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Review
| Gender and the Civil Rights Movement, by Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 288 pp. $21.95, paper.
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| The editors have assembled a key collection of essays that address how normative race, gender and class discourses interacted to shape the cultural context of the civil rights movement and its legacy. In one essay, Marisa Chappell, Jenny Hutchinson and Brian Ward highlight how segregated public transit entailed a denial of respectability for black citizens, presenting the Montgomery Bus Boycott as a gendered "reassertion of respectability" against segregationist "vulgarity and barbarism." Focusing on the struggle for "access to...opportunities that might make middle-class status, ideals of conventional respectability, and domestic stability more attainable," the authors describe how Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. employed discourses of male restraint and female deference. In another essay, Peter J. Ling reprises debates about male chauvinism among SCLC leaders, discerning an alternative vision of gender relations in the autobiography of Rev. Andrew Young. |
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In a further essay, John Kirk reads autobiography to reveal the influence of gendered stereotypes upon NAACP activist Mrs. Daisy Bates and raises questions about the supposedly ubiquitous role of the black church in the early civil rights movement. Kirk observes that Bates' "acceptance of hatred as an emotion that may be turned to good use" was "markedly at odds with a message of nonviolence." This reinforces Ling's exploration of tensions between the tactic of nonviolence and notions of masculinity, as well as Jenny Walker's reassessment of Gloria Richardson, a nonviolent activist in Cambridge Maryland who nonetheless accepted armed self-defense by the black community when whites attacked. Bates became disillusioned by the lack of support shown by male NAACP leaders for the 1960 sit-ins, raising questions about the "crucial year of 1966," which is often used to demarcate optimism/disillusionment. |
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In yet another essay, Belinda Robnett shows how gender interacted with race, class, and religion to influence changing leadership styles in SNCC, arguing that women were liberated from the confines of societal norms between 1964–1966 because they fostered ties with the black community through "bridge leadership." When movement solidarity deteriorated and Black Nationalist philosophy gained adherents however, SNCC became authoritarian and patriarchal. Moving on, Brian Ward argues that disillusionment led to a reassertion of patriarchal and sexist themes in the late 1960s. During the late 1950s, idealistic, devotional Rhythm and Blues had briefly eclipsed the "misogynistic tendencies of the blues tradition," as "resentments that had previously fueled sexual demonology and domestic violence" were channeled toward the racial, economic and political system. Ward also exposes how "black macho posturing" functions in a context where "racism, economic disadvantage and political impotence...amplif[y] the patriarchal and sexist patterns of American society." In the 1990s, even as some crossover acts forged "constructive, meaningful and responsible" middle-class themes, voyeuristic whites purchased fantasies of brutal sexual assertiveness, terrible homophobia, nihilistic violence and acquisitive materialism, expressed by "utterly disillusioned" young urban Gangsta Rappers. Eithne Quinn emphasizes Gangsta Rap's "self conscious opposition to the responsible and emotionally expressive black masculinity" of the soul man, and its "oxymoric conflation" of nostalgic soul-era type vocal style with misogynistic and violent lyrics |
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For Sharon Montieth, representations of Martin Luther King Jr. in the novels of Julius Lester and Charles Johnson are likewise part of contested public discourses on male leadership that preoccupy contemporary concerns about "failure to overcome racial and gender divisions." Johnson's male characters struggle for power and visibility, but are eclipsed by historically skewed representations of black manhood, while females grieve and provide strength to the family. Lester reveals "ordinary and fragile" qualities against which male civil rights workers are measured, yet reinforces binary gender divisions in his own representations of interracial sex. Both authors use parody and pastiche to imaginatively interrogate representations of charismatic black male leadership, yet fail to confront the female model of "bridge leadership" delineated by Robnett. Lest disillusionment reign, Britta Walderschmidt Nelson demonstrates that black Congresswomen sustained struggles for both African American and female liberation during the 1990s. They pressed for voter registration, public works, job training, tax credits, educational and health care programs, and other legislation to deal with both the feminization of poverty and the criminalization of black males. |
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This collection is invaluable for advanced college students and university teachers who, already familiar with the historiography of the civil rights movement, may wish to bring interdisciplinary perspectives to bear on questions of how social movements and activists operated within particular social and cultural environments. The essays will provoke advanced students to pursue new research on women's roles in other civil rights organizations, on the gendered implications of civil disobedience and black power, on the role of violence in bringing about social change, and on interactions between politics and popular culture. Enterprising instructors can also use this volume to direct undergraduate and high school students toward gendered readings of movement photographs, diary extracts, speeches, films, music, and fiction, so that they can unravel the complicated nature of social change, and question the role of "great men" in history. |
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| KOC University, Istanbul, Turkey |
John Drabble |
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