From Suffragists to Pink Pussyhats: In Search of Intersectional Solidarity

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 490-493
Author(s):  
Chaya Crowder ◽  
Candis Watts Smith
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
100Th Anniversary ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Sojourner Truth ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Combahee River Collective ◽  
Feminist Movements

The 100th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment is an opportunity to reflect on the role of women in American politics. The tools of intersectionality allow scholars to pinpoint the progress and pitfalls produced by ongoing modes of sexism and patriarchy as well as racism and classism. It is now well known that major movements for the rights of American women have not always addressed the issues specific to black women (Simien 2006). Indeed, in 1851, Sojourner Truth discussed this issue of not being included in conversations about women’s rights (or civil rights for blacks) in her alleged “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. Similarly, the fact that Ida B. Wells and other black women were told to process at the back of the 1913 Women’s March on Washington is another illustration of the historical exclusion of black women by their white counterparts (Boissoneault 2017). Decades later and even after the 1965 Voting Rights Act enforced black women’s enfranchisement, the Combahee River Collective (1977) noted the exclusion of issues that affect black women by both 1970s white feminist movements and male-dominated anti-racist movements.

Selma and the Place of Fiction in Historical Films

2018 ◽  
Vol 142 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-123
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Knapp
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Hybrid Nature ◽  
Historical Film ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Historical Films ◽  
Moral Certainty ◽  
Historical Reenactments

Every historical film must contend with the possibility that its viewers will be scandalized by its mixture of fact and fiction, but no recent historical film has faced such pressure to justify its hybrid nature as Selma has, in large part because no recent film has taken on so momentous and controversial a historical subject: the civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The renewed urgency of the issues Selma dramatizes, along with the film’s own commitment to the “moral certainty” of the civil rights movement, helps explain why Selma wavers in a self-defense that links the fictionality of its historical reenactments to the purposely theatrical element of the marches themselves. But politics are not the only problem for fiction in Selma, and to show why, this essay compares Selma to an earlier historical film, The Westerner (1940), that openly flaunts the commercial nature of its fictionality.

Afterword

2020 ◽  
pp. 229-240
Author(s):  
Kathy Roberts Forde
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
New South ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Voter Registration ◽  
New Era ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Southern States ◽  
Racial Democracy

Racial divisions shaped the women’s suffrage movement and inflected much of the journalism that helped suffragists collectively imagine women as political beings, persuade others that women should be directly involved in electoral politics, and secure the vote through ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. These racial divisions proved tragic. If the Nineteenth Amendment ever promised a new era of racial democracy in America, that promise was lost when white suffragists abandoned the citizenship aspirations of black women (and men) in the South to the forces of white supremacy. Henry Grady’s New South ideology veiled coordinated efforts across the Southern states to thwart black political power and institute the “solid South” of white supremacy. In 1920, Mary McLeod Bethune helped lead black Floridians in a voter registration drive—a bold effort to claim black civil rights promised in both the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments. The result was violent voter intimidation across the state and a massacre of black citizens in Ocoee.

The Gospel of the Sit-In

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Gershenhorn
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Black Workers ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Civil Rights Act ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City

During the 1960s, Austin lent his talents and his newspaper in support of the direct action movement in Durham and throughout the state. Unlike many other black leaders in the city, he immediately and enthusiastically embraced an early sit-in in Durham that began in 1957, three years before the more celebrated Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins. He also aided a boycott of white retail businesses that refused to hire black workers by publishing the names of those businesses in the Carolina Times. This strategy was quite effective in forcing white businesses to hire African Americans. Austin’s efforts and those of countless civil rights activists led to major freedom struggle successes with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

scholarly journals THE SEQUEL: THE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT, THE NINETEENTH AMENDMENT, AND SOUTHERN BLACK WOMEN'S STRUGGLE TO VOTE

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 433-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liette Gidlow
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Woman Suffrage ◽  
The South ◽  
American Women ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
Fifteenth Amendment

This essay reframes both the woman suffrage narrative and narratives of African American voting rights struggles by focusing on the experiences of southern African American women between the 1870s and the 1920s. It argues that the Fifteenth Amendment remained central to their suffrage strategy long after the failure of the “New Departure” to win court sanction caused white suffragists to abandon it. As white supremacists in the South worked at the turn of the century to disfranchise black men, leading African American suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and Adella Hunt Logan called for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as well as the enfranchisement of black women. After the federal woman suffrage amendment was ratified in 1920, many southern African American women encountered the same barriers to voting—obstructionist tactics, threats, and violence—that black men had faced a generation earlier. In short, for aspiring African American voters in the South, the failure of the Nineteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black women constituted a sad sequel to the failure of the Fifteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black men.This interpretation offers three significant interventions. It pairs the Reconstruction-era Amendments with the Nineteenth Amendment, recognizing their shared focus on voting rights. It connects the voting rights struggles of southern African Americans across genders and generations. Finally, it finds that, for some women, the canonical “century of struggle” for voting rights continued long after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.

After the march, what? Rethinking how we teach the feminist movement

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 402-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Elizabeth Vickery
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Teacher Educators ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Intersecting Identities ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Feminist Movements

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the history of Black women as critical civic agents fighting for the recognition of their intersecting identities in multiple iterations of the feminist movement. Design/methodology/approach Utilizing Black feminism and intersectionality I explore the many ways in which Black women have fought against multiple forms of oppression in the first, second and fourth wave feminist movement and organizations in order to fight for their rights as Black women citizens. Findings Black women in the past and present have exhibited agency by working within such multiple civil rights movements to change the conditions and carve out inclusive spaces by working across differences and forging multiracial coalitions. Originality/value This paper serves as a call to action for social studies classroom teachers and teacher educators to rethink how we remember and teach feminist movements. I also explore how we can use this past to understand and advance the conversation in this present iteration of the women’s movement to work across differences in solidarity toward equal justice for all.

Cultural Disenfranchisement and the Politics of Stigma

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Myra Mendible
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Citizenship ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Moral Geography ◽  
Exclusionary Policies ◽  
Physical Spaces

This article focuses attention on the pivotal role that stigmatization processes play on both legal and discursive fronts, that is, in justifying restrictive policies affecting ethnic minorities and in framing reactionary discourses in support of such measures. It argues that racial stigmatization is the key component in ongoing efforts to exclude Black and Latino citizens from full cultural citizenship in the United States, setting the groundwork for punitive and exclusionary policies aimed at disenfranchising and undermining their political agency. While legal documents record the rights and privileges accorded citizens within the nation’s physical spaces, the politics of stigma, I contend, maps a moral geography: it sets the contours and limits of communal obligation, disrupting affective bonds and attachments that can spur social change. As an instrument of power, stigmatizing processes today are helping to reinstate the kinds of policies and attitudes that the Voting Rights Act intended to redress, engendering a hostile climate for Blacks and Latinos in the United States and threatening hard-won civil rights and political gains.

Selma in the “Glaring Light of Television”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aniko Bodroghkozy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Television News ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
News Story ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
News Reporting ◽  
News Program ◽  
American Press ◽  
Television Coverage

This chapter examines television news' reporting of the Selma campaign for voting rights that led directly to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Television cameras present on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday March 7, 1965, were able to capture the beating, gassing, and brutalizing suffered by voting rights demonstrators as they attempted to march to Montgomery. The uproar generated by that footage generated more support, volunteers, and moral clout for the civil rights movement. This chapter considers how one news program, The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, presented the Selma campaign as an ongoing nightly news story, with particular emphasis on its coverage of the campaign's three martyrs: Jimmie Lee Jackson, Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo. It also discusses the response of white Selmians in the “glaring light of television” and the commentary in the African American press regarding the television coverage of the campaign.

Forgotten Architects of the Second Reconstruction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy N. Thurber
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Critical Mass ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
White House ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations ◽  
Federal Authority ◽  
Second Reconstruction

This chapter analyzes how the Republican Party responded to two central demands—economic opportunity and voting rights—of the modern African American freedom struggle from the 1940s through the early 1970s. It argues that scholars have underestimated the role of the Republican Party in shaping the Second Reconstruction. Liberal Democrats and civil rights organizations had to respond to what Republicans believed about the role of race in American life and the place of federal authority in racial matters, as they struggled to get legislation through Congress and approved by the White House. Republican support, they correctly believed, was essential to what did become law. At the same time, a critical mass of the Republican Party was willing to support proposals that earlier generations of Republicans had overwhelmingly rejected.

scholarly journals Preparing for 2007: Legal and Legislative Issues Surrounding the Reauthorization of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Benson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Political Empowerment

Forty years ago, civil rights activists across the country rejoiced in the passing of the Voting Rights Act1 (“VRA” or “the Act”). The Act was a crowning achievement of the classical civil rights movement and the culmination of a bloody series of events seeking political empowerment for African-Americans in the United States.

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