The 'Great Migration' from 1915 to 1925, during which some 1.25 million blacks left the South to settle in major urban centres of the North like New York and Chicago, was an issue that attracted the attention of white Americans. This chapter discusses the approach of W. E. B. Du Bois to the academic studies on black migrants from a sociological, rather than a historical perspective. The emphasis on cultural awareness and achievement during the Black Power era highlighted the fact that African American cultural history remained a largely neglected area of twentieth century black history. In an influential 1937 article the African American scholar and leading inspiration of the Renaissance, Alain Locke, famously recorded what appeared to be a virtual obituary for the movement.

This chapter focuses on service rights which complement the legal rights which victims of crime have been afforded in Ireland. It maps the services which are available to victims at each stage in the criminal justice process, from reporting through to offender release. Many of the organisations discussed in the chapter offer counselling services and/or emotional support to victims outside of the criminal justice process. The importance of information provision, along with shortcomings in the delivery of information to victims at various stages of the process, is a recurring theme in this chapter. Gardaí play a crucial role in the support of victims of crime, not least because a Garda is the first person to whom a victim recounts the incident. The chapter explores the gaps between the rhetoric and the realities of service provision for victims of crime in Ireland with reference to available research on their experiences.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts on black civil rights discussed in this book. During the 1950s and 1960s the spread of more liberal attitudes and values, reflected in the rise of Martin Luther King and the post-war Civil Rights Movement, inspired scholars to investigate the African American past. Scholarly debate on the African American experience from the 1890s through to the early 1920s gathered momentum with fresh studies on the spread of racial segregation and black migration to the cities. The rise of feminism and growth in popularity of women's history in the closing decades of the twentieth century prompted academic researchers to pay more attention to the issue of gender in all periods of African American history. Whether writing about the 1890s or the 1980s historians began to recognize the importance of class divisions in African American communities and the civil rights struggle.

This chapter explains the emergence of the modern assumptions commitments and strategic priorities that have shaped the position of the victim in the justice system. In particular, it demonstrates how the paradigm of prosecuting and investigating crime moved from an intensely local, unstructured and victim-precipitated arrangement to a structured, adversarial, State-monopolised event where the accused was largely silenced and the victim was rendered invisible. The chapter traces the ways in which different justice systems have accommodated victims of crime. It highlights the broad historical changes in the assumptions and realities that governed victim relations under pre-modern exculpatory and modern inculpatory models of justice. The chapter represents the shift from personal to institutional relations, ensuring that subjective and emotive experiences were increasingly represented as invalid, tainted knowledge.

The achievements of race leaders like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael generally took more subtle, less tangible, forms. These included community empowerment, heightened racial pride and consciousness, and a decolonization of the black ghetto mind, rather than specific political initiatives to address the physical problems of the inner cities. Thus scholars in the 1960s and 1970s concluded that the Black Power Movement was lacking in any true substance, meaning or accomplishments, and was therefore not worthy of serious study. Transcribed and edited with the assistance of African American journalist Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X quickly became regarded as the authoritative account of his life and became an inspirational text for Black Power leaders of the late 1960s and early 1970s. By the 1970s and 1980s academics were beginning to make a welcome, if overdue, contribution to the understanding of Black Nationalism of the 1960s.

This conclusion presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book examines the criminal justice system's interactions with victims of crime. It demonstrates the 'conditions of possibility' of the return of victims of crime by examining the factors that shaped this emergence and informed its assumptions. The book focuses on 'rupture', 'discontinuity' and the 'incidence of interruptions' in order to produce a proper understanding of this emergence. It considers service provision for victims of crime. The book charts the challenges which continue to face service users, providers and the wider criminal justice sector in the delivery of services which are responsive to the needs of victims and meet increased demands under the EU Directive on Victims' Rights.

Justice systems are partially being reconstructed again, as they demonstrate an increased sensitivity to the needs and concerns of victims of crime. It has been suggested that a number of factors has facilitated the increased awareness of victims in Western criminal justice systems, which are discussed in this chapter. To begin with, the introduction of state compensation programmes can be viewed as an early attempt to move victims away from the periphery of the criminal process. The growth in the women's movement also 'raised the consciousness of women to the oppression of criminal violence'. The European Convention of Human Rights acts as another influential normative framework that seeks to extend the reach of rights in the criminal process to include victims of crime. The chapter provides information on specific challenges for the Irish criminal process. It also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.

The historiography of the African American experience since 1980 is, for obvious reasons, less expansive than for earlier decades. The subject matter of the first studies of the African American experience in the last two decades of the twentieth century has been influenced by a number of factors. In common with early works on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s there has been a tendency for researchers to concentrate primarily on nationally known leaders and major political and legislative developments. In a 1996 study, political scientist Robert C. Smith concluded that since the 1970s the black Civil Rights Movement had 'been almost wholly encapsulated into mainstream institutions; co-opted and marginalized'. A notable historiographical development of the late 1990s was a sudden proliferation of studies on Louis Farrakhan, leader of the black separatist organization the Nation of Islam.

This chapter documents a variety of issues which continue to concern victims of crime in Ireland and those working on their behalf. The absence of comprehensive, accurate and reliable data on the experience of victims of crime while engaging with the criminal justice system and support services is raised as a concern. The chapter examines the challenges facing the state in tackling the problem of under-reporting and attrition in this country. It also documents the burden placed on victims and the potential for disillusionment and further trauma through engagement with the system, focusing on the potential to minimise risk through comprehensive training programmes designed to enable front-line workers to provide a sensitive and compassionate service to victims. Innovative policy options adopted in other jurisdictions, including the creation of an Ombudsman for Victims of Crime and measures to unify service provision within the sector, including Witness Care Units, are also explored.