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Reviews
| Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle. By Laurie B. Green. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 415 pp. Maps, photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
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In Battling the Plantation Mentality, Laurie B. Green provides a new analysis of the black freedom movement in Memphis, Tennessee. Her monograph focuses on working-class African Americans who chose to fight the ravages of the "plantation mentality" that followed them as they migrated out of rural Arkansas and Mississippi to Memphis. Green highlights blacks' determination to relieve themselves of the ever-present humiliation they endured due to their class, race, and (in the case of black women), gender. Her use of richly textured oral history interviews allows the voices of working-class African Americans to ring clearly as they counteracted and circumvented Memphis's racist environment during and after World War II. |
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A focus on working-class black activism reveals nuances not commonly explored in other scholarship on the black freedom movement. Green adeptly uses the oral history interviews she collected in the mid-1990s to demonstrate how blacks criticized not only white racism but also African American complacency. One of her most useful examples is Sally Turner, a working-class woman who was prostrate with frustration at her coworkers' refusal to unionize from fear of losing their jobs. This example further exposes the ways in which working-class blacks understood and analyzed their world. Their conceptualization of "freedom" permeated every part of their daily lives as they left sharecropping behind and migrated to Memphis. Their activism was designed to eviscerate white racism and to reclaim black consciousness from the slave mentality that for so long had held many African Americans captive. In doing so, blacks in Memphis projected images of themselves that demonstrated their self-empowerment even under the worst circumstances through such media as radio and film. This activism also encouraged African Americans to battle the more tangible sources of their oppression as they shaped their definitions of freedom by combating police brutality and unfair working conditions. |
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Green's study also hinges on the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike and their accompanying placards that read "I Am a Man" which further contributes to defining freedom among Memphis blacks. Although the roots of this strike reach back to the 1950s, its greater significance—beyond the desire for improved working conditions and increased pay—was the demand that black men be treated like adults rather than dependent and degraded children. Green skillfully points out the relevance of this strike for black working-class women, who also fought for increased pay and freedom from sexual harassment, physical abuse, and "gendered images" of themselves as domestic servants. Through this integrated set of goals, black men and women once again approached and defined their activism using their own particular understandings of the world in which they operated. |
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Green asserts that in their quest to procure "freedom" from the "plantation mentality," African Americans in Memphis borrowed, deconstructed, and reconstructed "contemporary political discourse" (p. 5), which in turn allowed them to build a "counter-hegemony" (p. 5). The agency blacks exercised permitted them to protest the failure of democracy, the lack of justice, and express their desire for better lives, even as they were often at the mercy of political juggernauts such as the Crump administration in the mid-1950s. |
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In her final analysis, Green concludes that more remains the same than has changed as African Americans in Memphis continue to face many of the same problems that plagued them in the years following World War II. It is this realization that makes this monograph such a necessary contribution to our ever-changing understandings of the black freedom movement.
Cherisse Jones-Branch
Arkansas State University
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