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An “Oasis of Freedom” in a “Closed Society”: The Development of Tougaloo College as a Free Space in Mississippi's Civil Rights Movement, 1960 to 1964 1
Author(s) -
LOWE MARIA R.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
journal of historical sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.186
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-6443
pISSN - 0952-1909
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6443.2007.00321.x
Subject(s) - movement (music) , civil rights , civil society , sociology , space (punctuation) , freedom of movement , political science , law , isolation (microbiology) , safe haven , public administration , aesthetics , politics , economics , international economics , philosophy , linguistics , microbiology and biotechnology , biology
Based on archival research and in‐depth interviews, this study explores how Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi developed into a pivotal movement center in Mississippi's civil rights movement and the ways in which Tougaloo's faculty and administrators as organic intellectuals helped to create, maintain, and augment such a free space and the social networks who utilized it. The school served as an interracial “safe haven” for those involved in and sympathetic to the civil rights movement who in turn, helped to cultivate networks, ideas, and strategies that contributed to the movement in meaningful ways. The school's heritage, its sources of financial support, and its relative physical isolation allowed Tougaloo College to challenge Mississippi's closed society from within.