Gender in the Civil Rights Movement

Peter J. Ling, Sharon Monteith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138001763
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135669133
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In a new anthology of essays, an international group of scholars examines the powerful interaction between gender and race within the Civil Rights Movement and its legacy.

INTRODUCTION

Gender and the Civil Rights Movement

Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith

The civil rights movement was primarily concerned with race, but it was also about personal identity. For many of its participants, it was clear that the goal of freedom for African Americans would require all Americans to confront the racism within themselves and what it did to both white and black people.¹ African Americans lead the movement. They rightly regarded it as their liberation struggle and found a new sense of themselves in the empowerment they experienced.² Many, though by no means all, African American spokespersons also saw their fight as one over integration. Racial segregation and the systematic discrimination that accompanied it prevented black Americans from enjoying the same life chances as whites. By stigmatizing African Americans, racism attacked their self image so that other key cultural categories of personal identity, such as manhood and womanhood, became problematic.³ Gender and Jim Crow became entangled in deeply pathological ways that were symbolized in the ritual of lynching, as Ralph Ellison has described:

usually enacted in a preselected scene (such as a clearing in the woods or in the courthouse square in an atmosphere of high excitement and led by a masked celebrant dressed in a garish costume who manipulated the numinous objects (lynch ropes, the American flag, shotgun, gasoline, and whiskey jugs) associated with the rite as he inspired and instructed the actors in their gory task.

Lynching affirmed white power and, as Ellison shows, broke down all distinctions between the real and the symbolic, since the victim was “forced to undergo death for all his group.”⁴ It also perpetuated the myth of the innocent white woman on her pedestal whose accusation of sexual assault could put black men and boys in peril at the hands of a lynch mob with the power to punish for a hint of disrespect or even on a whim.⁵ As Evelyn Brooks-Higgenbottom points out, “Lynching rationalized by the white South as its defense of [white] womanhood, served … to maintain racial etiquette and the socio-economic status quo.”⁶ This situation was unjust and immoral, and by the middle of the twentieth century it was acknowledged that if this were ended, the United States would live more honorably in conformity with its creed.⁷

Although some African American writers, such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, recognized that racism was very much about the pathology of whiteness, most liberal and radical commentators shared the view that the evil consisted solely of a prejudicial white construction of blackness.⁸ African American leaders, such as the Reverend Martin Luther King, who strove to appeal to the white majority, argued that their goal of integration would be liberating to white Americans also, as captured in King’s oft-used metaphor of a “single garment of destiny”: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”⁹ The small groups of whites who supported the movement actively in the early stage of each phase or local confrontation also commonly felt that racism limited their freedom.¹⁰ But usually they conceptualized the problem in terms of racial barriers of prejudice around a world of universal principles that was invisibly coded “white.” It is only in recent years that the scholarship on racism as a historical phenomenon has looked critically at whiteness.¹¹

Labor historians such as David Roediger have explored with greater precision the socialist view that racism serves to obscure the objective ties of class interest. His nineteenth-century working-class whites use minstrelsy to construct a racial identity that sets them apart from black slaves yet allows them to express their longing for a pre-industrial world symbolized by the African.¹² Robin Kelley sees the same process at work in more recent popular culture with Native Americans, Africans and Asians serving as “the embodiment of pre-industrial freedom from industrial discipline, hence a model to hate, fear, and emulate simultaneously.”¹³ But whereas previous writers stressed the creation of the black or colored race as a scape-goat and pariah, more recent writers like Phyllis Palmer have underlined how particularized ethnic identities came to be subsumed in the overriding category of whiteness. Palmer cites Gloria Yamato’s call to reclaim ethnicity to illustrate the hegemonic power of whiteness and the need to deconstruct the category if we are to understand racism. Palmer and her students at George Washington University were taken aback by the power of whiteness “as a cultural-ethnic way of building identities and as a crucial thread in the social, economic and political fabric of the United States.”¹⁴ In the process of deconstruction, race becomes a dialectical category in which categories of difference need to be seen as continuously contingent upon each other. As a consequence, historical studies of the civil rights movement have now begun to reconstruct a three-dimensional profile of white racists, for example, after decades in which stereotypes have made it easy (and dangerously comforting for white Americans) to regard white southerners of the period as almost cartoon-like exemplars of bigotry and ignorance.¹⁵ The challenge to whiteness, and the institutions that have reproduced it throughout history, is gradually overtaking the preoccupation with individual white supremacists. Whiteness, the last bastion of identity politics, has begun to receive the kind of critical examination that rejects its transparency and breaks open the ways in which the very invisibility of whiteness contributes to its power.¹⁶

At the outset, the post-war civil rights movement was not overtly or self-consciously concerned with gender inequality. But like other freedom struggles, its critique of existing practices and assumptions provided a position from which to review gender relations. As the movement reached its peak in 1965–66, gender became a stated issue. Included in this collection is an essay by Belinda Robnett looking at gender and leadership roles in the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Robnett considers the circumstances surrounding the circulation of a paper on the position of women in SNCC by Mary King, Casey Hayden and others. She argues that after 1966, SNCC, under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael became more macho in style, whereas previously its principles of participatory democracy had made it non-hierarchical and relatively non-prescriptive in terms of gender. After leaving SNCC, such white women activists as Hayden, King and Sara Evans became involved in the women’s movement. Women lead in this movement and regarded it as their liberation struggle. Many early feminists defined their goal as equal rights, the creation of a society in which men and women shared the same rights and opportunities. Although some women defined the struggle in terms of a patriarchy that was as deeply ingrained in social institutions as racism was, a majority, initially, saw the crucial problem as the widespread acceptance by women of narrow and discriminatory conventions of womanhood. Drawing on the experience of the African American freedom struggle, they stressed the need for women to raise their consciousness and create their own personal and collective identity. From this critical process emerged a dynamic and wide-ranging feminist critique not simply of established social practices and institutions but also of other schools of social criticism, including Marxism, and other social protest movements, including the African American liberation movements insofar as they ignored the issue of patriarchy. As Manning Marable notes, the African American reaction to this critique was decidedly hostile at the outset.¹⁷ The civil rights movement thus informed this women’s movement and was itself informed by it.

Although a minority of males openly espoused the feminist cause, the preponderance of female practitioners among analysts of gender has meant that it is only relatively recently that the field of men’s studies has attained a status comparable to that more rapidly achieved by women’s studies. Like whiteness, maleness was so powerfully positioned as a normative complex that initially issues of inequality were raised without questioning maleness itself. As a result, the demands of women and minorities for equality were often cast as aspirations towards the lifestyle of the white male in terms of employment, sexual conduct, and personal expression. Only thereafter did critics begin to consider the historical peculiarities of this normative model. As an exercise in gender history rather than women’s history, this volume also deals extensively with masculinity. It recognizes that the discourse of gender is embedded not only in the conventions governing the social behavior of men and women in both public and private spheres but in the dynamics of differential power in all human relations. Powerfully learned, gender ideals blind us to alternate ways of being. Starkly dichotomized subject positions are often drawn between black men as, for example, when Malcolm X famously differentiated between the “house slave” who, he believed, loved his master more than himself, and the “field slave” who hated that same master with a vengeance. Such hard lines of demarcation between native sons are painful but they have sometimes proved a rallying cry in themselves. Malcolm X warned: “Whites better be glad Martin Luther King is rallying the people because other forces are waiting to take over if he fails.”¹⁸ Malcolm’s heirs in the Black Panther Party, notably Huey Newton, were also drawn to the propaganda value of seemingly simple dichotomies: white/black; reactionaries and revolutionaries; bourgeois and proletarian; nonviolence/self-defense; and women and men. But such assertion of difference served ultimately, and surely not coincidentally, to divide and destroy them.

Since the 1960s, the scholarship on African American men has been increasing dramatically, through the work of psychiatrists like Alvin Pouissant, sociologists like Robert Staples and Kenneth Clark, historians and philosophers like Manning Marable and Cornel West and cultural critics like Clyde Franklin and Michael Dyson. Film makers like Melvin Van Peebles, Spike Lee and John Singleton have begun to unpick the most pernicious paradigmatic formulations of black men in American society, and film critics, like Donald Bogle and James Snead, have explored the hermeneutics of more traditional cinematic representations. To re-consider the civil rights movement from the standpoint of gender is to assert the dialectical character of both Race and Gender. It is also to insist on their historically constructed character. The term “gender” is used in preference to the term “sexes” to emphasize that the cultural construction of difference is more important to male/female identities than simple physiological differences.¹⁹ These physical differences have given rise to biological explanations of gendered behaviors and the developing science of genetics continues to fuel simplistic sociobiological explanations such as those that argue that endocrinal functions ensure that testerone predisposes males towards aggression, competition, and violence whereas oestrogen inclines women towards passivity, tenderness, and exaggerated emotionalism.²⁰ The ignominious history of scientific racism, however, tends to make most scholars of race skeptical of such appeals to nature. The gendered body, like the racialized one, has been socially constructed as a cultural, performative text to be read according to changing and contested discourses. It should not be universalized or placed outside of history, or otherwise essentialized.

Despite this emphasis on social construction, the contributors to this volume have not, in the main, embraced post-structuralist attacks on the cult of objectivity that seem to reject the methodological principle that the past should be reconstructed through the critical examination of documents and records. Most of the essays here assay that task and hopefully do so with a certain self-consciousness of their own biases and the complex task of reading texts. They recognize that objectivity is an ideal and that those historians who feel most confident of their objectivity are perhaps those who subject their work to the least rigorous interrogation. Like other narrators, historians do, in a sense, invent a past for their readers, but like other social scientists, they hope that their commitment to what Karl Popper termed “falsificationism” gives their efforts some integrity. Hence, if an earlier scholar’s description of the African American activist Mrs Gloria Richardson was historically inaccurate, it is proper and useful both for that description to be corrected here and for us to ask why the earlier description was at variance with the “facts.” A key part of that explanation is a too ready acceptance of the explanatory frameworks established by the mass media. Intent on reaching a large audience, such media tend to use familiar narrative patterns and stereotypes. In their difficult task of distilling history, scholars of the civil rights movements have stuck too easily to the established journalistic accounts, and even when they have attempted to publicize neglected heroines like Gloria Richardson, they have been drawn towards literary devices that mislead.²¹ Gender and race are themselves categories in contest and struggle; they are not fixed and, consequently, the frameworks through which scholars approach their subjects also change and develop.

Sociologists have attempted to codify the learned behaviors of gender via the concept of “sex roles” that encompass the attitudes, attributes and actions that are seen as appropriate for men and women. Those who have promulgated rather than questioned such roles have also added to an earlier prescriptive literature on parenting that has been a key part of the discourse on gender. Such exhortatory texts have been among the most conspicuous documents of efforts to enforce the values of particular groups under the claim of normative status. Hence, to consider gender in relation to the civil rights movement is also to highlight the tensions between these normative roles in the United States that were rooted in white, middle-class, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant assumptions and the experience of African Americans and sundry “others.” As Robert Staples has observed, “I see the black male as being in conflict with the normative definition of masculinity. This is a status which few, if any, black males have been able to achieve. Masculinity, as defined in this culture, has always implied a certain autonomy and mastery of one’s environment.”²² In Memp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
• CHALLENGING CONVENTIONS
• LEADERSHIP
• LEGACY
• CONTRIBUTORS
• Index