WASM Review examples
Review of How It Feels To Be Free:
Black Women Entertainers and the Civil
Rights Movement (Ruth Feldstein, 2013)
Feldstein, Ruth, How It Feels To Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights
Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 296, ISBN 9780195314038)
Reviewed by Judith Smith, University of Massachusetts, Boston
How did black women entertainers from the 1940s to the 1970s represent "freedom dreams" in
different moments of civil rights protest to audiences in the U.S. and around the world? How were they
constrained by gendered expectations of black womanhood, and how did they represent challenges to
these gender conventions amid their demands for black liberation? These are the questions animating
Feldstein's important new study of a group of black women artists--Lena Horne, Miriam Makeba, Nina
Simone, Abbey Lincoln, Diahann Carroll, and Cecily Tyson. All of these women made names for
themselves in musical, film and television performance, and all took risks to connect their artistry with
black activism, often appearing in circumstances and sparking public conversations over which they had
little control. Feldstein writes that "in their public performances and their political protests . . . they
drew attention to unequal relationships between blacks and whites and to relationships between men
and women" (6). In doing so, they expanded the meanings of "how it feels to be free" and they
anticipated later emerging formulations of black militancy and women's liberation.
Feldstein places these women entertainers within the rich traditions of nineteenth and early twentieth
century entertainers whose public performance resisted racial and sexual stereotypes. Like the black
and white female abolitionists whose demands to speak in public challenged the norms defining
women's place, these artists' interest in self-representation challenged conventional expectations for
female entertainers. Here Feldstein builds on the work of literary and music scholars: Daphne Brooks'
formulation that black women performers evoked "an insurgent power that exceeded the way that
audiences tried to define them as primitive and as sexualized objects," and Farah Jasmine Griffin's
decoding of complex meanings conveyed in Billie Holiday's multi-layered musical performances.
Feldstein argues that performances by the artists in her study, and reactions to these performances,
together worked to represent black activism, and to remake the meanings of black womanhood, thus
contributing to the political history of the period. Especially when they appeared before audiences
outside the United States, they "exported" ideas about black protest, and their repertoires, performance
styles, and self-presentation of blackness, beauty, glamour, and female sexual agency circulated new
popular cultural representations of identity and renegotiated power relations.
The openings for these black women to forge careers as creative artists emerged in a historical period
when multiple forms of night life flourished and going out was routine. They found rich possibilities for
artistic expression intertwined with black, interracial, and international political radicalism in New York
City's vibrant cultural life unfolding on multiple stages. Their performing careers intersected with
important shifts in civil rights consciousness, from a kind of cultural nationalism that coexisted with
interracialism before 1965 to popular formations of blackness with a more insistent masculinism after
1965, and concurrent shifts in popular entertainment, as urban nightlife faced increasing competition
from television's living room appeal.
Lena Horn, a generation older than the other five women, broke into performance in the revue at
Harlem's Cotton Club, sang in nightclubs, travelled with big bands, and appeared at Cafe Society, the leftwing interracial nightclub popularizing the integration of jazz and political cabaret. Horne's
film appearances, in black-cast musicals produced by Hollywood studios that relied on presold musical
talent, circulated her particular modern style of glamour as sexual and respectable, desirable and
unattainable. Dissatisfied with the constraints of her film roles, Horne returned to nightclub
performance and television variety shows, all the while lending her celebrity to radical black and
interracial protest. By the late 1950s, when Miriam Makeba, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, Diahann
Carroll and Cecily Tyson in some sense followed Horne's path into performing careers and arts activism
in New York City, Horne described herself as inspired to change in response to younger black artists'
political militancy and creative expression.
Political and cultural shifts shaped the performing context and opportunities for recognition for these
artists in the United States, and disrupted any simple celebrity pathway from musical and theatrical
performance to widely circulating film, television, or recording. Miriam Makeba's exile jazz and folk
performances--in the 1959 underground art film Come Back Africa , in U.S. nightclubs, on television
variety shows, and on recordings--most powerfully represented the connection between the new
domestic civil rights militancy and the struggle against apartheid, until her marriage to black power
spokesperson Stokely Carmichael embroiled her in political conflicts that foreclosed many performing
opportunities. Nina Simone's genre-busting musical performances in hybrid jazz/folk clubs from the late
1950s through the 1960s led to hit recordings and concert stages, in the United States, Europe, and
around the world. Her embodiment of an American racially-based authenticity, classical skills and
cosmopolitan elegance and her provocative original songs circulated her fierce vision of racial and
sexual liberation, but she too, found herself caught in political and commercial trends that drove her to
leave the United States. The singer who would rename herself as Abbey Lincoln began performing as a
glamorous nightclub singer but renamed herself when she shifted her repertoire to experimental jazz
emphasizing the black freedom struggle in the late 1950s. The kind of politically and musically
provocative jazz with which Lincoln affiliated herself was losing its popular audience in the 1960s, and
although she dazzled critics in two independent screen roles, these experiments did not translate into
continuing performing opportunities. Diahann Carroll followed Lena Horne's early path most closely,
performing in nightclubs, on Broadway, and in musical films; her support of civil rights protest coexisted with her glamorous musical celebrity, but the performance she was most closely identified with
limited the sorts of film roles she was offered and able to make convincing. Off-Broadway productions
and an early experiment in an urban television drama series employing the aspiring actress Cecily Tyson
did not yield continuing performance opportunities. By the mid-1960s and certainly in the 1970s,
mainstream media made new efforts to include representations of black women, and extended the
performing careers of Carroll and Tyson. Carroll's glamorous persona shaped her appearances on serial
television, as a nurse in Julia in the 1960 and as a ruthless wealthy "black bitch" on Dynasty in the 1980s.
Tyson memorably portrayed strong and dignified black womanhood in the film Sounder and on the
television special The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman ; Feldstein argues that the historical characters
in these productions encouraged audiences to imagine the 1970s as "post-racial." This work presented
fewer openings to represent contemporary iterations of continuing racial and gender protest.
By looking at these artists in relationship to one another, as shaped in part by radical cultural arts
activism flourishing in new York City in the 1940s and1950s, and as operating in a shared political
context in the 1960s, How It Feels To Be Free provides a powerful corrective to popular journalistic
accounts proclaiming on each one's uniqueness; the star ascent/downfall trajectory of individual
biographies; and the personal revelations, confessions and excisions in memoirs and autobiography.
Feldstein's account challenges conventional histories that separate culture and politics, and offers an
insistently powerful racial and gendered analysis of the particular obstacles constraining black women's
pathway to self-expression and recognition as creative artists. Feldstein points out that recent
posthumous narratives about these artists continue "to obscure the vital communities of women whose
members performed civil rights," and the ways in which they influenced each other (21). Fortunately for
readers, Feldstein's beautifully researched and nuanced account restores these artists as "part of an
emergent collectivity," revealing them actively shaping circumstances not of their own making. How It
feels to Be Free begins the work required to rewrite "narratives of black activism and feminism, and
render these social movements in all their messy complexity and richness" (194).
Judith Smith is a professor of American Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston. Her explorations into
postwar radio, film, drama, and television have appeared in various published essays and in Visions of
Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, And Postwar Democracy, 1940-1960 (Columbia University
Press, 2004). She has written about cultural expression emerging from New York City's black left in that
volume and in her new book, Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical (University of Texas Press,
2014).
Review of Standing on My Sisters'
Shoulders (Joan Sadoff, Robert Sadoff,
and Laura J. Lipson, 2002)
Standing on My Sisters' Shoulders . Prod. by Joan Sadoff, Robert Sadoff, and Laura Libson. Sadoff
Productions, 2002. 61 mins. (Women Make Movies, Inc., 462 Broadway, Suite 500WS, New York, NY
10013.)
Reviewed Rhonda D. Jones
Until recently, the literature on the Civil Rights movement did not acknowledge, much less analyze, the
efforts of black female activists. Their commitments and sacrifices were largely overshadowed by the
charismatic images of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, Stokely Carmichael, and
Andrew Young. In the last decade, however, scholars like Barbara Ransby, Vicki Crawford, Cynthia
Griggs Fleming, and Chana Kai Lee have demonstrated that men led the national movement, but it was
women who shouldered the all-important burdens of local organizing. The 2002 documentary, Standing
on My Sisters' Shoulders , offers rare film footage and on-screen interviews that further establish the
crucial role played by local African American women and their white female allies in the key civil rights
campaigns of the mid-1960's.
Director Laura J. Lipson focuses her film on the oppressive Mississippi Delta, which produced wellknown grassroots leaders like Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray, who are featured in
the film alongside local heroes like Unita Blackwell, Flonzie Goodloe Brown-Wright, Mae Bertha
Carter, and Arnell Ponder. The documentary uses taped interviews, photographs, and archival footage,
to focus on key moments in the civil rights struggle in Mississippi--including the Emmett Till murder of
1955, the Freedom Rides of 1961, the Woolworth's sit-in of 1963, Freedom Summer of 1964, and the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party of 1964. Lipson shows the daily risks local women took to
challenge segregation, become registered voters, and organize voter registration drives. Those
interviewed on screen point out that lynch law put men at greater risk than women if they defied racist
rules, and women's historic involvement in the black church gave them a safe and sacred space from
which to disseminate information, form committees, and train community leaders. These local female
leaders mobilized at a particular moment in history, despite limited monetary and political resources.
Using both contemporary and historic footage of Mississippi, the film opens with the chilling images of
the segregated Jim Crow South during the 1950s and 1960s. Lynchings, Klan demonstrations, unchecked
violence, limited education, economic reprisal, poll taxes, literacy tests, and abject poverty
presented formidable obstacles to an African-American uprising. But, inspired by the Montgomery bus
boycott that stretched from the end of 1955 through most of 1956, the Supreme Court decision in Brown
v. Board of Education , the passage of the Civil Rights bills of 1957 and 1960, and the Freedom Rides in
1961, women in Mississippi's local communities were galvanized into action. Standing on My Sisters'
Shoulders depicts these grassroots female leaders as organic intellectuals who drew on their own
experiences with the repressive system of Jim Crow and the egalitarian theology of their churches to
fashion a simple demand for blacks' inalienable right, as American citizens, to self-determination.
From Mamie Till Bradley's insistence that the "whole world" see her son's beaten body to the
Congressional testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray against the exclusionary
practices of the Mississippi Democratic Party in 1965, Sisters offers an excellent film companion to
the emerging literature on women's civil rights organizing. Lipson illustrates how local black organizers
like Anne Moody and Fonzie Goodloe Brown-Wright worked with white allies like Joan Trumpauer and
Winifred Green to integrate lunch counters, schools, and elections and to acculturate young SNCC
activists unfamiliar with the ways of the rural South. Lipson also shows how local women both initiated
and enacted the agendas typically associated with male-dominated national organizations like SNCC
(Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, COFO (Council of Federated Organizations), CORE (the
Congress of Racial Equality), and SCLC (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference).
While all of the women profiled in the film serve as a source of inspiration, two of the most renowned
figures in the film are Mae Bertha Carter and Fannie Lou Hamer. Carter's poignant struggle to keep
seven of her thirteen children in the all-white Drew High School was captured in Constance
Curry's award-winning book, Silver Rights (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1995); and
Hamer's defiant leadership of the voting rights campaign in Montgomery County has been chronicled
in For Freedom's Sake by Chana Kai Lee (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). Both of these
women's stories are effectively portrayed in this film, which includes interviews with Carter and two of
her children. Hamer's story is better known than Carter's but this film makes impressive use of
interviews to argue that Hamer was a charismatic leader because she operated without an ounce of
vengeance, instilling in others a capacity to turn their fear and anger into optimism and determination.
Lipson's film takes care to show the gains that these civil rights activists made, not only for the whole
nation but in their own lives. Unita Blackwell, for example, became the first black female mayor in
Mississippi; all seven of Mae Bertha Carter's children attended college; and Constance Slaughter Harvey
was the first black woman to graduate from the law school at Ole Miss, in 1970. Standing on My Sisters'
Shoulders also shows how the 1964 efforts by Hamer, Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray within the
progressive, multi-racial Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party altered forever the Democratic Party's
acceptance of political segregation in the South. Footage and interviews recall the MFDP's challenge to
the state's all-white delegates at the Democratic National Convention, capturing Hamer's historic
appearance at the 1964 convention in Atlantic City. The film also traces the three women's appearance
before the U.S. House of Representatives to testify that state representatives were elected illegally. In
calling for open elections, their actions pressured President Lyndon B. Johnson into signing the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, which eliminated among other things the literacy tests and poll tax. By 1968, Unita
Blackwell was in the company of fifty-four African American female mayors in the state of Mississippi.
Standing on My Sisters' Shoulders has received a Special Jury Prize at the Savannah Film and Video
Festival, the Audience Award at the Atlanta Film Festival, Humanitarian Award at the Long Island Film
Expo, and was a Finalist at the USA Film Festival.
Review of Reasoning from Race:
Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights
Revolution (Serena Mayeri, 2011)
Serena Mayeri, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2011. 382 pp. Cloth, 39.95, ISBN: 0674047591)
Review by TJ Boisseau, Purdue University
By unraveling the delicate strands of political activism, legal decision-making, and cultural rhetorics that
have often served to knit together twentieth-century legal struggles to achieve race and sex equality in
the United States, Serena Mayeri has performed a valuable service to both critical race theorists and
women's historians as well as to legal scholars interested in understanding the complicated dance that
feminists and anti-racist activists have often engaged in during the last half century. Mayeri neither joins
the bandwagon of critics who have dismissed white feminists' efforts to analogize from race (accusing
them of exploitative tactics and insensitivity to the differences between the experiences of racial
injustice and sex discrimination) nor does she wave away this judgment without considering the
significant limits of analogizing from one to the other set of discriminatory practices. However, in the
end, her research lays to rest the canard that 1970s feminists pushed forward a narrow, formal,
assimilationist version of equality or actively denied any difference in experience of race and gender or
differences between men and women even. She does this by keeping her gaze trained on how black
women strove to make their cases for the intersection of the two.
Anchoring her narrative in the crush of civil rights organizing during the early 1960s, Mayeri ascribes
early efforts to link race to sex discrimination by such understudied luminaries as Pauli Murray. She
then describes the creative milieu within which feminist and anti-racist activists worked in the late
1970s and 1980s as opposition to analogizing from race to sex challenged them to delve deeper than the
"colorblindness" model proffered by conservatives and those opposed to affirmative action. In her book,
Mayeri carefully weighs the moments and cases in which analogizing produced insufficient and onedimensional analogies that constrained rather than opened up the possibilities for argument and
advocacy. With such a balanced narrative, Mayeri provides the reader with a nuanced and careful
discussion of just how and when race analogies arose in legal discourse and tracks their efficacy
over time in terms of legal precedents and legislative policies. By refusing to place white feminists at the
center and instead showcasing black women advocates and activists--such as, again most prominently,
Pauli Murray--Mayeri shows just how useful analogizing from race could be for both black and
white women, despite the tensions and competitiveness that this cooperative linking sometimes
produced.
Mayeri's description and tracking of the career and intellectual thought of Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray
represents a mainstay of the work. Murray's attempts to define "Jane Crow" present an early instance of
the kind of "intersectionality" thinking that has defined so much of the contribution of black women
scholars to our understanding of not just history but of identity, justice, and political culture in the last
two decades. Many other figures of importance in the interpretation of race-to-sex analogizing also
appear in Mayeri's work, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Wendy Webster
Williams as well as the lesser known lawyers working behind the scenes on cases of sex discrimination
that ended up hinging on analogies with race such as Ruth Weyand, and Jane Picker. Also leaping out
from these pages are important voices for change such as Fannie Lou Hamer--best remembered for her
electric testimony during the 1964 Democratic nominating convention but whose testimony once again
produced a firestorm in the early 1970s case of Katie Mae Andrews who was denied a teaching job on
the basis of her single motherhood ( Andrews v. Drew Municipal Separate School District , 1973). As
Mayeri shows, a case such as this one shows not only the pivotal role that black women played as
plaintiffs and witnesses in pushing the legal system to acknowledge their position at the intersection of
discriminations based upon both race and sex, but also the key roles played by black women as
advocates, lawyers, and activists, in insisting that no simplistic sense of analogy be allowed to hold sway
over public understandings of how race and sex, as well as class and later sexuality, were braided
together in American life and society.
This is no narrow legal history--parsing the difference between policy-making, judicial decisions, and
popular debate. Nor does this book get too caught up in the intricate nature of the social construction of
gender or race as constituted in social practice and law. Instead, Mayeri's careful historical narrative
keeps the reader's eye consistently on the prize of understanding the frequent resort to race analogies
made by feminists along with the variety of agendas and obstacles such analogizing produced that then
had to be overcome. In the process Mayeri charts the contributions, missteps, and limits of using race to
understand gender in law and policy making. This books insists that we put aside our prior convictions
regarding what should or should not have been feminist strategy to trace the "career of reasoning from
race," as she so cogently puts it, "that helps to explain why analogizing sex and race discrimination
appealed to feminists generally, and to African American feminist legal advocates in particular" (228).
TJ Boisseau is the Director of Women's Studies at Purdue University. She is the author of White Queen: May
French-Sheldon and the Imperial Origins of American Feminist Identity (Indiana University Press, 2004)
and co-editor along with Tracy A. Thomas of Feminist Legal History: Essays on Women and Law (New
York University Press, 2011).
Review of To Turn the Whole World
Over: Black Women and
Internationalism (Keisha N. Blain and
Tiffany M. Gill, 2019)
Keisha N. Blain and Tiffany M. Gill, eds. To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and
Internationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019). 296 pp. Paper, $26.00, ISBN: 978-0-25208411-9
Although "Black Internationalism" as a field of study is relatively new and rapidly growing, Black
activists and intellectuals have long theorized, organized, and engaged in global politics in an expansive
way. This internationalism ranged from political and cultural insurgencies against slavery,
colonialism, and imperialism to diplomatic relations throughout the African Diaspora and beyond
European nation-states. Historians Keisha Blain and Tiffany Gill's edited collection, To Turn the Whole
World Over (2019), explores the gendered components of Black internationalism by examining how
Black women engaged in global affairs from the nineteenth century to the present. Together, their
anthology represents the first and only collection to assemble the most recent and innovative
scholarship on Black women's internationalism, expanding the field theoretically, methodologically, and
temporarily.
To Turn the Whole World Over challenges dominant narratives of political struggle as the primary
avenue of black internationalism. Instead, the contributors map the contours of Black women's global
engagements beyond the overtly radical and progressive political arena. They argue that Black women
creatively "forged global connections and innovated strategic alliances through their consumption
activities and economic pursuits, leisure and religious practices, as well as through performance and
artistic expression" (4). Their approach unearths Black women's international activities in understudied
locales such as Australia, Spain, Germany, China, Haiti, and Liberia. Collectively, these scholars disrupt
male-centric frameworks of Black global politics and expand what constitutes evidence of foreign affairs.
The contributors shed light on the usefulness of scrapbooks, quilts, speeches and writings, artistic
performances, song lyrics, domestic activism, and leisure travel as alternative sites for examining where
Black women engage in global connections.
The contributors' essays are thematically divided into three main sections: "Travel and Migrations,"
"Creating Black Internationalism," and "Political Activism and Global Freedom Struggles." Travel has
been foundational for Black women's conceptualization of the world and for their positionality beyond a
specific nation-state. Coming into physical contact with people from different countries, cultures, and
histories transformed many Black women's ideas and racial consciousness. In this first section, readers
learn about Eslanda Robeson's trips through French and Belgian colonies in Central Africa during the
1940s. Drawing on unpublished diary entries, letters, and published articles, Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel
illuminates the ways Robeson's travels shaped her anti-colonial activism and feminist networks. As
Robeson's African trips showcase, the wartime and postwar eras opened the door for many African
Americans to travel abroad. Black presses, like the Chicago Defender, also played a key role in circulating
information about international travel opportunities and people's experiences while abroad. Take for
example, Kim Gallon's analysis of the Defender's popularity contests, a competition among women at
least eighteen years or older to achieve the most one-year subscriptions to the newspaper. Gallon
situates the competition's grand prize trips to Haiti as a key site of Black women's internationalism
through the lens of tourism and leisure. Although many African American tourists held Western ideas of
progress and social development, the tourist industry in Haiti allowed for economic cooperation
between individuals throughout the diaspora.
The following sub-collection of essays, "Creating Black Internationalism," examines how Black women
remembered, archived, and documented their internationalism through various forms of artistic
expression. Anne Donlon's biographical piece on labor activist, social worker, and world traveler
Thyra Edwards mines Edwards' scrapbook from her time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War to trace
the evolution of her ideas on race, gender, and fascism throughout the 1930s. Edwards was one of the
many African American volunteers and soldiers who traveled to defend the Republic of Spain against the
fascist forces led by General Francisco Franco. She was joined by other radical Black women thinkers
like Salaria Kea, Louise Thompson, Melva Price, and Alison Burroughs, who all brought a Black feminist
critique to an antifascist movement. Whereas scrapbooks usually document private and familial
accomplishments, Edwards' scrapbook recorded her and other organizers' contributions to the war
effort. Similar to Donlon's work on Black women's memory-making through objects, Stephanie Beck
Cohen's research on Liberian quilting offers an innovative reading on material culture and gifting
practices. She argues that Liberian women constructed social, political, and economic networks through
quilting from the late-nineteenth century to the present. African American settlers who founded the
country brought with them the art of quilting, and over time Liberian women adopted these techniques
and made it their own. To this day, Liberian women's quilts are gifted in social, religious, and diplomatic
environments, operating as a key site of cultural exchange and internationalism.
Centering Black American women's political ideas and activism to the histories of global liberation
movements, the last set of contributors in "Political Activism and Global Freedom Struggles" explores
radical and progressive approaches to forming and imagining international connections. In the case of
working-class and poor Black women who had limited financial resources to travel abroad, engaging in
local forms of grassroots organizing advanced their freedom dreams. Keisha Blain's account of Mitta
Maude Lena Gordon's massive letter-writing campaign throughout the 1930s posits emigration
efforts as another facet of Black women's internationalism. Gordon, an African American nationalist and
Garveyite, continued organizing for universal Black liberation, economic independence, and selfdetermination well after Marcus Garvey's 1927 deportation. Nearly twenty years later, civil rights and
Black Power activists would build on these Pan-Africanist ideas pioneered by Garveyites. Julia Erin
Wood's article makes this clear in her study on gender, internationalism, and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Several Black women in SNCC traveled to Guinea for three weeks
in 1964, and returned home with a renewed organizational and ideological commitment to
African nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and anti-colonial movements. Wood and Blain both
underscore the importance of women in pushing national organizations to have material ties
with Africa amid decolonial struggles.
Read together, the essays in To Turn the Whole World Over tell the stories of individuals and groups who
engaged in global politics through various forms of social, cultural, and economic diplomacy. The
anthology's contributors foreground the ways everyday Black women contributed to larger social
movements during the twentieth century, ranging from anti-fascism and anti-colonial efforts to PanAfricanist and Third World solidarities. Furthermore, these authors shed light on the significance of
international travel to liberatory worldviews and ideologies. They provide a more nuanced view of Black
internationalism that includes radical and progressive political activists as well as intentionally
apolitical entertainers and tourists. Scholarship on Black women's internationalism such as this opens
the door for more studies on Black women's leisure and pleasure activities, religious expressions, and
artistic creations.
Tiana Wilson is a doctoral candidate in History with a portfolio in Women's and Gender Studies at the
University of Texas at Austin. She is writing an intellectual and organizational history of the Third World
Women's Alliance. Her research has appeared in the Journal of African American History, Not Even
Past, Perspectives Daily, Black Perspectives, and the Handbook of Texas Women.
Sklar, Kathryn Kish and Erin Shaughnessy. "How Did African-American Women Define Their Citizenship
at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893?" Binghamton, NY: State University of New York,
1997. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cweb_collection%7C249
5748.
Address to be Delivered at the International Congress of Women in Berlin, Germany, June 13th
1904. Included in What Was the Relationship between Mary Church Terrell's International Experience and
Her Work against Racism in the United States?, Documents selected and interpreted by Alison M. Parker.
Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2012.
Pat Robinson and Group, "Letter to a North Vietnamese Sister from an Afro-American Woman--Sept.
1968," in Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Toni Cade. New York: New American Library, 1970, pp. 18994. Included in How Did African American Women Shape the Civil Rights Movement and What
Challenges Did They Face?, Documents selected and interpreted by Gail S. Murray. Alexandria, VA:
Alexander Street Press, 2010.
Shirley Graham Du Bois to Bettina Aptheker, 14 April 1971, Bettina Aptheker Papers. MS 157, Special
Collections and Archives, University Library, University of California, Santa Cruz. Included in Free Angela
Davis, And All Political Prisoners! A Transnational Campaign for Liberation, Documents selected and
interpreted by Dayo F. Gore with archival and editorial assistance from Bettina Aptheker. Alexandria,
VA: Alexander Street Press, 2014.
The International Agenda Teaching Tool: Teaching strategy, Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street,
2015. https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1006875209.
Alonso, Harriet Hyman. The Longest Living Women's Peace Organization in World History: The Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915 to the Present. Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street,
2012. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7
C2476915.
McCluskey, Audrey Thomas. Mary McLeod Bethune: First Lady of Black America. Alexandria, VA:
Alexander Street,
2016. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7
C2807713.
Review of Race Women Internationalists:
Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom
Struggles (Imaobong D. Umoren, 2018) and
Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist
Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom
(Keisha N. Blain, 2018)
Imaobong D. Umoren. Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom
Struggles (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. 193 pp. $34.95. ISBN-13: 978-0-5202-9581-0)
Keisha N. Blain. Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for
Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 264 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-08122-4988-0)
Reviewed by Brandy Thomas Wells, Oklahoma State University
Historians Imaobong D. Umoren and Keisha N. Blain offer gripping accounts of Black women activists
agitating for Black rights and liberation from the early to the mid-twentieth century. In Race Women
Internationalists, Umoren adopts a comparative focus that brings together the activities and thinking of
Una Marson, Paulette Nardal, and Eslanda Robeson--all recipients of varying biographical treatments,
but never studied alongside one another. The comparative approach reveals that across nations, Black
women activists simultaneously engaged in overlapping networks and internationalisms, including
Black, feminist, Christian, liberal, anti-fascist, radical, and conservative traditions. In Set the World on
Fire, Blain, too, shines a light on the vibrant and pragmatic political ideas and activism of Black female
nationalists. The book opens with familiar actors like Amy Ashwood and Amy Jacques Garvey, who
inspired and worked alongside no less impressive organizers like Mitte Maude Gordon and Celia Jane
Allen. Their opposition to gender inequality—what Blain calls "proto-feminist consciousness"—led them
to craft their ideologies and spaces to demand both racial and gender equality, liberation, and unity long
after the United Negro Improvement Association's star began to fade.
In moving women from the margins to the center, Umoren and Blain make clear that Black women
nationalists and internationalists were multidimensional beings. As a general rule, they were neither
monolithic nor static, nor always progressive. While Umoren's actors defy simple categorization as
radical or conservative, Blain's activists were more than Garveyites. In chapters one and two of Race
Women Internationalists, Umoren describes how Robeson's and Marson's experiences in London and
Nardal's experiences in Paris enabled them to contribute to a transnational public sphere that developed
their thinking about Black and feminist internationalism. For instance, Robeson's tours throughout
Europe led her to befriend several African students, complete a degree in anthropology at the London
School of Economics, and explore communism. While her growing interest in radical leftist politics made
her dissimilar from Marson and Nardal, chapter three illustrates that Italy's invasion of Ethiopia and the
Spanish Civil War led them all to the banner of anti-fascist internationalism.
From Paris, Nardal expanded her networks to cofound the Ethiopian Action Committee and to include
the International African Friends of Ethiopia, which Amy Ashwood Garvey helped to create. Here, and
throughout the book, Umoren introduces these activists as they were, revealing for instance, that
despite her work within the Ethiopian Legation in London and the League of Nations Union during and
after the Second World War, Marson held limited, civilizationist views that led her to champion selfdetermination that if successful would look like Western civilization (though she claimed a more
advanced version). Additionally, Nardal's appreciation of French colonization led her to call for
Martinique's increased role in French governance and politics rather than for its independence.
Although Umoren does well to present these complexities, she misses an opportunity to contrast the
actions and ideologies of these activist-intellectuals. Additionally, it would be interesting to know to
what extent these activists, all of whom were contemporaries, knew of each other, and how they
assessed each other's political contributions.
Akin to Race Women Internationalists, Blain's Set the World on Fire unfolds in thematic-chronological
discussions. In chapter one, readers learn how black nationalist and internationalist women like
Henrietta Vinton Davis, Ethel Maude Collins, and Laura Adorker Kofey simultaneously embraced and
subverted masculinist articulations of Black nationalism in the United Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA) in the 1920s. The activists also called upon their beliefs in racial pride, African redemption,
political self-determination, and economic self-sufficiency. In chapter two, Blain reveals that out of this
"political incubator" (p. 20) grew organizers like Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, who drew upon but also
expanded far beyond Garveyism following Marcus Garvey's 1927 deportation. In the back of her Chicago
restaurant in 1932, Gordon created the Peace Movement of Ethiopia (PME). Soon, the organization grew
to claim some 300,000 supporters in cities across the country. When it decided to extend to the Jim
Crow South in 1937, the focus of chapter three, it was the ingenuity and intelligence of Celia Jane Allen, a
figure long overlooked in the history of Black internationalism, that ensured the organization's success.
For six years, Allen inspired rural African Americans to become PME members through speeches and
grassroots activism.
Shrewdly, Allen called upon the support of White supremacists like Theodore G. Bilbo, a U.S. senator
from Mississippi and Ernest Sevier Cox, a writer, preacher, and organizer in Richmond, Virginia. In this
discussion, Blain's work deals with the complexities of these ideologies and interactions to a greater
extent than Umoren's book. For instance, Blain makes make clear that while this agenda was inherently
problematic, it was also performative. By using submissive and deferential language to appease and
court White supremacists, Allen was tapping into a pragmatic and historical form of activism long used
by various disenfranchised and disadvantaged populations. Even more, such acts serve to show that
PME activists were committed to utilizing every possible resource and method to achieve freedom.
Unfortunately, actions that were expedient in the moment were costly in the long run. Along these lines,
while Blain does well to address the paternalist ethos that undergirded the PME's support for
emigration to Liberia, the inclusion of African voices in response to or as part of this plan, would have
served to enrich this discussion.
Like Umoren, Blain ends her account by considering the ways that the Second World War shaped Black
nationalist women's anticolonial and pan-Africanist activism. Race Women Internationalists shows that
in these years only Robeson deepened her internationalist work through writing and travel. Nardal
came to express her commitment to global freedom through cultural forms, while Marson's experiences
with racism in the United States led to a hiatus before her conservative views emerged in full form.
Success also evaded the activists in Set the World on Fire. Even so, Blain's account is not without hope;
she grants attention to their active mentoring and enduring legacies in her final chapter that reaches
into the late 1960s, which coincided with the decline of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia. While the
organization continued to profess the same goals, meetings were smaller, and membership numbers
steadily declined. Blain explains that while the PME did not see the fruition of its dreams, activists of the
1960s and 1970s were inspired by the commitment of their predecessors. Blain's book, which fills in
more of the historical record, will undoubtedly serve as an important part of contemporary discussions
and reflections.
The history in these books is much needed. These accessible and well-written accounts bring the
nuanced and diverse activism of Black nationalist and international women to light. They importantly
and unapologetically allow these activists to emerge as their authentic selves. To provide such rich
histories, Umoren and Blain use a variety of sources including personal correspondence, published and
unpublished newspapers, poems, plays, short stories, and census and Federal Bureau of Investigation
records. Scholars who hope to write engaging and accessible histories would do well to model their
research after Race Women Internationalists and Set the World on Fire. Fortunately, records within the
Women and Social Movements, International, can serve as a good start. Though many of the sources are
from U.S. archives, the reports, photographs, and correspondence of entities like the Women's Africa
Committee Records, the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, and the African Women's
Leadership Institute capture the voices and experiences of American, African, and Caribbean women and
reveal these populations' remarkable connections to find unity and liberation.
Brandy Thomas Wells is Assistant Professor of History at Oklahoma State University. Her past essays have
appeared inWomen and Social Movements in the Modern Empires since 1820andOrigins: Current Events
in Historical Perspective. She is currently preparing a manuscript on the international interests and
endeavors of African American women in the National Association of Colored Women Clubs and the
National Council of Negro Women.
Review of For the Many: American Feminists
and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality
(Dorothy Sue Cobble, 2021)
Dorothy Sue Cobble. For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic
Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). 584 pp. Hardcover, $35.00, ISBN:
9780691156873
Reviewed by Mary M. Báthory Vidaver, University of Mississippi
For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality by Dorothy Sue Cobble is
a big book, not just in size (though it probably weighs a pound or two), but in terms of its scale, its scope,
its synthesis of material, and its intention. Moving from the Progressive Era to the present day and
touching on every continent except Antarctica (like I said, big), the book draws attention to
conversations between feminism, democracy, and equal rights through the lens of global debates over
women's work. In so doing, Cobble argues for a reconsideration of "the egalitarian, social democratic
traditions of American women, little understood and often underestimated (2)." These traditions, she
argues, inspired an activism amongst women for social, political and economic equality through the
policies, institutions, and legislation they promoted.
In making her argument, Cobble weaves together three separate threads: U.S. women's relationship to
organized labor, their legislative aims as women workers, and their efforts to use international
organizations in pursuit of those aims. Drawing on correspondence, reports from international
conferences, organizational records, and legislative proceedings, she records women's struggles to find
common ground with one another, to wrest a seat at the table (literally and metaphorically) from male
leaders, and to create international alliances to further their agenda of democratic equality.
Multiple scholars, including Cobble herself, have examined the first two threads. In this book, Cobble
spotlights the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) and its alumni—women such as Rose
Schneiderman, Mary Anderson, Esther Peterson, and Maida Springer—as key players in opening the
doors of organized labor to women and devising woman-oriented legislative policies. Similarly, other
historians have made plain the transatlantic links underlying women's suffrage, social reform, and state
welfare programs. Cobble, however, wants to tell "a global story (5)" that includes the voices not just
of Europeans, but of Asian, African, and Latin American women. Thus, she introduces the U.S.
reader to women like Tanaka Taka of Japan or Minerva Bernardino of the Dominican Republic, while
quashing any remaining notions that the modernization of women's role and place during the twentieth
century was a one-way transfer from an industrial Global North to a more traditional, less forwardthinking Global South. For example, women from the United States frequently discovered the superiority
of legal protections for women workers in South American nations, an insight Katherine Marino also
makes in her book Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights
Movement.
Yet, despite the author's global ambition, this is clearly a work of U.S. history whose primary actors are
U.S. women in the world. She captures their response to global voices and their discovery that U.S.
imperialism disguised as a civilizing mission chilled potential relations between the
colonizers and the colonized. She centers on their alliances, rivalries and objectives within
international organizations.
Examining U.S. women's goals within such organizations as the International Labor Organization (ILO)
and the United Nations Economic and Social Council (UNESCO), Cobble makes an intriguing observation.
She argues that the efforts to establish permanent women's departments, committees, and
conferences in these spaces were more means than ends. Those entities served as beachheads (the seat
at the table) and venues to make proposals for something greater than equal pay, equal opportunity, and
job protections for new mothers. What these women truly sought was a world which granted all
humans—regardless of sex, race, or other differentials—a full set of rights: civil, political, social,
and economic.
Cobble labels them "'full rights' or 'social democratic' feminists (3)." Their activism, whether for shorter
working days or suffrage, derived from a belief in the interdependency of rights and a deeply-held faith
that human flourishing required the extension of full rights for all people. They believed that no single
type of right should predominate and that the exclusion of any group from a full array of rights
threatened the claims of everyone to those rights.
Such a framing offers another look at the Progressive Era U.S. women with whom the book begins as
well as the women who followed them. It suggests that more than just municipal housekeeping, social
control, or citizenship motivated the social reform of Jane Addams or Margaret Dreier Robins. It
also demonstrates that full-rights feminism was not unique to white, middle-class women in the
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, but was embraced by multiple generations of
working class women, immigrant women, and women of color. Mary McLeod Bethune and other
members of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) are perhaps even better examples of
full-rights feminism than Addams and Robins, while Pauli Murray inserts full-rights feminism into the
founding documents of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Finally, this framing highlights the
continuity of full-rights feminism. As Cobble shows, each generation of women undertook a conscious
hand-off of the full-rights baton to the next. The tools for mentorship varied over time—invitations to
join voluntary organizations, employment in federal and state governments, and nomination for
positions in international organizations—but the goal was always the same: the ongoing recruitment,
grooming and promotion of new leadership talent into positions of increasing responsibility.
While male chauvinism, especially among union leaders, was the most obvious barrier to the
implementation of a full-rights feminism, it was not the only problem. The single-minded focus on
passage of the Equal Rights Amendment by Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party (NWP) also
generated frustrations among full-rights feminists. Having achieved political equality, these white,
educated, and middle-class individual-rights feminists in the NWP now sought economic equality for
themselves. They found sex-based worker protection laws irksome and problematic in their pursuit of
training and careers in the professions. Their concentration on the rights of individuals rather than
society as a whole led to their alignment with the Chamber of Commerce and other anti-labor
groups. Like the full-rights feminists, they also sought out global connections, but as a means to build
momentum for their amendment in the United States rather than for any improvement of world
conditions, Cobble claims.
So was the Women's Liberation movement of the 1970s a descendent of this white, educated, middle
individual rights feminism? Cobble offers some evidence to the contrary. As she explains, Gloria Steinem
was the granddaughter of a Jewish suffragist, who attended the International Congress of Women
in 1908. After graduating college in 1956, Steinem spent several months traveling in India. The trip led
to a lifelong friendship with Devaki Jain, a feminist economist and disciple of Gandhi, transformed her
into a "Gandhian humanist and internationalist (384)" and led her to Dolores Huerta and the
United Farm Workers. As an advocate for women's liberation, Steinem framed women as an
oppressed, colonized people and sought a sisterly rapprochement between white women and
women of color, women of wealth and women in poverty, middle-class women and working-class
women. While Cobble does not fully unpack the maternalist, salvationist undertones of Steinem's
language, she does establish her direct descent from the full-rights, rather than the individualrights, feminists. Similarly, by calling attention to the concurrent political emergence of feminists who
were not white or Protestant, such as Shirley Chisolm, Bella Abzug, and Patsy Mink, she further
broadens "second-wave feminism" from being defined by individual job and reproductive rights
to questions of power, peace, and social welfare.
Though the book has some weaker sections, in particular an extended examination of the already wellcovered New Deal, it still repays the reader's effort. Moreover, its combination of individual biographies
and the records of organizations and conferences makes possible a teaching cross-fertilization between
the book and the Women and Social Movements (WASM) databases. Although Cobble does not mention
the WASM explicitly, many of the cited documents and individuals are found there. In the book, for
example, Mary Anderson develops from an immigrant factory worker, to labor activist, leader of
the mixed-class Women's Trade Union League, and then head of the Woman's Bureau in the U. S.
Department of Labor. It would be interesting to explore how the documents in The Women and Social
Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 database align or differ with the portrait Cobble has drawn
of her. Similarly, students and teachers could compare Cobble's reading of the 1975 World Conference of
International Women's Year Report with their own reading of it on the WASM International database.
Those are just two of the many ideas a scroll through the databases brought to mind.
Whether read in its entirety or in parts, the book raises new questions, introduces new faces, and gives a
new global context to U.S. women's and labor history. It deserves a place on any bookshelf.
Mary M. Báthory Vidaver is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Mississippi, a 2021 Social
Science Research Council Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellow, and the 2021 recipient of
the Reed-Fink Award for Southern Labor History. Her dissertation project examines how a sociallyfocused religiosity meshed seamlessly with a commitment to Jeffersonian democracy and broad
constructions of civil rights to inspire social activism across multiple generations of white Southerners and
across diverse movements in an effort to redeem the region they loved from the sins of both the Old and the
New South.
Review of Hands on the Freedom Plow:
Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC
(Faith S. Holsaert, et al. eds., 2010) and
Living with Jim Crow: African American
Women and Memories of the Segregated
South (Anne Valk and Leslie Brown,
2010)
Faith S. Holsaert, et al. eds, Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2010. 656 pp. Cloth, 34.95, ISBN: 0252035577).
Anne Valk and Leslie Brown, Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the
Segregated South (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 228 pp. Cloth, 90.00; Paper, 28.00, ISBN: 023062152X).
Reviewed by Pam Brooks, Oberlin College
We Are Soldiers in the Freedom Army: Women, Jim Crow, and the Black Freedom Movement
Miss Ella Jo Baker, unparalleled organizer and legendary figure in the Black Freedom Movement, is
known to have theorized that within a social movement context "strong people don't need strong
leaders." [1] She was referring to her own role as conduit, rather than celebrity or publicity-seeking
leader, one who encouraged people to recognize and believe in their own capacity to bring about
necessary change. Sociologist Belinda Robnett refers to Ella Baker and other Movement women's
organizing as "bridge leaders," forming important links to organizational structures and
successful grassroots mobilization. [2] Baker later acknowledged that it had always been her goal to
"get people to understand that in the long run they themselves are the only protection they have against
violence or injustice." [3] For in the Jim Crow South of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, as the system of
segregation faced determined opposition from below, white violence could be deployed at any moment
in order to quell the demand for Black freedom. However, strong people, as Baker knew, had the habit of
surviving and resisting Jim Crow. Even in the everyday acts of living and working, in forming
communities of co-operation and faith, in raising their children to be resourceful, respectable people,
and in finding ways to further their own political and economic interests, Black Southerners persisted in
the midst of a system designed to keep them powerless. By the latter stages of the 1960s, segregation
and the Jim Crow system were falling. As talented local leaders and their network of people and
organizations joined with a cadre of professional Movement activists, including Ella Baker, they put
pressure on the federal government to make the Southern states adhere to a more democratic system.
How Black people managed to withstand Jim Crow and ultimately overcome its most pernicious features
is narrated in the stories of two sets of historical witnesses. Both Living with Jim Crow: African American
Women and Memories of the Segregated South by Anne Valk and Leslie Brown and Hands on the Freedom
Plow: Personal Accounts By Women In SNCC edited by former Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee organizers Faith S. Halsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty
Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner give powerful voice to women who make
history and the important ways in which they do so. Increasingly, women's history, and Black women's
history in particular, have provided scholars with a rich field of inquiry; biographies, narrative texts,
anthologies and theoretically based works are quickly making their way through the literary pipeline.
Still, placing the oral testimonies of everyday women at center stage and thereby creating a history of
several generations marked by a particular social phenomenon and told directly from women's own
vantage points is new and enlightening. Together, ninety-nine women subjects become the historians of
record, relying on their memories to recount what otherwise would have gone unnoticed. Forty-seven
Southern Black women vividly describe their personal histories included in Living with Jim Crow . The
narratives are culled from the Duke University Behind the Veil Project--a substantial collection of oral
histories reminiscent of the 1930s Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives. Indeed, in the
women's lives, readers quickly discern what Ella Baker meant by the "strong people" she held in such
high regard. The remaining fifty-two women who testify in Hands on the Freedom Plow come from many
parts of the United States and include women of different ethnicities. For the first time, a generous crosssection of women stand center stage in SNCC's written history, and they provide the irrefutable evidence
of how SNCC became such an effective and dynamic organization in the struggle for Black
empowerment.
The women "narrators" of Living with Jim Crow were born between the years 1900 and 1947 and were
interviewed in the mid-1990s. Their lively stories often told with humor, if not with the matter-of-fact
sensibility of many Southerners, detail the progressive life stages experienced within their own rural or
urban communities and according to their own priorities often "without the presence or appraisal of
whites." (3) All of the women worked outside their homes as farmers, factory or domestic workers, but
also as teachers, social workers, barbers, beauticians and businesswomen. However, a few of the women
interviewed had interesting careers in unexpected professions: Flossie Fuller Branchcomb of Norfolk,
Virginia worked as a welder for over fourteen years; Theresa C. Lyons of Durham, North Carolina was
one of two women Fellows with the all-Black North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, Willie Ann
Lucas of Hughes, Arkansas worked as a trained midwife, and Irene Monroe of Bessemer, Alabama owned
and operated a popular nightclub, booking the likes of Louis Armstrong, Nat "King" Cole, and B. B. King.
While many were unable to finish high school, several women held college and university degrees and
went on to become teachers themselves, as Celestyne D. Porter enthused, "the top of the line was
teaching school." (136) A variety of women gave their time and energies freely to their churches and
community organizations, and raised families of their own, continuing many of the traditions they
learned as children. Other themes come to light here as well, such as the frequent migrations of young
women and their families, color prejudice within the Black community, union organizing among Black
workers, the importance of formerly enslaved family members, the sexual vulnerability of young Black
women, and their effective, if risky, deployment of self-protective strategies. What emerges from this
wonderful collection is the remarkable resilience displayed by the women narrators as they reveal both
the pain and more pleasurable aspects of making meaningful lives in the segregated South.
For the majority of the women speaking in Living with Jim Crow , hard work was a constant--and it was a
necessity in most cases. They describe their working lives in rural and urban contexts as effortful and,
for the most part, low-paying, no matter the kind of work performed. As Cleaster Mitchell of Blackton,
Arkansas remembered, "In '43 I was only making 2.50 a week. I washed, I ironed, I took care of the baby,
I worked the garden, I mowed the yard, I took care of the chickens, I pumped the water for the animals, I
did everything."(93) Rodie Veazy's work life at home in Memphis, Tennessee was equally difficult. After
her father died from alcoholism at the age of fifty-five, she worked to help her mother: "We had a hard
life. . . My responsibility was head of the house . . . I started cooking when I was about ten . . . My
grandmother taught me how to cook. I learned how to cook, wash, iron, clean house. I had that daily."
(109) Back in the country, landowners would often renege on their obligation to pay their workers:
"And you could work by the day, and if he didn't want to pay you off, he would just come out and say,
'Don't come up here. I'm not paying nobody off today.'" (33) Echoing Ms. Mitchell's experience with the
landowner's unfairness, Theresa Lyons admitted, "As I look back now, I know how they cheated us,
because we never had anything . . . I just can't remember ever when I didn't have to work." (47)
However, Lyons also remembered the importance of "neighbors helping neighbors," the informal system
of reciprocity existing among community members that could make all the difference in getting by. As
Cleaster Mitchell agreed, "Everybody shared with each other what they had." (34)
The women in this gem-packed book also reveal the gender dynamics at play within their lives, certainly
as wives and mothers, but also as sex-segmented workers, often prone to incidents of sexual
harassment. Many discuss the hardships of having babies before marriage, or beginning families at very
young ages. Pre-feminists show up as well, like Florence Borders of New Orleans who worked for Mary
McLeod Bethune and respected her because "She wanted to see us married, and raise families, and still
work at whatever it was we chose to do." (69) Margaret Sampson Rogers of Wilmington, NC likened a
husband's expectation of sex to a job: "It was expected, and still is to a certain degree, that a woman has
three or four jobs. She works out of the house. She is the maid, cook, and chief bottle washer. She is
expected to be there for the husband whenever sex is required, whether she wants it or not. That's the
third job . . . Then . . . take care of the kids on top of all the other stuff. So you have a good four or five jobs
that you do and it is expected that you do this." (75)
The last chapter of Living with Jim Crow is devoted to several women's Movement activities and the
death of Jim Crow. "The best thing, recalled Cora E. Flemming of the Mississippi Delta, "that I've seen so
far really is black people can stand up for themselves." (164) Encouraged by her mother, Flemming
assisted CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and SNCC workers to organize demonstrations and became
one of the founders of the Delta's Head Start program. As a "bridge leader" she urged people to "test
your mind, your skills, your ability, things you can do to help yourself and help others in the community
around you." (162) Finally, readers will recognize the name, though perhaps not the back-story, of
Shirley Miller Sherrod of southwest Georgia. Her narrative is a powerful testament to the strong desire
among Black rural people to own land and their willingness to achieve this kind of economic
independence at great personal cost.
Hands on the Freedom Plow is a jubilant book. Taking up the narrative thread where the previous work
left off, this rich and illuminating collection represents all the women organizers' love, dedication, and
hard work pledged to the people they served and to one another. Answered here in clear detail, are the
questions that confronted a wide range of young and older women in SNCC, many of whom were not
from the South: why would any woman, college-educated or not, knowingly choose to join a movement
that could put them in such grave danger? What meaning do the women attach to their Movement work?
In what ways were the women transformed by their Movement experiences? What did the women do
after their direct participation in the Movement ended--how did their experiences affect the rest of their
lives? How did their Movement work shape their understanding of themselves as women? These kinds
of questions have resonance today, especially among young people who are inspired to become change
agents in a twenty-first century world facing new and complex challenges. Reading like authors of a
Movement handbook or primer, the SNCC women organizers discuss theory and practice, conflicting
views and common assumptions about how best to free Black people from twentieth-century bondage.
These women went to jail leading demonstrations, performed mundane tasks in offices, communicated
with high-level officials, planned strategy, raised money, sheltered volunteers, ran meetings and
workshops, lent their artistic abilities in service to the Movement, partied at the Elks Club, and
challenged one another to stay focused and do their best.
Gwendolyn Zoharah (Robinson) Simmons's opening narrative, "From Little Memphis Girl to
Mississippi Amazon," sets the tone and establishes some of the themes that follow in the later
selections. Simmons takes note of the spirited Black women in her world; she rejects segregation in her
hometown of Memphis. She joins the NAACP youth organization, heads off to Spelman College in 1962,
and quickly becomes a member of SNCC over the strong objections of her family and school
administrators. She is an important part of the Mississippi Freedom Summer corps in 1964, becoming a
project director in Laurel despite her youth and lack of this type of experience--but she is enthusiastic,
fully committed, and an effective director, leading with a self-described "feminist" perspective: no sexual
harassment, "all underage local women off-limits to project males," and "modest dress." She issues one
warning only. (29) She faces down her fear and the sheriff's gun. She does not go back to school after the
summer; she remains in Laurel for eighteen months and acquires the reputation of an "Amazon." She
does not leave SNCC until 1968, and is proud to have become, as she says, one "of those known as the
Mississippi field staff, considered the baddest, baddest, baddest organizers in SNCC." (32) Simmons kept
up her activism beyond SNCC and finished her college degree at Antioch before attaining a Master's and
Ph.D. from Temple University. She studies Sufism, teaches religion at the University of Florida, and has
raised a feminist daughter who is a documentary filmmaker. This sort of interesting, full, and meaningful
life is repeated many times in the pages of this book. Readers surely must come to respect such women
as extraordinary, those who have been so committed and who have accomplished so much. On the
other hand, like the women of Living with Jim Crow , what also comes across are the everyday human
qualities and struggles that connect these women to any one of us.
The narratives of women whose names are well known, like Bernice Johnson Reagon, Casey Hayden,
Mary King, Gloria Richardson, Victoria Gray Adams, Denise Nicholas and Diane Nash are effectively
positioned alongside other narratives from women who were known only in smaller circles like Gloria
House, Jean Smith Young, Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely. Reagon, founder of the women's a capella
group Sweet Honey in the Rock, describes her involvement in the Albany Movement in southwest
Georgia. She was already a student leader at Albany State looking for ways to protect herself and other
Black women from white men's constant sexual harassment. No longer wishing to face down her
oppressors on her own, Reagon found refuge in the Movement: "uncovered, without shelter, with every
ounce of strength I had," she says, "and all my heart and soul, I joined this Movement for FREEDOM!"
(127) Denise Nicholas, leaving Ann Arbor, Michigan for Jackson, Mississippi to join the Free Southern
Theater in the summer of '64, felt she had "landed on another planet or stepped back in time." But she
met all sorts of people from around the country and from the local area and, she recalls, "Pretty soon I
was in it. I was home." (259) Casey Hayden, white and from Texas, like her friend and colleague Connie
Curry, white and from North Carolina, was a member of the National Student Association when the
student sit-ins and bus rides began. Both women lobbied the NSA to support the Southern Black
students protesting segregation. Hayden, philosophy and English graduate student at the time, won over
the NSA with a moving talk about the appropriateness of conscience, democracy, and civil disobedience.
In the process, "this whole event . . . gave me a chance to step out onto the open ground of my whole life."
(52)
Indeed, "stepping out onto the open ground" of their lives, the women of SNCC have demonstrated the
meaning of a profound commitment to social justice. Still active in any number of causes and endeavors,
these women describe for their readers what it means to have become transformed. Such
transformations did not take place smoothly or without conflict--in fact, surviving conflict, such as the
ouster of white people from the organization, and weathering controversy, such as the subject of
women's location in SNCC, could result in greater self-awareness and a deeper understanding of
privilege. However, they knew that their consensus-building leadership style was ultimately aimed
at something much "bigger than a hamburger," as Miss Baker once said. [4] She had been their
organizational birth mother, after all, and had advised all of them to stick with their own creative
independence. That they did and in the process many learned, as Gwen Patton of Montgomery, Alabama
did, that "one's life is a movement when one becomes conscious." (586)
These two outstanding books unquestionably argue for the value of women's committed lives to their
families, communities, and the Black Freedom Movement. Soldiers all in the army of justice, these
women, as the gospel songs challenged them to do, kept their eyes on the prize and their hands on the
freedom plow.
Pam Brooks, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Oberlin College, is the author of Boycotts,
Buses, and Passes: Black Women's Resistance in the US South and South Africa (University of
Massachusetts Press). She is currently at work on a memoir of her father Owen H. Brooks, a Mississippi
veteran of the Movement, and on a transnational treatment of several US and South African women artists'
freedom songs of the 1950s and '60s.
Endnotes
1. Quoted in Carol Mueller, "Ella Baker and the Origins of 'Participatory Democracy,'" in Women in the
Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965 , eds. Vicki L. Crawford,
Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 51.
Back to Text
2. See Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long?: African American Women in the Struggle for Civil
Rights , (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Back to Text
3. Ella Baker, "Developing Community Leadership," taped interview with Gerda Lerner, December,
1970, in Black Women in White America: A Documentary History , ed. Gerda Lerner (New York: Vintage,
1973), p. 347.
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4. See Ella J. Baker, "Bigger Than a Hamburger," Southern Patriot 18 (May 1960).