Race and Gender Discourse Strategies: Creating Solidarity and Framing the Civil Rights Movement

In the post–World War II period, nations and territories used international sport to codify and communicate their ideal citizenries. For the United States, black women who competed in track and field complicated these efforts. This book analyzes the ideological influence of black women track stars, examining how they destabilized dominant ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. The strivings and successes of black American track women, such as Alice Coachman, Mae Faggs, and Wilma Rudolph, at the Olympic Games and other international sporting events from 1948 to 1962 repeatedly forced white and black sport cultures in the United States to wrestle with the meaning of black women’s athleticism. Both white and black sport cultures struggled to fit black women athletes into their respective visions for the postwar American nation, reflecting and reinforcing how the Cold War, civil rights movement, and their intersection encouraged broader reconfigurations of the racial, gender, and sexual associations of ideal American identity. Ultimately, these American sport cultures marshaled racialized gender expectations to contain the threat that black women track stars embodied, interpreting and reinterpreting the meaning of their athletic efforts in ways that bolstered established hierarchies of race and gender.

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“I Wanted It to Change and to Make Up for Its Past”

The Daughters of the American Revolution and Patriotic Memory in the Twentieth Century ◽

10.5744/florida/9780813066608.003.0006 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 162-204

Author(s):

Simon Wendt

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Vietnam War ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Public Rhetoric ◽

Race And Gender ◽

Immigration Laws ◽

Femininity And Masculinity ◽

And Gender ◽

The 1960S

The chapter explores the organization’s post–World War II history. This period saw major challenges to its conservative vision of America’s “imagined community.” Despite these challenges, the DAR’s views on race, immigration, gender, and the nation’s past remained virtually unchanged. It continued to embrace ethnic nationalism, opposing racial integration and a liberalization of America’s immigration laws, and upheld the very same ideals of femininity and masculinity that its campaigns had emphasized prior to 1945. The organization regarded the social movements of the 1960s, including the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and second wave feminism, as a grave danger to the nation. Although the DAR began to admit black members in 1977 and finally acknowledged African Americans’ patriotic contributions to American independence in the 1980s, its public rhetoric of civic tolerance frequently belied the DAR’s conservative views on race and gender.

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A Political Companion to James Baldwin

10.5810/kentucky/9780813169910.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Keyword(s):

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Historical Context ◽

James Baldwin ◽

The Political ◽

Individual Experience ◽

Race And Gender ◽

The Past ◽

Political Implications ◽

And Gender

In this text, a group of prominent scholars assesses James Baldwin’s relevance to present-day political challenges. Together, they address Baldwin as a democratic theorist, activist, and citizen, examining his writings on the civil rights movement, religion, homosexuality, and women’s rights. They investigate the ways in which his work speaks to and galvanizes a collective American polity, and explore his views on the political implications of individual experience in relation to race and gender. This volume not only considers Baldwin’s works within their own historical context, but also applies the author’s insights to recent events such as the Obama presidency and the Black Lives Matter movement, emphasizing his faith in the connections between the past and present. These incisive essays will encourage a new reading of Baldwin that celebrates his significant contributions to political and democratic theory.

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Lillian Smith

American Literature ◽

10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0208 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Will Brantley

Keyword(s):

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

White Supremacy ◽

Rural Setting ◽

Human Beings ◽

Race And Gender ◽

The North ◽

Lillian Smith ◽

And Gender ◽

Liberal Vision

Lillian Smith (b. 1897–d. 1966) was born in Jasper, Florida, and grew up in a large and well-to-do southern family. In 1915, in the wake of the First World War, her father, Calvin Warren Smith, lost his financial standing and relocated his family to their summer home in North Georgia where he opened first a hotel and then a summer camp for girls, which Smith would later own and direct. It is somewhat surprising that no one has yet made a feature film based on Smith’s life. She is the Floridian teenager who found herself transplanted to a scenic but rural environment in the north Georgia mountains; the young woman who superintended elementary schools in this rural setting; the undergraduate student at both the local Piedmont College (1915–1916) and the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore (1917–1918, 1919–1922); the music teacher at a missionary school in Huzhow, China, an experience that solidified her social consciousness (1922–1925); the progressive director of Laurel Falls Camp for girls, many of whom came from the state’s wealthiest families (1925–1948); the publisher of South Today, a quarterly magazine and forum for liberal thought that she coedited for ten years with her life partner Paula Snelling (1936–1944); the controversial author of Strange Fruit, one of the best-selling novels of 1944; the self-analyst who published Killers of the Dream, a groundbreaking work of autobiography and cultural criticism that appeared first in 1949 and then again in an expanded edition in 1962; the friend and advisor to influential players on the national scene, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr.; and the combative social activist who withstood threats as she promoted her liberal vision through fiction, letters, essays, speeches, and pamphlets—including Now Is the Time (1954), her ardent defense of school desegregation—and creative works of self-writing and nonfiction prose, including The Journey (1954) and her final book, Our Faces, Our Words (1964). Smith was diagnosed with cancer in 1953, the disease that took her life in 1966 at the height of the civil rights movement that she, through her writings and activism, had helped to bring about and which she saw as evidence that human beings can in fact evolve. Smith turned a searchlight on the workings of white supremacy and blasted conservative ideologies of both race and gender. She has, since her death, emerged slowly but steadily as a pivotal figure in attempts to redraw the boundaries of the literary and cultural renaissance in the mid-20th century South.

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Passing the Baton toward Belonging

10.5622/illinois/9780252043482.003.0004 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 81-114

Author(s):

Cat M. Ariail

Keyword(s):

Black Women ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Double Burden ◽

Race And Gender ◽

Sport Culture ◽

And Gender ◽

Young Black Women ◽

Track Athletes ◽

The Cold War

This chapter analyzes how the colliding demands of the Cold War and civil rights movement began to endow black women track athletes with propagandistic purpose, as demonstrated by the interpretations of their presences and performances at the 1955 Pan-American Games and 1956 Olympic Games. The “double burden” of race and gender now made them powerful symbols of the promise of American democracy. Black American sport culture also more enthusiastically embraced black track women as race women, recognizing them as active contributors to the effort for black rights. Yet, these altered understandings of black women athletes were not possible without the athletes themselves, especially Mae Faggs, who modeled the often-overlooked agency of young black women.

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Gender, Race, and Twentieth-Century Dissenting Traditions

10.1093/oso/9780198702252.003.0013 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Laura Rademaker

Keyword(s):

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Global South ◽

Demographic Shift ◽

Race And Gender ◽

Independent Churches ◽

Embodied Experiences ◽

The Usa ◽

And Gender ◽

Evangelical Feminism

This chapter bases its analysis of rapid changes in conceptions of race and gender in the contextual shifts in authority, autonomy, and demography within Dissenting Protestantism around the world, particularly between the bureaucratized, wealthy global North and the poor, mostly non-white and female churches in the global South. The chapter ‘embraces the intersection’ of categories of race and gender to avoid overlooking lived, embodied experiences of people as both ‘gendered and raced’. Subjects covered include Pentecostalism’s fresh expressions of gender and conceptions of race, women’s work in the international missionary movement and the social gospel, new dissenting Christianities and expressions of racial identities in a context of decolonization and the rise of independent churches; the civil rights movement in the USA and the rise of second-wave feminism; conservative reactions to evangelical feminism, ‘complementarian’ gender roles, and the demographic shift in (D)issenting Protestantism—the rise of the global South.

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Race and Gender

The Vanishing Middle Class ◽

10.7551/mitpress/9780262036160.003.0005 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Peter Temin

Keyword(s):

African Americans ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Jim Crow ◽

Latino Immigrants ◽

Dual Economy ◽

Race And Gender ◽

African Slaves ◽

And Gender ◽

The 1960S

Racism, or racecraft, began when African slaves first were brought to America. Slaves were not included in “all men” who were created equal, and the Civil War did not make African Americans equal citizens. Jim Crow laws and actions prevented them from voting and getting a decent education until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. The backlash from this movement led to a dual economy. Women also were not full citizens until the 20th century, and their right to full equality is still being contested. Latino immigrants more recently have entered racecraft on a par with blacks, as in pejorative statements about black and brown people.

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