Joshua Wilson

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade stands as a historic victory for abortion-rights activists. But rather than serving as the coda to what had been a comparatively low-profile social conflict, the decision mobilized a wave of anti-abortion protests and ignited a heated struggle that continues to this day. Picking up the story in the contentious decades that followed Roe, The Street Politics of Abortion is the first book to consider the rise and fall of clinic-front protests through the 1980s and 1990s, the most visible and contentious period in U.S. reproductive politics. Joshua Wilson considers how street level protests lead to three seminal Court decisions—Planned Parenthood v. Williams, Schenck v. Pro-Choice Network of Western N.Y., and Hill v. Colorado. The eventual demise of street protests via these cases taught anti-abortion activists the value of incremental institutional strategies that could produce concrete policy gains without drawing the public's attention. Activists on both sides ultimately moved—often literally—from the streets to fight in state legislative halls and courtrooms. At its core, the story of clinic-front protests is the story of the Christian Right's mercurial assent as a force in American politics. As the conflict moved from the street, to the courts, and eventually to legislative halls, the competing sides came to rely on a network of lawyers and professionals to champion their causes. New Christian Right institutions—including Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice and the Regent University Law School, and Jerry Falwell's Liberty University School of Law—trained elite activists for their "front line" battles in government. Wilson demonstrates how the abortion-rights movement, despite its initial success with Roe, has since faced continuous challenges and difficulties, while the anti-abortion movement continues to gain strength in spite of its losses.

Speech, Violence, and America's Culture Wars

The Street Politics of Abortion

Barbara Hamilton

Donna Duck Wheeler

In 2006, William Carey College celebrated 100 years of serving students in south Mississippi. To accompany the centennial, alumni director Donna Duck Wheeler wrote William Carey College: The First 100 Years. In the 11 years following 2006, the school's enrollment increased to nearly 1,500 students and more programs, such as the College of Osteopathic Medicine, have been established. The span between the first volume and this updated one also includes the name change to William Carey University and the discovery of an additional predecessor institution, Pearl River Boarding School, founded in 1892. This expanded volume, published in commemoration of the institution's corrected 125th birthday, tells the next chapter of Carey's history--a history filled with faculty, staff, students, and alumni living out the words of the university's namesake, William Carey, and "expecting and attempting great things for God."

Joshua Wilson

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