Challenging Historical Iconography: A Look at Women's Everyday Political Mobilization

Abstract

Challenging Historical Iconography:A Look at Women's Everyday Political Mobilization Crystal R. Sanders (bio) Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 255 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $34.95 Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv + 352 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography and index. $34.95 Rebecca Tuuri, Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xii + 313 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography and index. $29.95 Iconography in history can be a dangerous thing. It encourages the deification of men such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X as lone freedom fighters in the long civil rights movement. It codes Pan-African strategists as male and reduces the long and wide geographical arc of white supremacy to the actions of a few men such as George Wallace and Ross Barnett. The danger with historical iconography is that it leads to inaccurate and reductionist accounts of history. It often marginalizes women's leadership or excludes them altogether. Three recently published monographs about black and white women's everyday political mobilization, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom; Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy; and Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, push back against historical narratives that center exclusively on men. These works show that from civil rights struggles and massive resistance in the United States to global black nationalist movements, women have played pivotal roles. Together, the books complicate our understanding of gender and the ways in which women have attempted to make sense of the world they live in and transform. The works also challenge male-dominated narratives about civil rights activism, black emigration, and American conservatism. While these books are not the first [End Page 629] to put female actors at center stage, they expand our knowledge of women's political work in various arenas. In Strategic Sisterhood, Rebecca Tuuri introduced readers to the longstanding political and social justice work of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), an elite black women's organization formed by Mary McLeod Bethune in 1935. The esteemed black woman educator and activist sought to unite black women's sororities, professional organizations, and auxiliaries to improve black women and their communities. Under Bethune's tenure from 1935 until 1949, the council focused on obtaining federal government jobs and military opportunities for black women but failed to shed its elitist image. In addition to Bethune, other powerful black women who held NCNW leadership positions include Sadie Alexander, the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in economics in the United States, and Patricia Harris, the first African American woman to serve in a United States presidential cabinet and to serve as a United States ambassador. While NCNW membership has consisted mainly of middle-class black women, the council supported both moderate and radical black activism throughout the twentieth century, partnering both with interracial groups and groups committed to black separatism. While it is now expected that scholarship on the civil rights movement include the contributions of women, studies that focus on women's civil rights organizations remain rare. Historian Tiyi Morris's Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi (2015) is one notable exception. Tuuri's scholarship on the NCNW, the largest black women's organization in the United States at the height of the civil rights, Black Power, and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, helps to fill the void and complicates traditional understandings of radical political organizing. Dorothy Height assumed the NCNW presidency in 1956 and used the position to ensure that black women's voices and perspectives were included in civil rights leadership gatherings throughout the 1960s. When March on Washington organizers denied women a major speaking role at the historic event in 1963, Height, under the auspices of the NCNW, organized a women's conference the very next day. She convened...