program available to able, non-elderly single men and women or couples without children in their custody—hence their disproportionate presence in shelters. After the mid-1970s, then, the poor became more numerous and they got poorer. Not only could fewer poor people establish and maintain independent households, but also friends and kin could not so readily afford to take them in for extended periods. Thus, time-honored traditions of mutual aid began to buckle, particularly in African American communities.
At the same time, the nation’s supply of low-cost rental housing was shrinking as the result of changes in the federal tax structure, rising interest rates and faltering federal commitment to the production and maintenance of public housing. While ample growth occurred in the national housing stock throughout the 1980s, the number of low-end units fell dramatically and the vacancy rate in that sector of the market became increasingly small. By 1989 there was a 5 million unit shortfall in housing affordable to poor people.
Part of the “affordable housing gap” consisted of a dearth of “marginal housing,” mainly the singleroom occupancy hotels that had for generations provided regular shelter for the alcoholics, substance abusers and mentally ill persons who had always comprised some portion of the desperately poor. Such disreputable structures were systematically destroyed by urban-renewal projects and private gentrification. This has had an important impact on the characteristics of today’s homeless population, of which perhaps 30 to 40 percent suffer from a current major mental disorder or a substance use disorder.
The erosion of marginal urban habitats coincided with laws passed in most states in the 1970s which made it difficult for persons with a mental illness to be committed to a psychiatric hospital or to be retained there for more than a few days. Similar laws eliminated the commitment of alcoholics and addicts and jail sentences for public drunkenness. This process of “deinstitutionalization”—a de facto change in housing policy—was intended to be accompanied by readily available residential care in local areas. Yet, after twenty years (longer in states like California and New York), community care remains an unfulfilled promise.
Industry:Culture
For centuries black Christian churches have functioned as important religious, political and social institutions for African Americans in the United States. To date there are seven major black Christian denominations in the United States: African Methodist Episcopal (AME), African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ), Christian (formerly Colored) Methodist Episcopal (CME), National Baptist Convention, USA., Inc., National Baptist Convention of America, Progressive National Baptist Convention and the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). Historically these churches functioned as safe havens from the social ills of slavery political disenfranchisement, segregation and urban displacement. As some of the few autonomous black institutions in the United States, African American Christian churches served as mediators between an oppressed community’s public struggles for full citizenship and its private efforts to maintain selfrespect and self-determination.
Some scholars contend that the seeds of the modern black church were planted during the early period of enslavement. During this time, enslaved African Americans received their initial introduction to Christianity from Protestant missionary societies such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (1701) and later from the evangelical activities of the Awakenings. Rather than embrace a Christian theology that justified their enslavement and legitimized their obedience, enslaved African Americans sought to create a theology reflecting their own interpretation of Christianity. Within this distinct understanding of Christianity, African Americans encompassed various forms of resistance. For enslaved communities, engaging in collective religious worship was in itself an act of resistance. African Americans gathered in densely forested areas or “hush harbors” for secret worship services. Secluded from the ears of their slave masters, they preached against the institution of slavery worshipped in their own African-derived styles and prayed for their freedom. Within this “invisible institution,” African Americans formulated a unique religiosity that would come to embody in part, the spiritual substance of black churches.
As Christianity developed among enslaved and free blacks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, debates in American culture focused on the efficacy of Christianity in creating communities of docile or rebellious African Americans. Slave rebellions closely connected to Christianity and black religious institutions began to surface in the first half of the nineteenth century. The potent combination of Christianity and resistance fueled the Southern insurrection plans of Gabriel Prosser in 1800, Denmark Vesey in 1822, and Nat Turner in 1831. Despite these prominent examples of religion and resistance, it remains largely inconclusive to what extent Christianity made African Americans more accommodative to or resistant against their oppressed social situations.
What is conclusive, however, is that Christianity became a forum for exercising levels of autonomy and independence.
African Americans expressed their autonomy through the formation of independent black churches. Between 1773 and 1775 the earliest known separate black Christian church was established by an enslaved African American, George Liele, in Silver Bluff, South Carolina. Converted within this black Baptist community in Silver Bluff was another enslaved African American, Andrew Bryan, who later established the First African Church in Savannah in 1788. By 1830 this church housed some 2,417 free and enslaved black members. The eighteenth century also marked the rise of independent black Christian churches in the North. The independent church movement among free black Methodists in the North gave rise to the first separate African American Christian denomination in the United States. Although other historical churches such as the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (1801) and the Christian (formerly Colored) Methodist Episcopal Church (1870) helped to comprise the total body of black Methodists in the United States, the African Methodist Episcopal Church had by far the greatest appeal among African Americans. Established by an ex-slave, Richard Allen, in 1787 as an independent church in Philadelphia, PA and in 1816 as a separate black denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church quickly evolved into a network of black Methodist churches that extended into other states such as Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey This new black denomination had as its collective mission abolitionism, racial unity, mutual aid and education. Several nineteenth-century colleges such as Wilberforce, Morris Brown, Allen, Paul Quinn and Shorter Junior College were, in fact, founded under the auspices of the AME church. As a direct result of its missionary endeavors in the South throughout the nineteenth century the AME church was able to increase its pre-Civil War membership of 20,000 people to almost a half million in 1896.
Its current membership stands at over 2 million of a total black Methodist membership of some 4 million, thus making black Methodists second in number only to the black Baptists (10 million) among black Christians in the United States. Within this context of black Christian membership, the rise of black Pentecostalism in the early twentieth century would eventually give birth to the third largest black Christian denomination in the United States, the Church of God in Christ (1907), with a current membership of over 3 million.
Although African American Baptists, Methodists and Pentecostals comprise a large majority of the black religious bodies in the United States, these Christian denominations by no means exhaust the historical diversity of black spirituality. Existing alongside these Christian denominations have always been alternative spiritual traditions that utilize African-derived rituals and folk beliefs as primary sources of power. During slavery the hidden services of the “hush harbors” coexisted in enslaved communities with the presence of African conjure. The practices of conjure, often used interchangeably with “hoodoo,” mirrored African rituals of divination, charm production and “root-work” or herbalism. Conjure and “hoodoo” created a space for the power of human agency within an elaborate spiritual world of spirits, ancestors, charms, divination and folklore. The coexistence of these two systems of religious thought are a direct reflection of the historical complexity of black religious identity. Historically these alternative spiritual orientations were heavily concentrated throughout the southern US in places like New Orleans, Louisiana and the low country and sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia.
More recent expressions of African-derived spiritualities include traditional Congo, Akan and Yoruba-inspired traditions such as Santería (Ocha) and Voudou. Many of these recent traditions developed in the United States largely as a result of the efforts of African and African Caribbean immigrants, indigenous cultural and political nationalist movements in the 1960s and transatlantic travel to Africa on the part of African Americans. Although many of these recent traditions are not directly linked to the historical phenomenon of conjure/hoodoo in the US, they do possess a shared African orientation that remains significantly pronounced in black religiosity.
Industry:Culture
