Pens, Planes, and Politics

2018 ◽  
pp. 223-238
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Geographical Proximity ◽  
Military Industrial Complex ◽  
Civic Leader ◽  
Defense Contracts ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter combines political, labor, and cultural history methodologies to compare the Lockheed aircraft factory in Marietta, Georgia, and the Scripto pen and pencil factory in nearby Atlanta. While the mostly male employees at Lockheed, a majority-white plant, enjoyed the job security delivered by defense contracts at the height of the Cold War military-industrial complex, the Scripto workers, the majority of whom were African American women, faced the more capricious turns of the market. Many of the disparities between these factories stemmed from their common management history found in the career of attorney, businessman, and civic leader, James V. Carmichael. Although situated within close geographical proximity, Lockheed and Scripto helped create disparate racial, political, and cultural worlds in the mid-twentieth century. The tale of these two factories uncovers the stark contrasts between the ways race, gender, and government intervention shaped different sectors of the postwar southern economy.

scholarly journals Christianity’s Last Stand: Visions of Spirituality in Post-1970 African American Women’s Literature

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 369
Author(s):  
Trudier Harris
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Black Women Writers ◽  
The Moment

Christianity appealed to writers of African descent from the moment they set foot on New World soil. That attraction, perhaps as a result of the professed mission of slaveholders to “Christianize the heathen African,” held sway in African American letters well into the twentieth century. While African American male writers joined their female counterparts in expressing an attraction to Christianity, black women writers, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, consistently began to express doubts about the assumed altruistic nature of a religion that had been used as justification for enslaving their ancestors. Lorraine Hansberry’s Beneatha Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959) initiated a questioning mode in relation to Christianity that continues into the present day. It was especially after 1970 that black women writers turned their attention to other ways of knowing, other kinds of spirituality, other ways of being in the world. Consequently, they enable their characters to find divinity within themselves or within communities of extra-natural individuals of which they are a part, such as vampires. As this questioning and re-conceptualization of spirituality and divinity continue into the twenty-first century, African American women writers make it clear that their characters, in pushing against traditional renderings of religion and spirituality, envision worlds that their contemporary historical counterparts cannot begin to imagine.

Being Muslim

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvia Chan-Malik
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Gender Justice ◽  
American Islam

Being U.S. Muslims: A Cultural History of Women of Color and American Islam offers a previously untold story of Islam in the United States that foregrounds the voices, experiences, and images of women of color in the United States from the early twentieth century to the present. Until the late 1960s, the majority of Muslim women in the U.S.—as well as almost all U.S. Muslim women who appeared in the American press or popular culture, were African American. Thus, the book contends that the lives and labors of African American Muslim women have—and continue to—forcefully shaped the meanings and presence of American Islam, and are critical to approaching issues confronting Muslim women in the contemporary U.S. At the heart of U.S. Muslim women’s encounters with Islam, the volume demonstrates, is a desire for gender justice that is rooted in how issues of race and religion have shaped women’s daily lives. Women of color’s ways of “being U.S. Muslims” have been consistently forged against commonsense notions of racial, gendered, and religious belonging and citizenship. From narratives of African American women who engage Islam as a form of social protest, through intersections of “Islam” and “feminism” in the media, and into contemporary expressions of racial and gender justice in U.S. Muslim communities, Being U.S. Muslims demonstrates that it is this continual againstness— which the book names affective insurgency—that is the central hall marks of U.S. Muslim women’s lives.

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