Black Women’s Geographies and the Afterlives of the Sugar Plantation

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 741-774 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jarvis C McInnis
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Southern Identity ◽  
Sugar Plantation ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Archives

Abstract This essay examines how several contemporary black women artists—Attica Locke, Natalie Baszile, Beyoncé, Ava DuVernay, and Kara Walker—interrogate the afterlives of the sugar plantation in present day literature, performance, and visual art. Drawing on Katherine McKittrick’s conceptualization of “black women’s geographies,” I show how these artists turn to the landscape and built environment of the sugar plantation and factory to restore black women and the US South to the global history of sugar. Part one, “Plantation Pasts,” examines Locke’s 2012 novel, The Cutting Season, alongside Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, as critiques of the sugar plantation’s ongoing economic viability through plantation tourism and modern agribusiness. By foregrounding a “logic of perishability” that insists on the plantation’s dissolution and demise, Locke and Walker interrogate these sugar plantation afterlives to exhume, expose, and ultimately revise buried histories of racial dispossession and consumption in the US and global sugar industries. Part two, “Plantation Futures,” examines how Natalie Baszile’s 2014 novel, Queen Sugar, its television adaptation created by Ava DuVernay, and several of Beyoncé’s music videos—“Déjà Vu” (2006), “Formation” (2016), and the visual album Lemonade (2016)—“return” to Louisiana’s sugar plantation geographies to confront the violent histories of slavery and Jim Crow and to reconcile African Americans’ contentious relationship to land, agriculture, and contemporary southern identity in the post-Civil Rights era. Given the limits of colonial and state archives of slavery, I argue that these artists reestablish the landscape and architecture of the sugar plantation and factory as counter-archives, wherein the slave cabin, big house, refinery, and cane fields are figured as contested sites of official history and memory. In doing so, they “respatialize” hegemonic geographies, exposing and indicting the persisting legacies of racial-sexual dispossession and violence, on one hand, and positing embodied practices of pleasure, mourning, and collectivity as modes of “reterritorialization” on the other, imagining a new relationship to land, agriculture, and the earth.

Race and Rape Prosecution in US History

2020 ◽  
pp. 57-104
Author(s):  
Matthew Barry Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Us History ◽  
Rape Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
Black Defendants ◽  
Post Civil Rights

This chapter examines the current disproportion of Black defendants wrongly convicted of sexual assault through a historical lens. It notes the US history of statutorily separate sexual assault penalties based on race of the defendant and victim. Throughout US history the legal definition and societal response to rape (and rape allegations) have been influenced by considerations of race. These considerations were consistently made to the detriment of Black defendants charged with rape. The chapter reviews how race, rape law, and prosecution have been manifested in different historical eras (the period of race-based enslavement, the period of Jim Crow segregation, and the current post–civil rights period) and the mechanisms of racial bias against Black defendants in the post–civil rights era.

Black Lives Matter and the revitalization of collective visionary leadership

Leadership ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 174271502097592
Author(s):  
Sarah J Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Visionary Leadership ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Black Queer

Herein, I share a conversation with Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, as context to detail the collective visionary leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. After highlighting how Garza enacts this tradition in the contemporary era, I revisit Ella Baker’s foundational model of collective visionary leadership from the civil rights era. Collective visionary leadership, embodied across these generations, is local and community-based, centers the power and knowledge of ordinary people, and prioritizes transformative accountability and liberatory visions of the future. Such leadership has been central to a range of transformational movements, and especially those anchored by Black women and Black queer folk. I also consider what critiques of traditional models of leadership collective visionary leadership levies both past and present. I call on all those concerned with the act of leading justly to take up this model.

Federal Policy and the Racial Integration of Southern Industry, 1961–1980

1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Minchin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Federal Intervention

In the last two decades, one of the central debates of civil rights historiography has concerned the role that the federal government played in securing the gains of the civil rights era. Historians have often been critical of the federal government's inaction, pointing out that it was only pressure from the civil rights movement itself that prompted federal action against Jim Crow. Other scholars have studied the civil rights record of the federal government by analyzing a single issue during several administrations. In this vein, there have been studies of the federal government's involvement in areas as diverse as black voting rights and racial violence against civil rights workers. These studies have both recognized the importance of federal intervention and have also been critical of the federal government's belated and half-hearted endorsement of civil rights.

West of Jim Crow

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

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

Monumental Constructions: Statues, Identity, and Gabrielle Roy’s “L’arbre”

2021 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-117
Author(s):  
Holly Collins
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
American South ◽  
Live Oak ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Significant Attention

Mitch Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans garnered significant attention for his book In the Shadow of Statues (2018), observing that many Confederate monuments were erected to buttress Jim Crow laws and serve as a warning to those who supported the civil rights movement. Likewise, there are a number of monuments in Québec that serve a particular political or religious purpose, seeking to reinforce a pure laine ideology. In this article, I explore the parallels between the literal and figurative construction and deconstruction of monuments that have fortified invented ideas on identity in francophone North America. Further, Gabrielle Roy’s short story “L’arbre,” which describes a “living monument,” tells the story of a racialized past in North America and unveils the falsities that have been preserved through the construction of statues that perpetuate racial myth. “L’arbre” examines the natural, unconstructed monument of the Live Oak: a tree that witnessed and holds the visible scars of the many terrible realities that took place in its shadows. I use Roy’s short story to show how she sought to deconstruct a whitewashed history of the post-Civil War American South and suggest that her broader corpus rejects determinism wholesale.

Trouble in My Way

2019 ◽  
pp. 133-160
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
University President ◽  
State University ◽  
Campus Environment ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Jackson State University ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the strained history of Jackson State University during the aftermath of World War II and leading up to the modern civil rights movement. Located in the heart of Mississippi, Jackson State students carved out space to express their militancy as the war came to a close. However, they quickly felt that space collapse around them as segregationists tightened their grip on the Magnolia State as the burgeoning movement for black liberation challenged the oppressive traditions of the most socially and politically closed state in the country. Administrators such as Jackson State University president Jacob Reddix quickly fell in line with the expectations of his immediate supervisors and squared off against outspoken scholar-activists such as famed poet and novelist Margaret Walker. The standoff resulted in a campus environment fraught with tension yet still producing students and faculty determined to undermine Jim Crow.

Race Women

2019 ◽  
pp. 70-100
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Women ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the fascinating history of Bennett College – one of only two single sex colleges dedicated to educating African American women. Although Bennett would not make that transition until 1926, the institution played a vital role in educating African American women in Greensboro, North Carolina from the betrayal of the Nadir to the promises of a New Negro Era. The latter period witnessed Bennett, under the leadership of David Dallas Jones, mold scores of young girls into politically conscious race women who were encouraged to resist Jim Crow policies and reject the false principals of white supremacy. Their politicization led to a massive boycott of a theatre in downtown Greensboro and helped to set the tone for Greensboro’s evolution into a critical launching point for the modern civil rights movement.

The Capital

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Denson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Heritage Tourism ◽  
Cherokee Nation ◽  
World War Two ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
World War ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
History Of

This chapter describes the expansion of removal commemoration in the post-World War Two decades, focusing particular attention on Georgia's reconstruction of New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation. While the project began as a local effort to promote heritage tourism, state officials applied a loftier theme to the commemoration, describing the site as an apology for Georgia's part in removal. The chapter examines the New Echota project in the context of the South's civil rights-era politics and as an example of American Cold War culture. It argues that the commemoration of the Trail of Tears offered white southerners a politically safe way to contemplate their region's history of racial oppression. The New Echota project included very little Cherokee participation, a feature that suggests the organizers assumed modern Cherokees were mostly irrelevant to their work in Georgia. The New Echota project required Cherokees to act as witnesses to commemorative acts conducted by non-Indians. It did not require them to participate as authors of those commemorations.

Rights, Dignity, and Public Accommodations

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-619
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Moral Issue ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
National Debate ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Public Rights ◽  
History Of

In this essay I consider why debates over applying anti-discrimination norms to public accommodations have long been, and remain today, such a resilient presence in the history of the United States. I use as my starting point the most famous iteration of this phenomenon, the national debate sparked by the 1960 sit-in movement and culminating in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations across the nation. The battle over racial discrimination and public accommodations in the early 1960s illuminates the moral issue at the heart of the issue, the lines of argument that characterize the debate over how to define legal rights in this area, and the ways in which different legal institutions have resolved, or failed to resolve, the issue. I then move backward time, highlighting the continuities between this episode and the struggle over race and public accommodations during Reconstruction. The history of the civil rights era provides a useful framework to analyze the terms of debate from a century earlier, and it provides particular insights into the significance of the concept of public rights that Rebecca Scott has so effectively brought to our attention.

LEGACIES OF RACIAL CONTENTION

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 325-348
Author(s):  
David Cunningham ◽  
Ashley Rondini
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Human Rights Education ◽  
Civic Action ◽  
Institutionalized Racism ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
White Families ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civic Practice

AbstractThis paper focuses on the ways in which past racial contention shapes possibilities for contemporary civic action focused on youth education. Drawing on the recently legislated Civil Rights/Human Rights Education curriculum in Mississippi—a state with an exceptionally charged history of racial contention—we identify barriers to curricular implementation in Mississippi public schools and draw on case studies of initiatives in two communities that have successfully overcome these barriers. Results emphasize how the legacies of civil rights era struggles interact with contemporary demographic and educational dynamics to enable two distinct forms of robust civic action. School-centered civic practice is enabled by communities characterized by strong civil rights organizing infrastructures, high levels of contention with White authorities throughout the civil rights era, and low participation in public schools by White families. Conversely, youth civic practice in communities marked by high levels of civil rights-era contention but significant contemporary White participation in public schools occurs through out-of-school initiatives. In both cases, however, participation in and exposure to civil rights and human rights education has occurred in racially-bifurcated ways that reflect the state’s legacy of institutionalized racism.

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