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.

Over the past few decades, the roles women play in public life have evolved significantly, as have the pressures that come with needing to do it all, have it all, and be all things to all people. And with this progress, misogyny has evolved as well. Today's discrimination is more subtle and indirect, expressed in double standards, microaggressions, and impossible expectations. In other ways, sexism has gotten more brash and repulsive as women have gained power and voice in the mainstream culture. Patriarchy is still sanctioned by every institution: capitalism, government, and evenâ€"maybe especiallyâ€"the church itself. This is perhaps the ultimate ironyâ€"that a religion based on the radical justice and liberation of Jesus' teachings has been the most complicit part of the narrative against women's equality. If we are going to dial back the harmful rhetoric against women and their bodies, the community of faith is going to have to be a big part of the solution. Erin Wathen navigates the complex layers of what it means to be a woman in our time and placeâ€"from the language we use to the clothes that we wear to the unseen and unspoken assumptions that challenge our full personhood at every turn. Resist and Persist reframes the challenges to women's equality in light of our current culture and political climate, providing a new language of resistance that can free women and men from the pernicious power of patriarchy.

Unconditional Equality examines Mahatma Gandhi’s critique of liberal ideas of freedom and equality and his own practice of a freedom and equality organized around religion. It reconceives satyagraha (passive resistance) as a politics that strives for the absolute equality of all beings. Liberal traditions usually affirm an abstract equality centered on some form of autonomy, the Kantian term for the everyday sovereignty that rational beings exercise by granting themselves universal law. But for Gandhi, such equality is an “equality of sword”—profoundly violent not only because it excludes those presumed to lack reason (such as animals or the colonized) but also because those included lose the power to love (which requires the surrender of autonomy or, more broadly, sovereignty). Gandhi professes instead a politics organized around dharma, or religion. For him, there can be “no politics without religion.” This religion involves self-surrender, a freely offered surrender of autonomy and everyday sovereignty. For Gandhi, the “religion that stays in all religions” is satyagraha—the agraha (insistence) on or of satya (being or truth). Ajay Skaria argues that, conceptually, satyagraha insists on equality without exception of all humans, animals, and things. This cannot be understood in terms of sovereignty: it must be an equality of the minor.

After decades of steady progress in terms of gender and sexual rights, several parts of Europe are facing new waves of resistance to a so-called ‘gender ideology’ or ‘gender theory’. Opposition to progressive gender equality is manifested in challenges to marriage equality, abortion, reproductive technologies, gender mainstreaming, sex education, sexual liberalism, transgender rights, antidiscrimination policies and even to the notion of gender itself. This book examines how an academic concept of gender, when translated by religious organizations such as the Roman Catholic Church, can become a mobilizing tool for, and the target of, social movements. How can we explain religious discourses about sex difference turning intro massive street demonstrations? How do forms of organization and protest travel across borders? Who are the actors behind these movements? This collection is a transnational and comparative attempt to better understand anti-gender mobilizations in Europe. It focuses on national manifestations in eleven European countries, including Russia, from massive street protests to forms of resistance such as email bombarding and street vigils. It examines the intersection of religious politics with rising populism and nationalistic anxieties in contemporary Europe.

How are men responding to feminism? In particular, at work dealing with the challenge to their power and privilege represented by positive action for sex equality? The 1980s saw many organizations, from major companies to left-wing local councils, take action to improve women's chances. The research on which this book is based evaluates the part of men in the equality process. The author demonstrates the social mechanisms through which women's aspirations for change are thwarted and draws lessons from experience for feminist activism in organizations in the 1990s.

This in-depth account of the rise and decline of the Citizens' Councils of America details the organization's role in the massive resistance to school desegregation in the South following the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Included are a new preface and updated bibliography. "A tour de force of research and narration. . . in highly readable style. [McMillen] . . . seems to have read everything the historical record has to offer on the subject and to have known exactly what to make of it. . . Himself squarely on the side of the future, he is sensitive to the anguish that prompted the hysteria of the misguided racist. . . . By any test, a masterful study." -- Journal of Southern History "Takes seriously the people who made the movement, when ridicule and caricature would have been an easier analytical technique. Solidly researched and well written. . . an intriguing story." -- Augustus M. Burns, Social Studies

This book challenges pre-service and in-service educators to reflect critically on their assumptions and engage in praxis promoting racial and social equity. Grounded in policy contexts, historical understandings, and critical theories, this book describes innovative community-engaged approaches to resisting racism and promoting equity and features reflections and personal narratives from partners in change—including on-the-ground activists, voices from younger and older generations, educators, and first-time writers. Fueled by the ideology of white supremacy for over four centuries that whites matter more than Blacks, the authors argue that racial inequities exacerbated during the Trump administration and the legacy of neo-liberal policies dating to the "New Federalism" fiercely necessitate invoking community-engaged strategies to advance equity. This book advocates for collaboration among schools, community organizations, businesses, university centers, and community activists to address historically pressing issues, including systemic racism, declining educational opportunities, limited access to ongoing health care, and the decline of civility in public life.