Challenging Dissemblance in Pauli Murray Historiography, Sketching a History of the Trans New Negro

Reviewed by: Freedom's Racial Frontier: African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West ed. by Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack Albert S. Broussard Freedom's Racial Frontier: African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West. Edited by Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack. ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. Pp. 424. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Two decades have passed since Quintard Taylor published In Search of the Racial Frontier (1998), the most comprehensive history yet written of African Americans in the western states and territories from the Spanish era to the 1990s. Taylor's meticulous scholarship stimulated a wave of new studies in western black history, including biographies, community studies, institutional histories, and anthologies. Freedom's Racial Frontier: African Americans in the Twentieth-Century West, edited by Herbert G. Ruffin II and Dwayne A. Mack, continues this resurgence of scholarship by offering thirteen essays and two oral interviews that examine the varied people, places, and institutions of the black West and the ceaseless quest for equality that black westerners waged to achieve full citizenship. Although the essays in this ambitious anthology lack a strong unifying thesis, almost every contributor views the West as a land of promise, where African Americans had the potential to improve their lives and to shape their futures. Students of Texas and western history will find rich material on African American community building and racial activism in such diverse areas as Spokane, Washington, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Boley, Oklahoma, and Fort Hood and Houston, Texas, although on occasion they may have already encountered the material. The strongest essay in the collection, Bernadette Pruitt's "'Beautiful People': Community Formation in Houston, 1900–1941," is drawn from Pruitt's excellent book, The Other Great Migration: The Movement of Rural African Americans to Houston, 1900–1941 (Texas A&M University Press, 2013). Similarly, Emily Lutenski's fine essay, "The New Negro Frontier: Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, and African American Modernism in the West," was published previously in West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands (University Press of Kansas, 2015). Still, readers will discover fresh material regarding how African Americans throughout the twentieth century confronted the American West, including in New Mexico and the territories of Alaska and Hawaii, where relatively small African American populations also demanded racial equality. Some of the most original contributions in this volume pertain to entertainment and the arts. Jeanelle Hope, for example, explores the relationship between African American and Asian women through poetry in the San Francisco Bay Area, an alliance that few scholars have examined, and one that we know virtually nothing about in other western cities. Gabriela Jiménez's essay, "'Something 2 Dance 2': Electro-hop in 1980s Los Angeles and Its Afrofuturist Link," examines the creative nature of African [End Page 219] American dance in Los Angeles by focusing on a genre of electronic music and dance that appeared there between 1983 and 1988. Like hip hop, which appeared on the East Coast and gradually entered the mainstream of both African American and American music generally, electro-hop also appealed largely to young, marginalized African American, Afro Latino, and Latino youth. It was also wildly popular in Europe, particularly Germany. Although many of the essays in this collection have appeared in print previously, readers will still find much to celebrate. Ruffin and Mack, for example, have given ample attention to the role of gender and sexuality in the twentieth-century West. In his excellent essay, "Black Women in Spokane: Emerging from the Shadows of Jim and Jane Crow," Mack traces the activism of African American middle-class women in Spokane, Washington, such as Bertha Cravens, who used local community organizations and the local branch of the NAACP to fight racial discrimination and to gain important concessions for Spokane's small black population. Similarly, Kevin Leonard's essay, "Containing 'Pervasion': African-Americans and Same-Sex Desire in Cold War Los Angeles," provides a compelling view of how black editors in post-World War II Los Angeles perceived homosexuality in the black community. Readers will also benefit from the extensive bibliographic essay as well as the brief biographical sketches and vignettes of significant events in western history...

Reviewed by: Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud, Cary D. Wintz Dolph Briscoe IV Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West. Edited By Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. 322. Illustrations, bibliography, index.) Too often we confine our study of the modern civil rights movement to the South and the cities of the North. While such a focus is understandable, the African American freedom struggle of the mid-twentieth century in fact occurred in locales throughout the United States. Historians Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz have assembled a remarkable group of scholars to expand our knowledge of civil rights in the states west of the Mississippi River. Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West [End Page 248] is a collection of articles that ponders this critical yet understudied topic. Its editors hope the book will serve as an opening dialogue to inspire further research into this often overlooked region of the country. (The essays about Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico were published previously.) African Americans throughout western states bravely organized in order to win racial equality. Events of national consequence, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision (1954), the Watts riots in Los Angeles during August 1965, and the 1966 founding of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, receive detailed coverage. The authors recover forgotten stories of ordinary black men and women, making grassroots organizing on the local level a theme in many of the essays. Not forgotten is the fact that other racial and ethnic groups, including Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, encountered discrimination and violence in the West. African Americans both cooperated and at times found themselves in conflict with other groups in this increasingly diverse region of the United States. Several of the authors begin their articles before the modern civil rights movement (defined in the book as the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s), tracing the black equality struggle in the West back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West begins with an introduction and a study of the pre-Brown period, features regionally organized overviews of different western states, and concludes with a discussion of the post-1970 years. “The Far West” section consists of chapters on the Pacific Northwest, California, and Nevada. “The Mountain States and the Desert Southwest” covers Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. “The Upper Midwest” includes articles on the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska. Perhaps most interesting to readers of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly will be “The South and the West Collide” about Oklahoma and Texas. Alwyn Barr’s essay, “The Civil Rights Movement in Texas,” is an excellent overview by a pioneering scholar of African American history in Texas. Barr particularly explains how the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People utilized the court system to attack segregation and barriers to voting in Texas. Barr further discusses black efforts to achieve equality in political representation, employment, and housing, and the challenges in these areas that persist to the present day. In editing this volume and securing contributions from numerous experts in African American history, Glasrud and Wintz have made a major contribution to historiography; it should be required reading for historians of the civil rights movement and would be worthy of assignment in undergraduate and graduate courses. Most importantly, Black Americans and the Civil Rights Movement in the West illustrates the resilience of African [End Page 249] Americans throughout the United States in the long struggle for racial equality. Dolph Briscoe IV Texas A&M University-San Antonio Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association

Reviewed by: Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golf by Lane Demas Donald Spivey (bio) Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golf. By Lane Demas. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 363. $30.00 cloth; $19.99 ebook) [End Page 128] Lane Demas, an associate professor of history at Central Michigan University, has penned the most important study of African American golfers yet published. The author masterfully weaves the story of black golfers into the African American journey for equality and personhood. The work is laced with historical nuggets as Demas traces black golf from ancient Egypt to slave caddies, to George Grant and the invention of the golf tee, to the pioneer black amateur and professional golfers, to Tiger Woods. Blacks were pitted against the color-line in golf as they were in every other sport from boxing to baseball. Struggling for admission and acceptance in the world of professional white golfers since the founding of the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) in 1916, blacks established their own association, the United Golfers Association (UGA), in 1925. Their continuing fight for the integration of the PGA was made even more difficult by the organization's official adoption of the "Caucasian-only clause" in 1934 lasting for twenty-seven years thereafter. Even the Harlem Renaissance did not earn blacks acceptance into the privileged world of white golf and its country clubs. African Americans built their own country clubs and golf courses, such as the famous Shady Rest County Club in South Plains, New Jersey, which served Harlem's elites, both non-golfers and golfers, including James Weldon Johnson, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Chuck Webb, and Count Basie. Female players Nettie Speedy, Maggie Mae Hathaway, and Sarah Spencer Washington, were mainstays in the development and promotion of African American social clubs, golf courses, and important as players. They helped to bring other black women into the sport. None excelled more on the greens than the great Althea Gibson. The author does not avoid the critics of black golfing such as W. E. B. Du Bois, H. L. Mencken, Marcus Garvey, Father Divine, Thur-good Marshall, and Ella Baker. For many it was a game of privilege, conspicuous consumption, and a waste of intellect and resources. The NAACP was hesitant to devote any of its resources to the fight [End Page 129] to desegregate golf courses and clubs. However, the struggle on the greens gained recognition as a part of the overall battle against the color line and racial discrimination with the Supreme Court victory of Holmes v. Atlanta (1955). The win against segregated public golf courses in Georgia was a substantive implementation of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and a blow against the counter-revolution occurring in the defiant Jim Crow South. Golf echoed the protest spirt of the times from the debates about integration to direct-action and Black Power. Joe Louis's favorite sport outside the boxing ring was golf. The Champ sponsored tournaments and individual players, along with taking to the links himself. Sammy Davis, Jr. and other celebrities lent name and fame to the movement on the greens. The author places the pioneer black golfers within the movement for civil rights: Walter Speedy, John Shippen, Bill Spiller, Ted Rose, Charlie Sifford, Lee Elder, and others. Some were, of course, more radical than others—just like the movement and its leading voices-such as Bill Spiller, one of the most militant of the black golfers who engaged in direct-action protest against the PGA and segregated golf tournaments. The final chapter is devoted to Tiger Woods and is a valuable exploration of race, class, and ethnic identity that Woods personifies. The chapter makes perfect sense, but ends the book without a conclusion or even a final paragraph in which the author ties the pieces together and gives the reader a concluding salvo to golf and its importance to the civil rights movement. That missing hole-in-one aside, Demas is to be commended for putting the game of privilege into its proper historical context as a significant player in the struggle for civil rights. His is a vital contribution to sport...

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Charisma and the Fictions of Black LeadershipExodus Politics: Civil Rights and Leadership in African American Literature and CultureMartin Luther King Jr., Heroism, and African American Literature

Suburban Erasure: How the Suburbs Ended the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey

On the Novel and Civic Myth

Remembering Alton Parker Hornsby, Jr., 1940–2017

Black Women in Higher Education

Journal Article Remembering the Dream: Alice Walker, Meridian and the Civil Rights Movement Get access Roberta M. Hendrickson Roberta M. Hendrickson University of Wyoming Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 24, Issue 3, September 1999, Pages 111–128, https://doi.org/10.2307/468042 Published: 01 September 1999

More History Than Myth:African American Women's History Since the Publication of Ar'n't I a Woman? Jessica Millward (bio) "History is supposed to give people a sense of identity, a feeling for who they are, and how far they have come. It should act as a springboard for the future. One hopes that it will do this for Black women, who have been given more myth than history." —Deborah Gray White1 At the time of its initial publication in 1985, Ar'n't I a Woman? was among a small, though significant, number of works focusing on the experiences of slave women in the United States.2 Calling critical attention to the world of female slaves, White interrogated stereotypes and historical inaccuracies about bondwomen by highlighting their experiences from childhood to adulthood. At the heart of White's study was the argument that life under bondage fostered an alternative definition of womanhood for African American women.3 Chattel slavery produced life conditions fundamentally separating White and African American women in the United States, prior to and after the Civil War. While White and Black women may have lived under a paternal, patriarchal structure, race-based experiences nonetheless divided them. As the first book focusing entirely on slave women, it is not surprising that Ar'n't I a Woman? continues to be one of the most important books ever produced on the subject. In the two decades since the publication of Ar'n't I a Woman? the study of African American women's history has gained considerable prominence in the American historical canon. African American women's intellectual work, historical contributions, social circumstances, and political participation are noted in countless articles, manuscripts, and dissertations.4 Discussions of African American women's nearly four-hundred-year existence in what became the United States reach back into the colonial era and rush forward into the twenty-first century. Much of this turn in the literature owes a great intellectual debt to questions raised and synthesized in Ar'n't I a Woman? Although White's work centered on slavery, the scholarly questions articulated by White continue to guide the writing of Black women's history in general. In particular, scholars focus their attention on three broad categories: the first being the long-standing debate on race and feminism; the second articulating the relationship between resistance, activism, and power; and the third centering on violence, sexuality, and the body. These topics respond to particular social and historical circumstances such as [End Page 161] slavery, emancipation, and welfare reform; however, they are not historically specific. Rather, they are salient currents in the dialogue between the myths surrounding African American women and their actual lived histories in the United States. Pervasive stereotypes about African American womanhood permeate social, political, and economic realities in the twenty-first century and inspire scholars to aggressively dismantle the notion that all Black women fit into one of three categories presented by White: the asexual mammy, the hot-tempered sapphire, and the wonton jezebel. In doing so, the canon of studies produced in the generations after Ar'n't I a Woman? highlights the multiplicity of African American women's identities in the United States. Race and Feminism Feminism(s), like the writing of Black women's history, is multilayered. Just as scholars realize that a taxonomy of differences based on class, educational attainment, and political orientation orders relationships between African American and White women, they also produce differences among Black women. Thus for historians of African American women, articulating the relationship between feminism and the writing of Black women's history is as challenging now as it was for White in 1985. White found that Black women came to their protofeminist consciousness through lived experiences in bondage. Slave women did not have access to such formal institutional frameworks as the church and educational settings. Rather they fashioned a distinct worldview that aided them as they negotiated their new lives after the Civil War. Thus while White women endured their own "race-determined sexism," writing African American women's history forces scholars to investigate how race determines their feminist consciousness.5 The African American community...

The Bible, most often the King James Version, has served as a source of inspiration, spiritual guidance, artistic production, education, and political strategy for Africans in America since their arrival in the New World. White enslavers allowed enslaved black people to attend Christian church services to listen to both white and black preachers admonish obedience to masters, according to the biblical teaching of Ephesians 6:5–8, Colossians 3:22–25, I Timothy 6:1–2, and I Peter 2:18–21. When the preachers chose Ephesians 6 as their biblical text, their sermons always stopped just short of verse 9, which instructs masters not to threaten their servants and to be aware that God is always watching. Abolitionists and fugitive slave narrators used the same Bible to argue for the sinfulness of slavery. Black men and women, inspired to answer “the Call” to preach the Christian gospel, used the Bible as their primary source for inspiration, authority, and confirmation. More than any other source, the Bible has been the foundation upon which Black preachers have built their homiletic arguments —spiritual, social, economic, political, and familial—despite the preacher’s level of literacy. Its stories, doctrines, language, rhythms, and tones have provided the preacher the tools to paint word pictures on a virtually blank and vast canvas for his or her listeners, some of whom could read, many of whom could not prior to the 20th century. Yet all were familiar with the messages of hope the Bible offered. For both early and contemporary African American women who aligned their lives with and even felt led to preach the Christian gospel, the Bible has supported their right to undertake what they believed to be a divine vocation. In the face of resistance from male clerical leaders of mainstream religious denominations, unlicensed black women preachers have systematically read the legitimacy of their ministries through the experiences of both Old and New Testament women, like Deborah, a judge of Israel; Mary Magdalene, the first to spread the news of Jesus’s resurrection when she returned from the tomb after His crucifixion; and Priscilla, the wife of Aquila, who worked with the Apostle Paul to establish the early Christian Church in Europe. From the earliest African American preaching women, like Elizabeth and Jarena Lee, to contemporary Black women preachers like Bishop Vashti McKenzie, the first woman elected bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the Bible offered indisputable evidence of God’s dispassionate call for laborers to His vineyard and continues to undergird their right to join that labor force. The Bible and the sanctuaries of Black churches served as the manual and meeting space for planning and implementing a successful 20th-century American civil rights movement. The Bible provided the movement’s most prominent leaders, like Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the messages of love, hope, urgency and inspiration they would preach in the face of hatred, despair, complacency, and resistance. Quoting the prophet Isaiah’s inspiriting words, they confidently proclaimed: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.” (Isaiah 40:4–5) Finally, for scholars of African American life and culture, especially those interested in its religious traditions and forms of spiritual expressivity, the Bible has remained the central text for the study of Black theology, liberation theology, Womanist Theology, and African American Hermeneutics and homiletics.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsDavid L. Chappell, Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 266. $23.95 (paper).Ian M. McDowellIan M. McDowellTexas Tech University Search for more articles by this author Texas Tech UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDavid L. Chappell’s Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. is a work of historical recovery, reinterpretation, and continuity of the Civil Rights Movement from 1968 through the early 1990s. Chappell’s primary purpose is to expose the actions of civil rights activists following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, which were substantial yet overlooked. He maintains that the advances made after 1968 are often eclipsed by the enormity of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the symbolism of King’s leadership. However, Chappell argues that “history changing acts like those of 1964 and 1965 are extremely rare,” and they should not confine the memory of the struggle for civil rights (26). Chappell contends that a “fresh look at the post-King era” is needed, one that exposes how activists “tested the limits of equality and black power” and how “the continuing struggle for rights and equality after 1968 is central to the meaning of freedom in America” (xii–xiii).Chappell utilizes a wide range of primary sources including news articles, presidential papers, congressional records, and speeches. He draws from fifteen different archives and libraries for research including the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the presidential libraries of Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. Chappell’s analysis of articles and studies provides perspectives of both activists and their opposition. Also, a wide variety of secondary sources are utilized to both provide background on important civil rights actors, actions, and opponents as well as to highlight how such history has been depicted. Chappell presents his findings in six chapters covering the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the 1972 and 1974 National Black Political Conventions (NBPC), the fight to pass a full employment act, the creation of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns of Jessie Jackson, and discourse and publications concerning King’s infidelity and plagiarism.Chapter 1 and its assessment of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 is one of the most intriguing in Chappell’s book. Chappell argues that the 1968 Fair Housing Act “was a substantive answer to some of King’s most radical demands and his last real victory” (3). Chappell shows that for King a housing bill was important and would have been one of the demands at a mass demonstration King proposed for late April of 1968. Chappell maintains that King’s assassination is what made the passage of a fair housing bill possible. King’s death is shown to have fostered significant sympathy, or at least “the political need to express sympathy,” allowing the act to pass into law shortly after his death (21). Chappell argues that the bill was important upon signing because it helped to make common discriminatory actions such as redlining and blockbusting illegal while also improving African American access to financing and rental properties. While the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 are most associated with the memory of the Civil Rights Movement and King, Chappell contends that the 1968 act “is more properly his legacy” and “significant as the beginning of the post-King era” (25–26).One theme Chappell illustrates persistently is the power of the black vote—including its limitations and potential. Chappell shows that the desire to win black votes played a role influencing many conservatives and moderates to display sympathy and pass the housing act. Chappell demonstrates in chapter 2 how the black vote helped elect African Americans like Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, and Carl Stokes of Cleveland as mayors. However, he contends the lack of unity shown at the NBPC’s conventions of 1972 and 1974 illustrates how institutions could not muster mass voting power. Chappell maintains only when attacked did black voters “rally at the polls to rebuff the assault” (62). In chapter 3 the black vote is shown as crucial to President Jimmy Carter’s victory in the 1976 election. Also, growing black political power is illustrated as helping garner Carter’s support for a full employment bill. The bill put into law made employment a right. However, Chappell argues the final bill might have been stronger if more blacks had registered to vote. In chapter 4 Chappell shows that black political power played an important role in drawing support for a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and in helping to “keep opponents of King’s work in check on major, headline generating legislation” (123). Chappell’s emphasis on the importance of growing black political influence is perhaps best illustrated in chapter 5 with the presidential campaigns of Jessie Jackson. Chappell shows that Jackson’s charisma, voter registration drives, and the significance of an African American running for president helped boost black registration “in 1984 to an all-time high of 66.3 percent of those eligible” (145). Chappell argues that this growth helped push through legislative changes such as the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1988 and a Fair Housing Act amendment, which made the 1968 act more enforceable.Chappell recognizes there was truly no leader with King’s combination of charisma, organization, and accomplishments following his assassination. However, Chappell argues that his successors continued the struggle for civil rights and justice. Chappell’s findings show that, while not united, the movement still had some leaders. Among them, King’s widow Coretta Scott King fought resolutely for full employment legislation and a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Jessie Jackson became the charismatic voice of many African Americans, and his presidential campaigns brought increased black voter participation and political influence. Chappell maintains that the “major victories that King represented was history’s great exception” and that it should not diminish or mask recognition of the accomplishments of those who followed (91). Chappell’s book exposes an overlooked period of the struggle for civil rights, one in which courageous and significant achievements were made by less celebrated yet equally determined actors. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 104, Number 1Winter 2019 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/701090 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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