This project addresses the uses of coalition in US political imaginaries throughout the 1930s and 1960s. Throughout this period, public familiarity with “coalition” undergoes a marked transformation: whether deployed as argument, performance, or organizational form. Analysis focuses on three case studies: accounts in the national and Black press of a conservative coalition in Congress working to limit or stall civil rights and labor policy throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the gradual incorporation of coalitional discourse in the planning and mobilization of the 1963 March on Washington, and attempts to establish and maintain a city-wide coalition of organizations throughout the Chicago Freedom Movement in 1965 and 1966. By attending to these developments as they unfold, we see how the uses of coalition become linked to the struggle for racial and economic justice in the United States—a conceptual transformation that likewise transposes the procedural mechanisms of the US Congress and the managerial relations of the modern firm into the lexicon of popular struggle.

Creator

• Molina, David Miguel

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-ax18-j546

Subject

• African American studies
• Rhetoric

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_845267
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15764

Keyword

• Black freedom
• Chicago Freedom Movement
• coalition
• political imagination
• New Deal
• March on Washington

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright