Southern Black Women Research Articles

Healing traditions in Black women's writing: Resources for poetry therapy

“Healing Traditions” identifies 54 Black women writers whose memoirs, poetry, and song lyrics provide resources for mental health practice in general and bibliotherapy in particular. Evans locates issues relevant to Black women’s perspectives, highlights themes found in leading artists’ work, and offers an in-depth poetry curriculum for creative approaches to empowerment. In this article, readers find three extensive lists of culturally relevant resources and learn keywords in memoirs, poems, and songs. Writers presented—named “Revolutionary Petunias” after Alice Walker’s poem—are a diverse group, including Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (President of Liberia), Jan Willis (Buddhist religion professor), Stacy Ann Chin (Chinese-Jamaican poet), Nina Simone (legendary songstress), and Mary J. Blige (songwriter of complex emotion). After an overview of resources, Evans then provides case studies of five Southern Black women poets and recommends 25 poems that address “hurt, healing, and hope.” She suggests how close readings of work by five poets (Margaret Walker, Maya Angelou, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Alice Walker) can help mentors and practitioners identify restorative themes during individual and group writing sessions. Evans defines balance as a “harmony between forces” and identifies equilibrium as a cornerstone issue in Black women’s lives. In sum, Evans reflects on her personal journey as a survivor of sexual violence and how a decade of teaching race and gender culminated in development of a curriculum of creative nonfiction for healing through poetry.

Hopeful Lament

A personal reading of Robin M. Boylorn's rich, troubling, critical, and beautifully composed text Sweetwater inspired the author to respond in the poetic form of the blues. Mixing major (hopeful) and minor (heartbreaking) themes and written as a lament, the author confronts the sorrow of marginalization and praises the brave and hopeful power of Boylorn's writing, which speaks in personal, familial, and cultural registers about the oppression and resilience of Southern black women. This song resolves by highlighting the philosophical and theoretical possibilities made possible by the critical auto/ethnographic storytelling exemplified in Sweetwater.

Fertility Transitions Along the Extensive and Intensive Margins

By allowing for an extensive margin in the standard quantity-quality model, we generate new insights into fertility transitions. We test the model on Southern black women affected by a large-scale school construction program. Consistent with our model, women facing improved schooling opportunities for their children were more likely to have at least one child but chose to have smaller families overall. By contrast, women who themselves obtained more schooling due to the program delayed childbearing along both the extensive and intensive margins and entered higher quality occupations, consistent with education raising opportunity costs of child rearing. (JEL I20, J13, J15, J16, J24)

The "Commonwealth of Virginia vs. Virginia Christian": Southern Black Women, Crime & Punishment in Progressive Era Virginia

In 1912, sixteen-year-old Hampton, Virginia resident and laundress Virginia Christian killed her white employer: fifty-one year-old widow and mother Ida Belote. Contributing to the expanding historical scholarship on African American women, this essay employs Christian’s life as a window into the lived experiences of some southern working-class black women during the early twentieth century. It critically interrogates Christian’s experiences as a household laborer, her murder trial and execution, and her use of lethal violence as a survival and resistance strategy against race oppression, labor exploitation, and white violence. Christian’s compelling life account and the diverse ways in which she and other southern working-poor African American women experienced and confronted Jim Crow segregation warrants more attention from scholars. At the same time, Christian’s distressing narrative is one that “disrupts those canonical discourses that have too often rendered African American women invisible.” Additionally, this article investigates a diverse yet significant group of African American and white Progressive era political activists’ efforts to save Christian from capital punishment. Appalled by the Commonwealth of Virginia’s decision to condemn a sixteen year-old girl to the electric chair, early twentieth century era anti-racist reformers appealed to state politicians in hopes of getting Christian’s death sentence commuted to life imprisonment.

Southern black women in the modern civil rights movement

Throughout the South, black women were crucial to the Civil Rights Movement, serving as grassroots and organisational leaders. They protested, participated, sat in, mobilised, created, energised, led particular efforts, and served as bridge builders to the rest of the community. Ignored at the time by white politicians and the media alike, with few exceptions they worked behind the scenes to effect the changes all in the movement sought. Until relatively recently, historians, too, have largely ignored their efforts. Although African American women mobilised all across Dixie, their particular strategies took different forms in different states, just as the opposition they faced from white segregationists took different shapes. Studies of what happened at the state and local levels are critical not only because of what black women accomplished, but also because their activism, leadership, and courage demonstrated the militancy needed for a mass movement. In this volume, scholars address similarities and variations by providing case studies of the individual states during the 1950s and 1960s, laying the groundwork for more synthetic analyses of the circumstances, factors, and strategies used by black women in the former Confederate states to destroy the system of segregation in this country.

Hope and Despair: Southern Black Women Educators Across Pre- and Post-Civil Rights Cohorts Theorize about Their Activism

Framed by theoretical perspectives on Black Feminist Thought, the life course, and the Generation X/Hip-Hop generation, I present findings from a subset of 10 Black women educators in Birmingham, Alabama who participated in a larger life story project. The participants, who came of age professionally across the pre- and post-civil rights movement (CRM), describe divergent and convergent social and historical contexts that shaped their professionalization, as well as their relationships with and perceptions of Black students and parents. Participants across generation theorize that teaching and leading are activist practices in their own right, which entail clandestine support and silent protest, intergenerational bridge-building, and debunking the myth of Black inferiority. Post-CRM educators, in particular, expressed ambivalence about their urban students’ futures. I conclude that multigenerational perspectives should figure more prominently in the scholarship on Black education in the US South. This emphasis could spark new directions and strategies for linking successive generations of Black educators, thereby maximizing opportunities for intergenerational dialogue and collaboration for transformative change in urban education.

African American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century South

Two recent monographs argue that nineteenthand early twentieth-century African American literature works to represent and imagine black identity in ways heretofore unrecognized. In Fugitive Vi sion, Michael Chaney considers how antebellum African American au thors from the South—who had been or had remained enslaved—-turn to the visual to ruminate on the relationship of racial blackness to sen sory knowledge. Sherita L. Johnson's Black Women in New South Lit erature and Culture attends to the overlooked significance of regional identity in literature by and about southern black women. Chaney and Johnson offer compelling arguments for renewed attention to the rela tionship of African American literature to the South. In six chapters along with an introduction and a brief conclusion, Chaney demonstrates that black authors and artists contend with rep resentations of slavery common to the antebellum period by combining

"My Idol Was Langston Hughes": The Poet, the Renaissance, and Their Enduring Influence

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I met Margaret Walker Alexander in the fall of 1970 when I taught my first class at Jackson State University. She and I both taught in the English Department, and I will never forget a lecture that Margaret gave to my students on Zora Neale Hurston. She and Zora had traveled similar roads as southern black women writers, and she recalled how she met Zora, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and other figures in the Harlem Renaissance. Her memories of Richard Wright were especially powerful, and I later reminded my students that Wright had lived on Lynch Street--the street that runs through the Jackson State campus--before he moved to Chicago. Margaret also directed the Institute for the Study of History, Life, and Culture of Black People (now the Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center). The Center featured visiting writers, such as Nikki Giovanni, and included a memorable program in which Fannie Lou Hamer both spoke and sang about her struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. While teaching at Jackson State, my former wife Josette Rossi and I rented a home on Guynes Street--now named Margaret Walker Alexander Street--in one of the first black middle class neighborhoods in Jackson. Margaret lived several doors to the east of our home, and two doors to the west was the home where Medgar Evers lived when he was assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith as he returned home to his family on the evening of June 12, 1963. Our neighbors told us about that tragic night and how it was forever etched in their memory. Margaret was one of three distinguished women writers who lived in Jackson at that time, the other two being Alice Walker and Eudora Welty. Alice was an aspiring young writer who had just finished her novel The Third Life of Grange Copeland, and Margaret encouraged her to pursue her literary career. Margaret and Eudora often appeared together at literary events in Jackson, and they enjoyed a special friendship for many years as the First Ladies of Jackson's literary world. They each had a circle of close friends in Jackson with whom they created literary salons where conversation and food were shared. Margaret loved to cook, and her journals are filled with references to food. Included among her close friends and admirers were poets and literary scholars Virgie Brock-Shedd and Jerry Ward, librarians Ernestine Lipscomb and Bernice Bell, Jackson's president of the National Council of Negro Women Jesse B. Mosely, historic preservationist Alferdteen Harrison, literary scholars Jean Clayton and Maryemma Graham, and Alleane Currie, Margaret's devoted friend and administrative assistant. Jesse Mosely later directed the Smith Robertson Museum and Cultural Center, where Richard Wright graduated from high school. For many years, Alferdteen Harrison directed the Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center at Jackson State and continued Margaret's important work with the current generation. Maryemma Graham teaches in the Department of English at the University of Kansas and is writing an important, long-awaited biography of Margaret. As a nationally acclaimed writer, Margaret was a celebrity on campus and an important role model for young African American women. Many students at Jackson State were the first in their family to attend college, and they were inspired by Margaret's stature as a distinguished poet and novelist. Her first book of poetry, For My People, was selected by Stephen Vincent Benet for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition award in 1942. Margaret's novel, Jubilee (1966), was based on her grandmother's life as a slave and was often referred to as the black response to Gone with the Wind. When I taught at Yale from 1972 to 1979, I brought Alice Walker, Margaret Walker Alexander, and Eudora Welty to read and speak to my students. Margaret was an old friend of Charles Davis, chair of the Afro-American Studies Program, who also served as Master of Calhoun College, where I lived as a resident fellow. …

Nikki Giovanni’s Appalachian Ties

Nikki Giovanni’s Appalachian Ties Virginia C. Fowler (bio) Certain aspects of Nikki Giovanni’s biography are not unique to her but common to several generations of African-Americans. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, she moved with her family to Cincinnati, Ohio (“Gateway to the South”). In 1943, when she was only two months old, she and her family were a part of what we now call the Great Migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North. Like many others, Giovanni’s parents migrated north to pursue better job opportunities and to escape the racial conditions of the South. In Knoxville, Giovanni’s father could find only low-paying, menial jobs, despite the fact that he had a college education. In Knoxville, his children’s lives would be constricted by segregation’s many rules and regulations. In Cincinnati, where he had moved with his mother when he was himself only a child (a part of an earlier wave of black migration from the South), Gus Giovanni was offered a job at a home for black boys, as well as opportunities for future, better-paying professional employment. Like many other children whose parents migrated to the North but left family in the South, Giovanni and her sister and cousins all returned to Knoxville for summer vacations; moreover, Giovanni lived with her grandparents in Knoxville from the time she was fourteen until she was seventeen, when she left Austin High School and went to Fisk University as an early entrant. Her grandparents’ home at 400 Mulvaney Street becomes in Giovanni’s work the enduring symbol of safety, happiness, warmth, and security. Even after its literal destruction, it remains, at least imaginatively, her refuge from a hostile world. Importantly, most of the values inscribed throughout Giovanni’s poetry are associated with her maternal grandparents. More powerfully than their home at 400 Mulvaney, which was ultimately destroyed in the wake of “urban renewal,” her grandparents live on in her poetry as ancestral figures offering wisdom, comfort, and love. As this brief summary of some of the biographical details of [End Page 42] Giovanni’s life suggests, both because of her parents’ roots in the South and because of her ties to her grandparents, Giovanni may have grown up in the North (although Cincinnati is in reality and not just in name the “Gateway to the South”), but many of the values instilled in her as a child were southern and Appalachian. Like many other African-American writers of her generation, however (for example, Toni Morrison), Giovanni tends to identify these values sometimes as “Southern,” but more often simply as “Black.” When she wants to celebrate black women, for example, her images are most often of southern black women. Although white Americans rarely acknowledge it, many elements of southern culture have some of their deepest roots in Africa. The abiding presence and importance of the past, the significance, even sacredness, of place, the centrality of food and food rituals, the importance of oral tradition—these were central to West African cultures. Similarly, quilts and quilting, which I have suggested are central tropes in Giovanni’s poetry, also have African roots. While African-American and feminist historians have made significant corrections to the traditional white, male version of southern history, few would venture to assert—as Nikki Giovanni repeatedly does in her lectures—that southern culture, at least in terms of these values, is black. In an early essay, Nikki Giovanni writes about the process by which black American culture becomes white in regard to music: “The blues didn’t start with Dixieland or work songs or Gospel or anything but us. . . . Dvorak’s ‘Fifth,’ commonly called ‘The New World Symphony,’ is nothing but our music” (Gemini, 117). Similarly, in her recent poem “When Gamble and Huff Ruled,” she states, “I dislike other people for taking our music our muse and our rap to sell their cars and bread and toothpaste and deodorant and sneakers but never seeming to have enough to give back to the people who created it” (Love, 51). Not only is it the case that “Black people don’t get paid for anything that we do,” Giovanni argues in a...

Ralph Ellison, Finished and Unfinished: Aesthetic Achievements and Political Legacies

Ralph Ellison, Finished and Unfinished:Aesthetic Achievements and Political Legacies Timothy Parrish (bio) Arnold Rampersad , Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 2007. 657 pp. $35.00. Kenneth W. Warren , So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. x + 131 pp. $37.50; $15.00 paper. John S. Wright , Shadowing Ralph Ellison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. xxiv + 269 pp. $40.00. On May 14, 1951, Ralph Ellison wrote his friend, Albert Murray, to alert him that a prodigious literary harvest had been sowed and would soon be reaped. "You are hereby warned," Ellison jibed, "that I have dropped the shuck."1 "The shuck" was Invisible Man, which Ellison had turned over to his publisher after seven years of labor. As recent critical work on Ellison attests, more than fifty years later its yield remains bountiful. A few months earlier, when he hoped but was not sure that he was close to finishing, Ellison identified for Murray one of his intentions as a writer. Referring to a review he had written of recent movies, Ellison thanked Murray for sharing it with the students he was then teaching at Tuskegee: "Thanks very much for seeing to it that a few Negroes read my reviews; I get the feeling that most times the stuff is seen only by whites and that, I'm afraid, doesn't mean much in the long run" (7). A little over a year later, [End Page 639] after Invisible Man had become the toast of the publishing industry and had been named the winner of the National Book Award, Ellison shared with Murray an especially perceptive critical response he received from one he identifies only as "ole Eubanks," a friend, Tuskegee graduate, and manager of the food service at the Harlem YMCA where Ellison had stayed when he first came to New York in 1936. "I'm not lying, I swear," Ellison assures Murray, "Eubanks says to me, 'Ellison, you know you're a hell of a nigguh? This goddamn stuff is History, man. It's history! You read this shit one time and you get to thinking about it and you go back, and damn if you don't find something else. You got to dig that stuff man, 'cause it's loaded!'" (40). In 1998, when the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Leon F. Litwack published his history of the Jim Crow era, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, he substantiated the claim of "ole Eubanks" by situating Ellison's work as the paradigm for understanding what happened to African Americans during the period between the Civil War and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), or the legal end to segregation. "Nowhere is the paradox of black life in the U.S. more graphically revealed," Litwack states at his book's outset, "than in Ralph Ellison's portrayal of the black odyssey in Invisible Man."2 The progress that Ellison's protagonist suffers obligates him at "every step" to "perform the rituals expected of him and play the roles defined by whites, all of them equally dehumanizing, equally degrading, equally unrewarding. For thousands and thousands of Southern black men and women, this odyssey summed up the entirety of their lives" (xiii). Early in Invisible Man, Ellison's narrator-protagonist confides to the uncertain reader that he is "no freak of nature, nor of history," but that "I was in cards, other things having been equal (or unequal) eighty-five years ago."3 Ellison's narrator is, in a sense, the end point of Litwack's history, just as Litwack's history is a version of Ellison's novel. Each of them, novelist and historian, presumes to tell the story of history's "transitory ones," as Invisible Man names them, "birds of [End Page 640] passage who were too obscure for learned classification, too silent for the most sensitive recorders of sound; of nature too ambiguous for the most ambiguous of words, and too distant from the centers of historical decision to sign or even to applaud the signers of historical documents" (432). Such a transitory one is "ole Eubanks," and to...

The Effects of Race and Region on Cardiovascular Morbidity Among Elderly Americans With Diabetes

There is conflicting evidence about whether nonwhite Americans with diabetes have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Because geographic region is known to influence the risk of CVD in the U.S., we sought to determine the effects of race and region on cardiovascular morbidity among elderly Americans with diabetes. We performed a national, retrospective, cohort study using the Medicare claims of 126,153 white and 17,962 black patients with diabetes, aged > or =65 years in 1994, who were followed through 1999 for incident acute myocardial infarction, ischemic heart disease, stroke, and heart failure. The effect of race, sex, and region on the incidence of these diseases was assessed using Cox proportional hazards regression, adjusting for baseline demographics and comorbidities. The incidence of any CVD ranged from 23.9/100 person-years among southern black men to 29.2/100 person-years among non-southern black women. The risk of CVD was lower among southern black men (hazard ratio 0.87 [95% CI 0.82-0.92]) and women (0.95 [0.91-0.99]) than their southern white counterparts. In the three other U.S. regions combined (northeast, midwest, and west), black men had a similar risk for CVD (1.01 [0.95-1.07]), and black women had a greater risk (1.10 [1.05-1.16]) than non-southern white men and women, respectively. Among elderly Americans with diabetes, the incidence of CVD is unlikely to differ a great deal between whites and blacks. Residence in the South seems to confer a modest benefit for elderly black people with diabetes.

"Maintaining a Home for Girls": The Iowa Federation of Colored Women's Clubs at the University of Iowa, 1919-1950

This essay examines the Iowa Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (IFCWC) campaign to operate a house for African American women at the University of Iowa from 1919 to 1950. (1) It seeks to add to a growing body of literature which focuses on African American philanthropy and collective black economic enterprises. An examination of the experiences of African American women at the University of Iowa and the IFCWC Home campaign offers an interesting case study that builds on recent research work on African American Women's philanthropy. (2) The IFCWC's economic enterprise developed because between 1913 and 1946, the University of Iowa barred African American students from campus and some student activities. The experiences of African American women at the University of Iowa are unique for two reasons: 1) the house they occupied was one of a few dormitories in the nation owned and operated by a formally organized group of African American women; and 2) the campaign to maintain the IFCWC Hom e provided mostly middle-class African American women students with the organizational, intellectual, and leadership skills necessary to become the next generation of black women activists. In general, the experiences of African American college women at predominantly white coeducational institutions in the early twentieth century are unique because white women often had the guidance and support of white women administrators and/or faculty. (3) African American women, on the other hand, had to look outside the university for such mentors and role models. The question remains then, how did the alliance with the IFCWC help to keep students connected to the African American community; and how did the community respond? How did limited employment prospects that resulted from race and gender prejudice help to bring about a sharply focused movement to make a college education available to a number of Iowa's young African American women? I contend that the IFCWC prepared African American women at the University of I owa to assume positions of leadership in organizations such as the IFCWC, National Association of Colored Women (NACW), the Order of the Eastern Star (OES), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and a host of other local and regional civil rights organizations. (4) Upon graduation, these women also assumed responsibilities in their local communities in their effort to the race. This work places African American women's lives at the center of inquiry in a preexisting historiographical paradigm which often excludes them through a preoccupation with African American men and white women. A few scholars, such as Linda Perkins, Elizabeth Ihle, Jeanne Noble, and Ellen Lawson, have completed various studies on African American women's higher education. Other scholars, such as Amy Thompson McCandless, offer thorough and insightful comparisons of the southern white and southern black women's education in the twentieth century. Outside the works by this small group of historians, the experiences of college educated African American women have been marginal. Particularly missing from current studies is any examination of African American women in the midwest. (5) Although African American women's historiography has recently focused on Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, these works avoid any elaborate discussions of African American women's history in midwestern states west of the Mississippi River su ch as Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa. (6) To be sure, this study is not only specific to Iowa, but to African American women who attended the University of Iowa. I contend that racism did not paralyze these women's struggle for equality. They transformed their experiences with racism into a call for social activism, racial uplift, and service to their communities. (7) As Kevin Gaines, Stephanie Shaw and other scholars point out, although African Americans agreed on the ideal of uplift they did not always agree on what types of behavior were appropriate. …

To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War. Tera W. HunterGendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. Laura F. EdwardsWhat a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era. Stephanie J. Shaw

<i>To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War</i>. Tera W. Hunter<i>Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction</i>. Laura F. Edwards<i>What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era</i>. Stephanie J. Shaw

Race, Region, and Gender in American History

Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, The Devil's Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1997, £28.50). Pp. 274. ISBN 0 19 511242 3.Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom’: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997, £19.95). Pp. 311. ISBN 0 674 893 9 3.Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998, £38.00). Pp. 252. ISBN 0 8032 3716 2.Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, £24.99). Pp. 240. ISBN 0 19 5114833.The historical study of women has evolved from a consideration of elite women, the quest for suffrage, and women in organized groups to encompass different classes, ethnic groups, and social settings. Writing women back into the historical record has led to a more creative use of data sources, a greater depth of understanding about how societies work on both formal and informal levels, and the exploration of gendered patterns of most aspects of the economy, social structure, and politics. However, the conceptual frameworks of women's history have not kept pace with the expansion of scholarship to encompass a more diverse population.These four books highlight two trends in contemporary historical practice: the inclusion of gender as an essential aspect of our understanding of the past and the use of comparative frameworks to investigate the significance of socially constructed sex roles for society. By contrasting women's lives in different settings and racial groups, the authors illustrate how communities shape gender roles and how those roles influence a wide range of social, political, economic, and cultural events. Gender thus takes its place as a fundamental category of historical analysis without which it is difficult to understand American (or any other) history; women's work, family relationships, voluntary, social, and political activities are as central to understanding society as men's.

Remembering the Dream: Alice Walker, Meridian and the Civil Rights Movement

If the Civil Rights Movement is `dead,'(1) and if it gave us nothing else, it gave us each other forever, wrote Alice Walker her first published essay, 1967 (Gardens 128). Her statement is true for Walker as an African American woman and as a writer. The Movement reaffirmed African Americans' connection to each other as a people and to their history of struggle against oppression. The Movement also allowed Walker to claim her self--she has described herself as to by the Movement--and to claim the lives of African American women of the rural South as the subject of her fiction (Gardens 122). Walker grew up rural Georgia, and, as a student at Spelman College from 1961 to 1962., she became involved the Atlanta Movement, working at voter registration and participating marches and demonstrations (J. Hams 33). Inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr., who urged civil rights workers to `Go back to Mississippi ... go back to Georgia,' his speech during the March on Washington 1963, she returned to the South for two summers and went to live Mississippi during the late 1960s and early 1970s, working at voter registration, teaching Headstart teachers and writing stories about rural southern black women. (Gardens 163, 27). Participation the Civil Rights Movement was central to Walker's life not only as a young woman but also as a young writer. She has written about the Movement some of her early poems, short stories, essays, and briefly her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), but Meridian (1976) is her novel of the Civil Rights Movement. Meridian is more than a novel about the Civil Rights Movement, and critics have focused on many aspects of this complex work.(2) But I would like to focus on Meridian as a novel of the Civil Rights Movement and try to show how Walker used her experience the Movement and the experience of others of her generation to deal with the social, political and philosophical issues raised by the Movement, issues that continue to engage us today. Other critics have focused on the Civil Rights Movement discussing Meridian,(3) but they do not discuss the connection between Walker's experience the Movement and the novel. Alice Walker is the only major African American woman writer who came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and participated it and the only one to write a novel about the Civil Rights Movement.(4) By 1970, when Walker began to write Meridian (J. Harris 33), the Civil Rights Movement, which offered the hope of Freedom Now! and the ideal and practice of nonviolence and and White Together, had been declared dead. Many young blacks had given up on white Americans and on nonviolence, because of their experience of white racist violence and intransigence the Civil Rights Movement. As early as 1963, Anne Moody, a young black woman active the Movement Mississippi, began to question everything I had ever believed in and to think Nonviolence is through, after a black church Birmingham, Alabama was bombed by racist whites and four young girls attending Sunday school were killed (Moody 320, 319). Despite the Movement, 1970 the United States continued to be racially divided and violent against black people. By 1970, some people, who called themselves black nationalists or black militants, and whose slogan had become Power, urged black women, who had struggled for their freedom along with black men the Civil Rights Movement, to subordinate themselves to black men, to make themselves less, for the good of their people. In an essay published 1973, while she was writing Meridian, Alice Walker quotes Barbara Sizemore, writing The Black Scholar, on the new `nationalist woman': `Her main goal is to inspire and encourage man and his children. Sisters this movement must beg for permission to speak and function as servants to men.' (qtd. Gardens 169). Both Walker and Sizemore viewed this development the freedom struggle with dismay. …

To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War

To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War

To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War.

Journal Article To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War. By Tera W. Hunter. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. x, 311 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-89309-3) Get access Deborah Gray White Deborah Gray White Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 85, Issue 1, June 1998, Pages 290–291, https://doi.org/10.2307/2568552 Published: 01 June 1998

To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War

To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War. Tera W. Hunter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. 311 pp. (Cloth US$29.95)

To 'joy my freedom: southern black women's lives and labors after the Civil War

Tera Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former master. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we see the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north.

With pen and voice: a critical anthology of nineteenth-century African-American women

O woman, woman! upon you I call; for upon your exertions almost entirely depends whether the rising generation shall be any thing more than we have been or not.O woman, woman! your example is powerful, your influence great.Maria W. Stewart, An Address Delivered Before the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of Boston (1832)Herein the only collection of speeches by nineteenth-century African-American womenis the battle of words these brave waged to address the social ills of their century. While there have been some scattered references to the unique roles these early women played in effecting social change, until now few scholars have considered the rhetorical strategies they adopted to develop their powerful arguments.In this chronological anthology, Shirley Wilson Logan highlights the public addresses of these women, beginning with Maria W. Stewart s speech at Franklin Hall in 1832, believed to be the first delivered to an audience of men and by an American-born woman. In her speech, she focused on the plight of the Northern free black. Sojourner Truth spoke in 1851 at the Akron, Ohio, Women s Rights Convention not only for the rights of black but also for the rights of all oppressed nineteenth-century women. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper struggled with the conflict between universal suffrage and suffrage for black men. Anna Julia Cooper chastised her unique audience of black Episcopalian clergy for their failure to continue the tradition of the elevation of womanhood initiated by Christianity and especially for their failure to support the struggling Southern black woman. Ida B. Wells s rhetoric targeted mob violence directed at Southern black men. Her speech was delivered less than a year after her inaugural lecture on this issuefollowing a personal encounter with mob violence in Memphis. Fannie Barrier Williams and Victoria Earle Matthews advocated social and educational reforms to improve the plight of Southern black women. These speechesall delivered between 1832 and 1895are stirring proof that, despite obstacles of race and gender, these still had the courage to mount the platform in defense of the oppressed.Introductory essays focus on each speaker s life and rhetoric, considering the ways in which these selected evidence and adapted language to particular occasions, purposes, and audiences in order to persuade. This analysis of the rhetorical contexts and major rhetorical tactics in the speeches aids understanding of both the speeches and the skill of the speakers. A rhetorical timeline serves as a point of reference.Historically grounded, this book provides a black feminist perspective on significant events of the nineteenth century and reveals how black of that era influenced and were influenced by the social problems they addressed.A government which can protect and defend its citizens from wrong and outrage and does not is vicious. A government which would do it and cannot is weak; and where human life is insecure through either weakness or viciousness in the administration of law, there must be a lack of justice, and where this is wanting nothing can make up the deficiency.Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Duty to Dependent Races, National Council of Women of the United States, Washington, D.C. (1891)