"They Didn't Treat Me Good": African American Rape Victims and Chicago Courtroom Strategies During the 1950s

2005 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Flood
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Rape Victims ◽  
The 1950S

Black Victims and Postwar Trial Strategies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Rae Flood
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
The State ◽  
Rape Victims ◽  
Defense Attorneys ◽  
American Women ◽  
Rape Trial ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Society ◽  
Do So

This chapter refocuses attention on the treatment of rape victims during the 1950s exclusively, when African American women began regularly appearing in court, challenging the idea that they did not trust the system, or that the State did not consider theirs to be winnable cases. Although these women did not do so without difficulties, their voices came to be a part of an expanded culture of rights in which numerous groups and individuals challenged inequality in modern American society. Moreover, despite the State's efforts to portray black rape victims as deserving of protection and justice, defense attorneys maintained racist and sexist stereotypes in court, causing an evolution of the rape trial into the hostile territory that contemporary rape victims face and feminists continue to reform.

Merging Traffic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Slobin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Auto Industry ◽  
General Motors ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
United Auto Workers ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
Auto Workers ◽  
The Media ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Special Case

This chapter surveys the institutions and movements that brought together the city’s musical life with the aim of merging disparate styles, trends, and personnel. First comes the auto industry, based on archival sources from Ford and General Motors that show how the companies deployed music for worker morale and company promotion. The complementary work of labor follows, through the United Auto Workers’ songs. Next comes the counterculture’s musical moment in the age of the folk revival and the artist collectives of the 1950s–1960s. Motown offers a special case of African American entrepreneurial merging of musical talent and style. The chapter closes with a look at the media—radio and newspapers—with their influential role in bringing audiences together, through music, in a city known for segregation, oppressive policing, and occasional outbursts of violence.

Subversive Invisibility during the Cold War: Paule Marshall’s “Brooklyn”

MELUS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-184
Author(s):  
Shirley Parry
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Paule Marshall ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Political Statement ◽  
Existential Choice ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract This essay explores how Paule Marshall engages issues of leftist politics and homosexuality in “Brooklyn,” her only fiction set during the Cold War. On the surface, this novella, the second in Marshall’s 1961 collection Soul Clap Hands and Sing, is a story of sexual harassment that, she has explained, was based on an experience she had at Brooklyn College. Marshall’s boldness in confronting the sexual and racial politics of the 1950s in the story’s depiction of an African American woman’s sexual harassment by her white professor has been noted by many. But less remarked is the fact that beneath the surface narrative of this story, Marshall has incorporated transgressive subtexts that address leftist politics and homosexuality, two issues that were deeply contested during the McCarthy years. A close examination of “Brooklyn” highlights the previously unrecognized narrative strategies that Marshall employs to both produce and conceal these subversive subtexts, thus creating a story that seems to reject communism at the same time that it incorporates a pro-communist political statement, and that seems to reflect the dominant culture’s assumption of heteronormativity while simultaneously endorsing the necessity of existential choice in the area of sexuality. In addition, Marshall shapes her characters so as to make existential choice more broadly the core theme of the story. This essay also situates the narrative in the context of Marshall’s own political activism as well as in the context of the negative impact that the Cold War political tensions had on African American writers during the 1950s.

Race, Photography, Labor, and Entrepreneurship in the Life of Maurice Hunter, Harlem’s “Man of 1,000 Faces”

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 (132) ◽  
pp. 144-171
Author(s):  
Clare Corbould
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Art Students ◽  
York Public Library ◽  
New York Public Library ◽  
The 1950S

Abstract In 1925, African American newspapers began reporting on Maurice Hunter’s work as a model for prominent visual and commercial artists, illustrators, and art students. By the 1950s, Hunter’s image had appeared on millions of advertising billboards, in all the major magazines, and in murals and statues in banks, parks, and department stores from Wall Street to Rochester to Cincinnati. Because no agency would represent a black model, Hunter was forced to raise his own public profile and create work opportunities. He did so by emphasizing his authenticity as a performer of nonwhite roles and at the same time his versatility as someone who could model for any role, including female and/or white. As well as permitting Hunter some degree of creative control over his work, his approach garnered him considerable esteem among elite African Americans. They also admired Hunter’s effort to control use of his image whenever photographed. This article examines Hunter’s labor, including his own effort to record it through scrapbooks he donated to the New York Public Library.

Black, white and blue: the racial antagonism of The Smiths’ record sleeves

Popular Music ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW WARNES
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Form

AbstractAs Matthew Bannister has recently suggested in these pages (see Popular Music, 25/1), The Smiths stand at the head of a 1980s Indie canon based on its rejection of a commodification associated with contemporary black US musics. This article argues that this racial understanding has also bled into the band’s critical reception, encouraging many to assume that Morrissey and Marr drew on exclusively white influences. Specifically, I argue that the white camp icons from the 1950s and 1960s who famously adorn the band’s record sleeves together form a kind of smokescreen, or ‘beard’, which stokes interest in Morrissey’s sexual predilections and orients it away from his and Marr’s Black Atlantic sources. The pre-immigrant Britain summoned up by these icons, I argue, helps prevent fans and critics alike from grasping that Morrissey’s lyrical attempts to find humour and succour by remembering pain is profoundly inspired by the African-American form of the Blues.

Writing African American Migrations

2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Jack S. Blocker
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Future Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
The Philadelphia Negro

Efforts to write the history of the African American migrations of the Civil War era, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era began soon after the start of these historically significant movements. Early scholarship labored to surmount the same methodological obstacles faced by modern scholars, notably scarce documentation, but still produced pathbreaking studies such as W. E. B. Du Bois'sThe Philadelphia Negro, Carter Woodson'sA Century of Negro Migration, and Clyde Kiser'sSea Island to City. Modern scholarship since the 1950s falls into eight distinct genres. An assessment of representative works in each genre reveals a variety of configurations of strengths and weaknesses, while offering guidelines for future research.

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