Many localities in America resisted integration in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education rulings (1954, 1955). Virginia’s Prince Edward County stands as perhaps the most extreme. Rather than fund integrated schools, the county’s board of supervisors closed public schools from 1959 until 1964. The only formal education available for those locked out of school came in 1963 when the combined efforts of Prince Edward’s African American community and aides from President John F. Kennedy’s administration established the Prince Edward County Free School Association (Free School). This temporary school system would serve just over 1,500 students, both black and white, aged 6 through 23. Drawing upon extensive archival research, Resisting Brown presents the Free School as a site in which important rhetorical work took place. Candace Epps-Robertson analyzes public discourse that supported the school closures as an effort and manifestation of citizenship and demonstrates how the establishment of the Free School can be seen as a rhetorical response to white supremacist ideologies. The school’s mission statements, philosophies, and commitment to literacy served as arguments against racialized constructions of citizenship. Prince Edward County stands as a microcosm of America’s struggle with race, literacy, and citizenship.

Political participation in America—supposedly the world’s strongest democracy—is startlingly low, and many of the civil rights and economic equity initiatives that were instituted in the 1960s and '70s have been abandoned, as significant proportions of the populace seem to believe that the civil rights battle has been won. However, rates of collective engagement, like community activism, are surprisingly high. In Resisting Citizenship, renowned feminist political scientist Martha Ackelsberg argues that community activism may hold important clues to reviving democracy in this time of growing bureaucratization and inequality. This book brings together many of Ackelsberg’s writings over the past 25 years, combining her own field work and interviews with cutting edge research and theory on democracy and activism. She explores these efforts in order to draw lessons—and attempt to incorporate knowledge—about current notions of democracy from those who engage in "non-traditional" participation, those who have, in many respects, been relegated to the margins of political life in the United States.

Migrants squats are an essential part of the ‘corridors of solidarity’ that are being created throughout Europe, where grassroots social movements engaged in anti-racist, anarchist and anti-authoritarian politics coalesce with migrants in devising non-institutional responses to the violence of border regimes. This book focuses on migrants’ self-organised housing strategies in Europe and the collective squatting of buildings and land. In these spaces contentious politics and everyday social reproduction uproot racist and xenophobic regimes. The struggles emerging in these spaces disrupt host-guest relations, which often perpetuate state-imposed hierarchies and humanitarian disciplining technologies. The solidarities and collaborations between undocumented and documented activists in these radical spaces enable possibilities for inhabitance beyond, against and within citizenship. These do not only reverse forms of exclusion and repression, but produce ungovernable resources, alliances and subjectivities that prefigure more livable spaces for all. The contributions to this book address these struggles as forms of commoning, as they constitute autonomous socio-political infrastructures and networks of solidarity beyond and against the state and humanitarian provision. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

Migrants squats are an essential part of the ‘corridors of solidarity’ that are being created throughout Europe, where grassroots social movements engaged in anti-racist, anarchist and anti-authoritarian politics coalesce with migrants in devising non-institutional responses to the violence of border regimes. This book focuses on migrants’ self-organised housing strategies in Europe and the collective squatting of buildings and land. In these spaces contentious politics and everyday social reproduction uproot racist and xenophobic regimes. The struggles emerging in these spaces disrupt host-guest relations, which often perpetuate state-imposed hierarchies and humanitarian disciplining technologies. The solidarities and collaborations between undocumented and documented activists in these radical spaces enable possibilities for inhabitance beyond, against and within citizenship. These do not only reverse forms of exclusion and repression, but produce ungovernable resources, alliances and subjectivities that prefigure more livable spaces for all. The contributions to this book address these struggles as forms of commoning, as they constitute autonomous socio-political infrastructures and networks of solidarity beyond and against the state and humanitarian provision. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

In Resisting Equality Stephanie R. Rolph examines the history of the Citizens’ Council, an organization committed to coordinating opposition to desegregation and black voting rights. In the first comprehensive study of this racist group, Rolph follows the Citizens’ Council from its establishment in the Mississippi Delta, through its expansion into other areas of the country and its success in incorporating elements of its agenda into national politics, to its formal dissolution in 1989. Founded in 1954, two months after the Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Council spread rapidly in its home state of Mississippi. Initially, the organization relied on local chapters to monitor signs of black activism and take action to suppress that activism through economic and sometimes violent means. As the decade came to a close, however, the Council’s influence expanded into Mississippi’s political institutions, silencing white moderates and facilitating a wave of terror that severely obstructed black Mississippians’ participation in the civil rights movement. As the Citizens’ Council reached the peak of its power in Mississippi, its ambitions extended beyond the South. Alliances with like-minded organizations across the country supplemented waning influence at home, and the Council movement found itself in league with the earliest sparks of conservative ascension, cultivating consistent messages of grievance against minority groups and urging the necessity of white unity. Much more than a local arm of white terror, the Council’s work intersected with anticommunism, conservative ideology, grassroots activism, and Radical Right organizations that facilitated its journey from the margins into mainstream politics. Perhaps most crucially, Rolph examines the extent to which the organization survived the successes of the civil rights movement and found continued relevance even after the Council’s campaign to preserve state-sanctioned forms of white supremacy ended in defeat. Using the Council’s own materials, papers from its political allies, oral histories, and newspaper accounts, Resisting Equality illuminates the motives and mechanisms of this destructive group.

Combining her own field work and interviews with cutting edge research and theory on democracy and activism, Ackelsberg explores collective engagement in order to draw lessons--and attempt to incorporate knowledge--about current notions of democracy from those who engage in "non-traditional" participation.

Many of the recent reforms in public services in the UK have been driven by the image of the 'responsible citizen' - the service user who does not only have rights to receive services but also has responsibilities for the delivery of policy outcomes. In this way, citizens' everyday conduct is shaped by governmental action, yet there is much evidence that both front-line staff in public services and the people who use them can sometimes act in ways that modify, disrupt or negate intended policy outcomes. Subversive citizens presents a highly original examination of how official policy objectives can be 'subverted' through the actions of staff and users. It discusses the role of public policy in the creation of 'good citizenship', such as making appropriate choices about what to eat and how much to save, to being an active participant in the local community. It also examines how the roles of service delivery staff have changed substantially, and how theories of 'power' and 'agency' are useful in analysing the engagement between public policies (and those employed to deliver them) and the citizens at whom they are targeted. The idea of subversive citizenship is explored through theoretical and empirical analyses by a range of prominent social researchers and will be of interest to students of social policy, sociology, criminology, politics and related disciplines, as well as policy makers involved in public services.