Introduction: Discourses on Race, Sex, and African American Citizenship

Abstract

From mid-19th century and even earlier, African Americans have demanded first class citizenship, the full works ... with no reservations ... and nothing less, as black labor leader A. Philip Randolph asserted in 1942. (1) But what exactly is What rights are conferred by citizenship? What obligations are exacted by citizenship? At most basic level, citizenship defines a person's relation State. When Dred Scott sought assert his rights as a citizen in 1857, Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney posed question: Can a Negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of political community formed and brought into existence by Constitution of United States, and as such become entitled all rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by that instrument citizen? Among those privileges, Taney continued, was privilege of suing in a court. In his opinion, African Americans, both free and enslaved, were not citizens. (2) The Civil Rights Act of 1866, 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, and 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, recognized African Americans as citizens, and granted African Americans rights--that is, rights sue in court and participate in civil affairs on equal terms. Civil rights in 19th century were defined in federal Civil Rights Act of 1866 as right to make and enforce contracts, sue, be parties, and give evidence, inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, and full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for security of person and property. (3) These civil rights are central public realm and for economic transactions, but contract and due process rights do not protect privacy, nor do they envision social equality or personal freedom in sexual matters. Without right sexual privacy and self-determination, African Americans remained second-class citizens even as black men exercised vote, bought land, and established families. In aftermath of Reconstruction, loss of civil and political rights came after a campaign of terror that used rape and lynching as its weapons. As essays in this Special Issue of The Journal of African American History show, continuing vulnerability of African Americans accusations of sexual crimes or improprieties compromised their citizenship rights. The five historians whose essays appear in this Special Issue challenge traditional constructions of citizenship through their explorations of gender and sexuality in African American history. Destabilizing rigid categories of race that were one result of interracial sexual relations is not a new project as we are reminded in Ann S. Holder's important essay, What's Sex Got Do With It? Race, Power, Citizenship and 'Intermediate Identities,' in Post-Emancipation United States. Commentators, including Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, T. Thomas Fortune, and Richmond, Virginia, editor John Mitchell challenged slavery and segregation by reminding their readers that certainty had be forged from a landscape of indeterminancy. Deploying community gossip and local traditions about sexual liaisons of white politicians, Mitchell's Planet undermined their blustering rhetoric of racial purity. In a democracy, citizenship and public service could only be non-racial, Mitchell argued, because all people contributed. Holder also provides a succinct and important chronology that traces ideological and legislative evolution of prohibitions on interracial sex from colonial times 20th century. Lynn Hudson points out in Entertaining Citizenship: Masculinity and Minstrelsy in Post-Emancipation San Francisco, even asking for a glass of whiskey in a saloon on San Francisco's Barbary Coast was an assertion of black manhood and citizenship. In public spaces, arenas which have not traditionally been understood as political, in streets, at theater, and at public entertainments, African American men negotiated citizenship against derogatory images of minstrelsy. …