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The other was that all the major civil rights organizations, new as well as old, were committed to the philosophy of non-violence, the doctrine preached by the most conspicuous leader in the Negro movement, Martin Luther King. ‘We will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer,’ he told the whites, ‘and in winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process.
C. Vann Woodward -
Above all, every member of the university has an obligation to permit free expression in the university. No member has a right to prevent such expression. Every official of the university, moreover, has a special obligation to foster free expression and to ensure that it is not obstructed.
C. Vann Woodward
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The developments in the North were those loosely embraced in the term modernization and included urbanization, industrialization,and mechanization. While those changes went forward apace, the antebellum South changed comparatively little, clinging to its rural, agricultural, labor-intensive economy and its traditional folk culture.
C. Vann Woodward -
Lamar related the Texas & Pacific bill to the national political crisis by presenting it as a means of “reconciliation” between the sections, “material reconstruction” of the South, and a way of restoring “mutual respect and affection” at a moment when those sentiments were desperately needed.
C. Vann Woodward -
To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom, for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily deprives others of the right to listen to those views.
C. Vann Woodward -
Despite its professed radicalism, the Republican party had obviously become the conservative party, spokesman of vested interests and big business, defender of an elaborate system of tariffs, subsidies, currency laws, privileged banks, railroads, and corporations, a system entrenched in the law by Republicans while the voters were diverted by oratory about Reconstruction, civil rights, and Southern atrocities.
C. Vann Woodward -
The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South,’ he said. ‘Where legal remedies are not at hand, redress is sought in the streets in demonstrations, parades and protests, which create tensions and threaten violence—and threaten lives.
C. Vann Woodward -
The blind spot for the in the Southern Progressive Movement - as for that matter in the national [progressive] movement - was the Negro, for the whole movement in the South coincided paradoxically with the crest of the wave of racism. Still more important to the association of the two movements was the fact that their leaders were often identical. In fact, the typical Progressive reformer rode to power in the South on a disenfranchising or white-supremacy movement.
C. Vann Woodward
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The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.
C. Vann Woodward -
Eight days later he sent to Congress the most sweeping bill for civil rights up to that time, and urged it ‘not merely for reasons of economic efficiency, world diplomacy and domestic tranquility—but above all because it is right.
C. Vann Woodward -
There was something else at stake, and it was probably of more consequence in the long run than any of the previous considerations. This was the question of whether the country could regain the ability to settle Presidential elections without the resort to force.
C. Vann Woodward -
It is substantially a proposition,” concluded the two Northern Democrats and three Republicans, who signed the Minority Report on the bill, “to build this road and the branches on Government credit without making them the property of the Government when built. If there be any profit, the corporations may take it; if there be loss, the Government must bear it.
C. Vann Woodward -
If state rights and laissez faire meant an end to force bills, removal of Federal troops from Southern state capitals, and abandonment of intervention in local politics and race discriminations, the South was for them strong. On the other hand the South had no patience with state rights and laissez faire if they implied abandonment of Federal subsidies, loans of credit, and internal improvements. Of these the South believed she had not had anything like her just share and she meant to have a lot more.
C. Vann Woodward -
On a different plane there were the less idealistic, less publicized aims of Northern policy during the war and the period following. These aims centered in the protection of a sectional economy and numerous privileged interests, and were reflected in new statutes regarding taxes, money, tariffs, banks, land, railroads, subsidies, all placed upon the law books while the South was out of the Union.
C. Vann Woodward