“Meet the Real Lena Horne”: Representations of Lena Horne in Ebony Magazine, 1945–1949

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
MEGAN E. WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Interracial Relationships ◽  
World War ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Hair Care ◽  
Night Club ◽  
Do So

Following World War II, Ebony's creator and editor, John H. Johnson, sought to create a popular black magazine in the vein of Life and Look that would reflect the accomplishments and joys, “the happier side,” of African American life.1 Throughout the first four years of its publication, Lena Horne appeared on the magazine's cover three times – the only woman to do so during this period. In this paper, I argue that the fledgling Ebony magazine drew on Lena Horne's wartime status as a beautiful black icon and represented her as a symbol of its ideological project, broadly, and as the Ebony image of postwar black womanhood, specifically. The magazine's representation of Lena Horne acts as a useful trope for understanding how Ebony imaged postwar black femininity in terms of motherhood, work, and civil rights activism; additionally, Ebony's representation of Horne and Ebony readers' letters to the editor reveal central issues of respectability, pinup photography, colorism, hair care, and interracial relationships as they were debated within the magazine's pages.Behind the lavish make-up, gay tinsel and brilliant glitter of American's most popular Negro entertainer, Lena Horne is a wonderfully human, somewhat lonesome, amazingly-honest, militant-minded personality who is relatively unknown to a vast audience of millions of movie, radio, and night club fans.2

Black Soldiers in World War II America

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert F. Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Military Training ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Establishment ◽  
Black Soldiers ◽  
American Military ◽  
The Military ◽  
American Racism

The history of the African American military experience in World War II tends to revolve around two central questions: How did World War II and American racism shape the black experience in the American military? And how did black GIs reshape the parameters of their wartime experiences? From the mid-1920s through the Great Depression years of the 1930s, military planners evaluated the performance of black soldiers in World War I while trying to ascertain their presence in future wars. However, quite often their discussions about African American servicemen in the military establishment were deeply moored in the traditions, customs, and practices of American racism, racist stereotypes, and innuendo. Simultaneously, African American leaders and their allies waged a relentless battle to secure the future presence of the uniformed men and women who would serve in the nation’s military. Through their exercise of voting rights, threats of protest demonstration, litigation, and White House lobbying from 1939 through 1942, civil rights advocates and their affiliates managed to obtain some minor concessions from the military establishment. But the military’s stubborn adherence to a policy barring black and white soldiers from serving in the same units continued through the rest of the war. Between 1943 and 1945, black GIs faced white officer hostility, civilian antagonism, and military police brutality while undergoing military training throughout the country. Similarly, African American servicewomen faced systemic racism and sexism in the military during the period. Throughout various stages of the American war effort, black civil rights groups, the press, and their allies mounted the opening salvoes in the battle to protect and defend the wellbeing of black soldiers in uniform. While serving on the battlefields of World War II, fighting African American GIs became foot soldiers in the wider struggles against tyranny abroad. After returning home in 1945, black World War II-era activists such as Daisy Lampkin and Ruby Hurley, and ex-servicemen and women, laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.

“The Negro Nurse—A Citizen Fighting for Democracy”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charissa J. Threat
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Male ◽  
African American Female ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
World War ◽  
Female Nurses

This chapter examines the efforts by black female nurses and white male nurses to claim a space for themselves in a profession that relegated them to the margins. It begins with a discussion of the founding of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses and the Army Nurse Corps (ANC), along with an overview of healthcare and home-front racial politics during World War II. It then turns to nurse shortages during World War I and World War II and proceeds by analyzing the World War II integration campaign by African American female nurses within the larger context of the civil rights movement. In an effort to break down racial barriers, the chapter shows that African American nurses co-opted traditional gender conventions to make the claim that the sex of the nurse, not race, should determine nursing care for soldiers. It also explores how African Americans used wartime rhetoric about equality and democracy on behalf of their campaign for equal rights, justice, and opportunity.

Race and Relevance: Arthur Garfield Hays and the Integration of the American Bar Association, 1938-1943

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard F Hamm
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Professional Organizations ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Issue ◽  
The Press ◽  
Bar Association ◽  
Do So

Abstract This article explores the role of Arthur Garfield Hays and mostly Jewish lawyers in dismantling the American Bar Association’s prohibition of African Americans becoming members. By publicly resigning from the organization and encouraging others to do so over the ABA’s treatment of African-American applicant Francis Rivers, these lawyers made the color bar a public issue in the press. While earlier efforts in the late 1930s had failed, World War II contributed to the success of the activists’ campaign in the early 1940s, as the struggle against Nazi racism had begun to undercut American racial practices. In August 1943 the ABA changed its procedures governing admission that had previously functioned to exclude African-Americans. Other legal professional organizations soon followed its example. Thus the legal profession refashioned itself into part of the liberal order emerging in the wake of World War II.

Paul Bunyan and the “Frozen Logger”

2020 ◽  
pp. 180-240
Author(s):  
Michael Goldfield
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The Other ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
Wood Industry ◽  
National Office

Chapter 5 highlights the wood industry, one of the largest industries in the country. Most of the woodworkers were located in the South, and half of those workers were African-American. Woodworkers successfully organized in the Northwest and Canada, the other two centers of the industry. Despite a perceived willingness of southern woodworkers to unionize, this did not happen. The chapter attributes most of the problems to an incompetent, right-wing, racially backward leadership, which was installed by the CIO national office before World War II. The chapter also argues that the successful organization of southern woodworkers had the potential to radically transform the civil rights movement.

An Unknown Negro Girl without Title or Prestige, 1940–1946

Pauli Murray ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 94-144
Author(s):  
Troy R. Saxby
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Attorney General ◽  
World War ◽  
Race Riots ◽  
Howard University ◽  
Negro Girl ◽  
And Gender

This chapter explores Pauli Murray’s continuing civil rights activism, emerging feminism, and legal training during World War II. Murray joined the Workers Defense League and campaigned to save sharecropper Odell Waller from execution. The experience partially inspired Murray to become a lawyer. While studying at Howard University, Murray became conscious of sexism, which she labelled “Jane Crow.” Murray’s mental health, sexual identity, and gender identity all continued to trouble her. She initiated restaurant sit-ins to protest segregation in Washington and reported on the 1943 Harlem race riots for a socialist newspaper. Murray also completed a master’s degree at Berkeley before becoming the first African American Deputy Attorney General of California.

6. Equality

2018 ◽  
pp. 76-91
Author(s):  
David J. Bodenhamer
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
African American Men ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
National Citizenship ◽  
The 1960S

Equality was not an explicit core value of the Constitution, nor was it a basic condition of republican governments. The framers, living in a world based on class distinctions, rejected hereditary aristocracy, but casually accepted the idea of a natural aristocracy based on merit. Political equality was an animating force of the Revolution, although this condition applied primarily to white, property-owning men. ‘Equality’ outlines the three Amendments adopted between 1865 and 1870 that ended slavery, made state citizenship a consequence of national citizenship, and designated African-American men as political equals. It also describes the women’s movement of the 1920s, the aftermath of World War II, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

“Dixie Carmen”: War, Race, and Identity in Oscar Hammerstein's Carmen Jones (1943)

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNEGRET FAUSER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pearl Harbor ◽  
World War ◽  
Porgy And Bess ◽  
Night Club

AbstractIn December 1943, an all–African American cast starred in the Broadway premiere of Carmen Jones, Oscar Hammerstein II's adaptation of Georges Bizet's Carmen. When Hammerstein began work on Carmen Jones a month after Pearl Harbor, in January 1942, Porgy and Bess was just being revived. Hammerstein's 1942 version of Carmen, set in a Southern town and among African Americans, shows the influence of the revised version of Porgy and Bess, with Catfish Row echoed in a cigarette factory in South Carolina and the Hoity Toity night club. It took Hammerstein more than eighteen months to find a producer, and when the show opened by the end of 1943, the setting in a parachute factory and urban Chicago reflected new priorities brought on by wartime changes. Commercially one of the most successful musical plays on Broadway during its run of 503 performances, Carmen Jones offers a window on the changing issues of culture, class, and race in the United States during World War II. New archival evidence reveals that these topics were part of the work's genesis and production as much as of its reception. This article contextualizes Carmen Jones by focusing on the complex issues of war, race, and identity in the United States in 1942 and 1943.

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