Fabricating black modernity: Fashion and African American womanhood during the first great migration

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-260
Author(s):  
Einav Rabinovitch-Fox
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
The North ◽  
American Society ◽  
Racial Progress

The early twentieth century was a time of great influx in America. Shifting demographics in the 1910s and 1920s, most notably the migration of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to the urban centres of the North, opened economic and leisure possibilities that provided new spaces to define black modernity and its role in shaping American identity. Debates over black women’s bodies, clothing, hair, and general appearance stood at the centre of public attention and political discourse over gender and race equality, forming a realm where African Americans could challenge white racist stereotypes regarding black femininity and beauty, as well as a means through which they could claim new freedoms and achieve economic mobility. Middle-class reformers, young black migrants, as well as new role models such as female performers and blues singers, all used dress and appearance to redefine notions of beauty, respectability and freedom on their own terms. For these women, fashions became intertwined with questions of racial progress and inclusion in American society, offering a way to lay claims for equal citizenship that moved beyond individual expressions and preferences. This article highlights the place of fashion as a critical political realm for African Americans, who were often barred from access to formal routes of power in the era of Jim Crow. Shifting the perspective beyond official forms of civil rights activism, it argues that fashion enabled black women to carve new positions of power from which they could actively participate in gender and racial politics, demanding their equal place in American society.

West of Jim Crow

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn M. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Freedom Fighters ◽  
White Schools ◽  
Black Bodies

This book follows California’s history of segregation from statehood to the beginning of the long civil rights movement, arguing that the state innovated methods to control and contain African Americans and other people of color. While celebrated in popular discourse for its forward-thinking culture, politics, and science, California also pioneered new ways to keep citizenship white. Schools, streetcars, restaurants, theaters, parks, beaches, and pools were places of contestation where the presence of black bodies elicited forceful responses from segregationists. Black Californians employed innovative measures to dismantle segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they borrowed some tactics from race rebels in the South, others they improvised. West of Jim Crow uses California to highlight the significance of African American resistance to racial restrictions in places often deemed marginal to mainstream civil rights histories. Examining segregation in the state sheds light on the primacy of gender and sexuality in the minds of segregationists and the significance of black women, black bodies, and racial science, in the years preceding the modern civil rights struggle. California has much to teach us about the lives of African Americans who crossed the color line and the variety of tactics and strategies employed by freedom fighters across the United States.

Jim Crow Capital

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
National Level ◽  
Political Campaigns ◽  
Black Freedom Struggle ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Post War

Jim Crow Capital tells the story of how black women in Washington, D.C. transformed civil rights politics between 1920 and 1945. Even though no resident of the nation’s capital could cast a ballot, women nonetheless proclaimed their first-class citizenship rights by working to influence congressional legislation, lobby politicians, shape policy, and secure freedom and justice for all African Americans, both in Washington, D.C. and across the country. During the course of their political campaigns, African American women’s relationship to federal and local politics underwent a fundamental transformation. During the 1920s, black women seized on their location in the nation’s capital to intervene in federal matters, thereby working to improve conditions for disenfranchised African Americans who lacked a political voice on a national level. But by the early 1930s, black women turned their attention to focus more fully on local politics in Washington, D.C. by waging campaigns for economic justice, voting rights, and an end to racial segregation and interracial police brutality, making their freedom struggle an example for the nation. Black women in Washington, D.C. crafted a broad vision of citizenship by waging comprehensive and interconnected campaigns for legal equality, economic citizenship, public commemoration, and safety from violence. Women’s political activism in Washington, D.C. influenced the post-war black freedom struggle and still resonates today.

Epilogue

2014 ◽  
pp. 115-118
Author(s):  
Heather Andrea Williams
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
First Century ◽  
The North ◽  
The Right

Despite the abolition of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, notions of black inferiority and white supremacy still persisted in both the North and the South. The ‘Epilogue’ outlines the profound struggles by African Americans to make their freedom meaningful. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to African Americans and promised equal protection under the law and, in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment gave black men the right to vote. The modern civil rights movement of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s began to impact on the discriminatory Jim Crow laws and practices, but for many African Americans, struggles for equality, justice, and fairness continue into the twenty-first century.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Maryann Erigha
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Culture Industries ◽  
Cultural Preferences ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Racial Progress ◽  
Post Civil Rights

Jim Crow Hollywood describes how Hollywood insiders consider race when making decisions about moviemaking. Movies by and about white Americans are said to be worthy investments, while movies by and about Black Americans are said to be risky investments. This way of thinking has profound effects on the way movies and people move through the Hollywood system—shaping their production budgets, determining who directs lucrative tent pole blockbuster franchise movies, and creating stigma around race and moviemaking. This chapter gives an overview of the book’s approach, a summary of prior research on race in culture industries, and a preview of the book’s chapters. Quotes from film directors, statistics on over a thousand movies, and emails between Hollywood insiders reveal that race is back in the forefront regarding how decision-makers in American culture institutions rationalize inequality. Except now understandings about race are mixed with talk about economic investments and cultural preferences, making racial inequality more palatable to the everyday observer and further entrenching racial divisions that counteract post-Civil rights narratives of racial progress.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Tyrone McKinley Freeman
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
First Century ◽  
Voluntary Action ◽  
American Life ◽  
Intellectual Inquiry ◽  
Historical Importance ◽  
Twenty First Century

The conclusion brings together the lessons and insights provided by examining Walker’s philanthropic life. After summarizing the origins, evolution, and character of Madam Walker’s gospel of giving, it underscores the historical importance of black women’s philanthropy in undermining and resisting Jim Crow and its enduring role in ultimately dismantling the institution. Further, it suggests an approach to theorizing black women’s generosity as being based on five characteristics: proximity, “resourcefull-ness,” collaboration, incrementalism, and joy. It also affirms philanthropy as a powerful interpretive and analytical lens through which to examine African American life in general and black women in particular. It urges collaboration between scholars interested in philanthropy and black women to mutually strengthen intellectual inquiry and understanding of who counts as a philanthropist and what counts as philanthropic giving. It contends that Walker’s gospel of giving is more accessible as a model of generosity than the prevailing examples offered by today’s wealthiest 1 percent. It is certainly the direct inheritance of African Americans today, but relevant to all Americans, regardless of race, class or gender, interested in taking voluntary action in the twenty-first century.

Assimilative Tendencies and Curricular Crosscurrents

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Gleason
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
National Organizations ◽  
American Society ◽  
Zoot Suit

Besides its massive impact on the institutional side of Catholic higher education, World War II affected the thinking of Catholic educators. We have already touched upon this dimension in noting how the war and postwar growth required them to expand their horizons and redouble their efforts in research, fundraising, and administration generally. Here we look more closely at how Catholics were affected by the great ideological revival of democracy that accompanied the war. This kind of influence was sometimes explicitly noted by Catholic leaders, as when Archbishop Richard Gushing of Boston called attention to the “neo-democratic mentality of returning servicemen and the university-age generation generally”; others recognized that it created problems since the Catholic church was so widely perceived as incompatible with democracy and “the American way of life.” We shall postpone examination of controversies stemming from this source to the next chapter, turning our attention in this one to the assimilative tendencies reflected in Catholics’ new appreciation for liberal democratic values, and to the major curricular concerns of the era which were also affected by the war. In no area did the democratic revival have a more profound long range effect than in the impetus it lent to the movement for racial equality and civil rights for African Americans. The publication in 1944 of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma marked an epoch in national understanding of what the book’s subtitle called “the Negro problem and modern democracy.” Myrdal himself stressed the importance of the wartime context, which made it impossible to ignore racial discrimination at home while waging war against Nazi racism. At the same time, increasing black militance, the massive migration of African Americans to northern industrial centers, and above all the great Detroit race riot of 1943—reinforced by the anti-Mexican “Zoot Suit” riots in Los Angeles the same summer—suddenly made the improvement of race relations an imperative for American society as a whole. By the end of the war, no fewer than 123 national organizations were working actively to “reduce intergroup tensions,” and the civil rights movement began a steady advance that led directly to the great judicial and political victories it won in the fifties and sixties.

(Re)Remembering Race

2019 ◽  
pp. 96-135
Author(s):  
Niambi Michele Carter
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Racial Experiences ◽  
Racial History ◽  
American Society ◽  
Racial Progress

Using interviews, this chapter highlights the ways in which blacks talk about immigration. In particular, the chapter seeks to uncover how blacks use their group’s past racial experiences (e.g., Jim Crow) to understand their present circumstances. Interviews conducted by the author reveal that respondents see their blackness as being devalued in American society. Their racial history aids in their assessment of their comparative racial progress. Through the particularities of their group’s history, they are able to understand how racial hierarchy positions their group relative to whites, and how the presence of immigrants highlights their disparate states in society. However, respondents in these interviews harbor no major hostilities toward immigrants. Rather, they are discomfited by the ways they perceive whites as exploiting immigrants in an effort to enforce the subordinate status on their group.

scholarly journals The American Dream: Its Echoes and Possibilities in Literary Discourse

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Kalu, Kalu Obasi
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
Inaugural Speech ◽  
The Face ◽  
American Society

The American Dream stems from the inaugural speech of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”(1941). The Four Freedoms envisaged an American society where the freedom of worship, freedom of speech, freedom of movement and the rights to life are enshrined, guaranteed, and accommodated. America has been clouded with numerous yearnings from all angles – politics, academic, economic, among other social upheavals for the enthronement of the Four Freedoms. Literary scholars have diminutively expressed the horrors of African Americans in various forms and shades, and have hopefully waited for the day it will be implemented. This paper attempts to relay the horrors, echoes, and possibilities of the American Dream as expressed by literary scholars, and the mass media. It also attempts to unveil the measures the African Americans have tried to live within the face of the horrors that have attained their existence among the White Americans. The possibilities of their struggles to live above subjugations, oppressions, the Jim Crow Laws, and racial discrimination that have rocked the American society for decades are also within the wavelength of this work. 

Recasting the Movement and Reframing the Law in Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights

2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (01) ◽  
pp. 243-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Lichtenstein
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
National Association ◽  
Department Of Justice ◽  
Colored People ◽  
The North ◽  
Civil Rights Division ◽  
Long Civil Rights Movement

Risa Goluboff's The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007) advances the historiographical idea that a long civil rights movement, beginning well before the mid‐1950s, had a robust and innovative legal dimension. Her study of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) itself, demonstrates that lawyers in those organizations took guidance from many working‐class clients to successfully deploy a conception of civil rights rooted on the farm and in the factory to challenge the economic and social edifice of Jim Crow, in the North as well as the South.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document