Telling It Like It Really Was: Women's Activism and Movement Making in Postwar America

Abstract

Christina Greene. Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 384 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Kimberly Springer. Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. x + 228 pp. Appendices, notes, and index. $74.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper). It has been a challenge to get Americans to broaden their understanding of the civil rights movement, to see it as more than something that Martin Luther King, Jr., led and Malcolm X made more militant. Over the last few decades, however, a number of fine historians have made that task much easier by chronicling the extent to which the American civil rights movement was in fact driven by grassroots determination. As important, they added greater depth to the civil rights narrative by pointing out that without the never-ending and unglamorous work of African American women in particular, King and Malcolm X would have had little to promote. As Charles Payne put it bluntly, "Men led, but women organized."1 But, as it turns out, we still only know the half of it. Or so we realize when we delve into a new book by Christina Greene. While it is common for scholars to publish books that add depth to existing historical narratives, it is rare when they write something that deftly changes the way in which we must understand a historical moment itself. Greene has accomplished this feat in Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina. Greene's study carefully excavates the postwar history of Durham, North Carolina—a town in the South known more for its prestigious university than its civil rights legends. In going over Durham's postwar past with such a fine-tooth comb, Greene first and foremost introduces us to a city with a civil rights past whose richness clearly rivals that of the better known Greensboro and Montgomery. Far more importantly, however, Greene's study of the Bull City sheds completely new light on the origins as well as the nature of the [End Page 72] American civil rights movement and forces us to turn our own understandings of the same inside out. As this book makes clear, we should not include women in our analyses of the civil rights movement simply because they did the grunt work that allowed the men to make history. According to Greene, long before civil rights became the national cause associated with King and Malcolm X, women had already made a powerful civil rights movement. More to the point, their early activism, leadership, and courage created the militant community-based activist infrastructure that was necessary for a later mass movement to thrive. And when that mass movement did come of age, women's contributions "involved more than simply licking envelopes or running mimeograph machines it could and did frequently entail leadership" (p. 96). As Greene illustrates, well before the famed civil rights events such as King's incarceration in Birmingham or the desegregation of Little Rock made news, there was "a distinctly black female organizational base [that] provided the experiences that propelled women into a movement that would change irrevocably not only their lives, but the life of the nation" (p. 32). African American women's determination to break down racial barriers during and immediately after WW II allowed them to set the stage for, rather than merely respond to, landmark civil rights victories such as Brown v. Board (p. 49). During the 1940s and 1950s black women banded together to insist on representation in the YWCA, the League of Women Voters, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and local government positions that affected the well-being of Durham's entire African American population (p. 35). And...