As early as 1947, Black parents in rural South Carolina began seeking equal educational opportunities for their children. After two unsuccessful lawsuits, these families directly challenged legally mandated segregation in public schools with a third lawsuit in 1950, which was eventually decided in Brown v. Board of Education. Amidst the Black parents’ resistance, Elizabeth Avery Waring, a twice-divorced northern socialite, and her third husband, federal judge J. Waties Waring, launched a rhetorical campaign condemning white supremacy and segregation. In a series of speeches, the Warings exposed the incongruity between American democratic ideals and the reality for Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. They urged audiences to pressure elected representatives to force southern states to end legal segregation. Wanda Little Fenimore employs innovative research methods to recover the Warings’ speeches that said the unsayable about white supremacy. When the couple poked at the contradiction between segregation and “all men are created equal,” white supremacists pushed back. As a result, the couple received both damning and congratulatory letters that reveal the terms upon which segregation was defended and the reasons those who opposed white supremacy remained silent. Using rich archival materials, Fenimore crafts an engaging narrative that illustrates the rhetorical context from which Brown v. Board of Education arose and dispels the notion that the decision was inevitable. The first full-length account of the Warings’ rhetoric, this multilayered story of social progress traces the symbolic battle that provided a locus for change in the landmark Supreme Court decision.

In Nikki Haley's Lessons from the New South, Wanda Little Fenimore traces the resurrection of the phrase “New South” with South Carolina’s former governor, Nikki Haley. Through analyzing speeches, Fenimore demonstrates how politicians use historical terms in new ways that obscure their roots but remain oppressive in the twenty-first century. This book reveals how Nikki Haley manufactured her “New South” as progressive, and forward-thinking, yet the term functions as a form of inferential racism, ultimately, reproducing traditional conservatism rooted in white supremacy. Scholars of rhetoric, communication, political science, and women’s studies will find this book of particular interest.

Six American communication studies scholars contribute six chapters to the first analysis of the role that rhetoric played in establishing, defending, challenging, and overturning legalized educational segregation by race. Coverage includes a reconstruction of the rhetorical context of Plessy v. Ferguson; the Harlan dissent in Plessy; the NAACP's efforts over 40-plus years to reverse Plessy's support of educational segregation; an analysis of the Brown decision, with particular focus on the controversial use of social scientific evidence; the reaction to the Brown decision in the South; and a comparison of two major Supreme Court decisions implementing Brown. Annotation ̧2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) -- Distributed by Syndetics Solutions, LLC.

"As early as 1947, Black parents in rural South Carolina began seeking equal educational opportunities for their children. After two unsuccessful lawsuits, these families directly challenged legally mandated segregation in public schools with a third lawsuit in 1950, which was eventually decided in Brown v. Board of Education. Amidst the Black parents' resistance, Elizabeth Avery Waring, a twice-divorced northern socialite, and her third husband, federal judge J. Waties Waring, launched a rhetorical campaign condemning white supremacy and segregation. In a series of speeches, the Warings exposed the incongruity between American democratic ideals and the reality for Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. They urged audiences to pressure elected representatives to force southern states to end legal segregation. Wanda Little Fenimore employs innovative research methods to recover the Warings' speeches that said the unsayable about white supremacy. When the couple poked at the contradiction between segregation and "all men are created equal," white supremacists pushed back. As a result, the couple received both damning and congratulatory letters that reveal the terms upon which segregation was defended and the reasons those who opposed white supremacy remained silent. Using rich archival materials, Fenimore crafts an engaging narrative that illustrates the rhetorical context from which Brown v. Board of Education arose and dispels the notion that the decision was inevitable. The first full-length account of the Warings' rhetoric, this multilayered story of social progress traces the symbolic battle that provided a locus for change in the landmark Supreme Court decision"--

The second edition of this handbook offers a thoroughly updated overview of the different approaches and perspectives in communication ethics today. Extending the path paved by its predecessor, this handbook includes new issues and concerns that have emerged in the interim—from environmentalism to artificial intelligence, from disability studies to fake news. It also features a new structure, comprised of three sections representing a wide array of communication ethics: traditions, contexts, and debates. Rather than focusing exclusively on a subset of ethics (such as interpersonal communication, rhetoric, or journalism, as do other handbooks of ethics in communication), this collection provides a valuable resource for those who seek a broader basis on which to study communication ethics. This handbook is a must-read for faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in all areas of communication studies, as well as in neighboring disciplines such as rhetoric, media studies, sociology, political science, cultural studies, and science and technology studies.

For over thirty years, Steven Mailloux has championed and advanced the field of rhetorical hermeneutics, a historically and theoretically informed approach to textual interpretation. This volume collects fourteen of his most recent influential essays on the methodology, plus an interview. Following from the proposition that rhetorical hermeneutics uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history, this book examines a diverse range of texts from literature, history, law, religion, and cultural studies. Through four sections, Mailloux explores the theoretical writings of Heidegger, Burke, and Rorty, among others; Jesuit educational treatises; and products of popular culture such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In doing so, he shows how rhetorical perspectives and pragmatist traditions work together as two mutually supportive modes of understanding, and he demonstrates how the combination of rhetoric and interpretation works both in theory and in practice. Theoretically, rhetorical hermeneutics can be understood as a form of neopragmatism. Practically, it focuses on the production, circulation, and reception of written and performed communication. A thought-provoking collection from a preeminent literary critic and rhetorician, Rhetoric’s Pragmatism assesses the practice and value of rhetorical hermeneutics today and the directions in which it might head. Scholars and students of rhetoric and communication studies, critical theory, literature, law, religion, and American studies will find Mailloux’s arguments enlightening and essential.

The author of The World of Prometheus argues that the transition to political friendship offered by the Brown v. Board of Education decision has not been completed, and proposes practical techniques of bridging citizenship and trust through sacrifice.

Combining biography with regional and national history, Dan T. Carter chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of George Wallace, a populist who abandoned his ideals to become a national symbol of racism, and later begged for forgiveness. In The Politics of Rage, Carter argues persuasively that the four-time Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate helped to establish the conservative political movement that put Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980 and gave Newt Gingrich and the Republicans control of Congress in 1994. In this second edition, Carter updates Wallace’s story with a look at the politician’s death and the nation’s reaction to it and gives a summary of his own sense of the legacy of “the most important loser in twentieth-century American politics.”

You Can't Padlock an Idea examines the educational programs undertaken at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee and looks specifically at how these programs functioned rhetorically to promote democratic social change. Founded in 1932 by educator Myles Horton, the Highlander Folk School sought to address the economic and political problems facing communities in Appalachian Tennessee and other southern states. To this end Horton and the school's staff involved themselves in the labor and civil rights disputes that emerged across the south over the next three decades. Drawing on the Highlander archives housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Avery Research Center in South Carolina, and the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee, Stephen A. Schneider reconstructs the pedagogical theories and rhetorical practices developed and employed at Highlander. He shows how the school focused on developing forms of collective rhetorical action, helped students frame social problems as spurs to direct action, and situated education as an agency for organizing and mobilizing communities. Schneider studies how Highlander's educational programs contributed to this broader goal of encouraging social action. Specifically he focuses on four of the school's more established programs: labor drama, labor journalism, citizenship education, and music. These programs not only taught social movement participants how to create plays, newspapers, citizenship schools, and songs, they also helped the participants frame the problems they faced as having solutions based in collective democratic action. Highlander's programs thereby functioned rhetorically, insofar as they provided students with the means to define and transform oppressive social and economic conditions. By providing students with the means to comprehend social problems and with the cultural agencies (theater, journalism, literacy, and music) to address these problems directly, Highlander provided an important model for understanding the relationships connecting education, rhetoric, and social change.