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.

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.

Power and Protection

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie B. Green
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Working Women ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
World War ◽  
Community Activists ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
Sanitation Workers

Gender bound together labor and civil rights, serving as a key axis in the struggles for racial justice from World War II to the 1968 sanitation workers strike, including the tragic murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Although the conflicts addressed in this essay are crucial to understanding the dramatic events of the later 1960s, they are usually obscured by national civil rights narratives that emphasize desegregation and voting rights, thereby pushing issues reflecting the intersection of labor, racial justice, and gender to the sidelines. This essay highlights conflicts ranging from the denial of World War II defense work, other than menial labor, to African American women to the support movement for the sanitation workers. In placing themselves quite literally on the front lines of that movement, women articulated their own interpretations of the strike’s slogan, “I am a man!” in relation to their own struggles as working women, mothers, and community activists.

“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.

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.

The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse

1995 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Monson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Jazz History ◽  
Moral Debate ◽  
And Gender

This essay situates hipness within a broader range of African American history and moral debate than is generally presented in accounts of jazz history. The perspectives of Amiri Baraka, Mezz Mezzrow, Norman Mailer, and Dizzy Gillespie are used to develop the thesis that there is a problem with white presumptions about how hipness relates to African American cultural life and history. This problem requires addressing interrelationships between race and gender, as well as the legacy of primitivism embedded in common assumptions about how jazz since World War II relates to social consciousness, sexual liberation, and dignity.

Talking Union

Red Strains ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernie Lieberman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
World War ◽  
Folk Revival ◽  
Protest Songs ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Progressive Party ◽  
American Left

Ernie Lieberman grew up in the midst of the folk revival that took place during the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. This chapter describes how folk music came to be important to the American left, the issues on which they focused (union organizing, racial and gender equality, peace), and Lieberman's own participation in the movement. As a child in the 1930s, he admired Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and sang folk and protest songs at summer camp, Progressive party conventions, and on tours for the Civil Rights Congress. In the 1950s, he performed and recorded albums with the first interracial folk group, and later, as political folk music began to reach a wider audience, became a songwriter.

“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

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.

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