Staging Migrations toward an American West

From Ida B. Wells to Rhodessa Jones

Marta Effinger-Crichlow

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781607323112
• eBook ISBN:
  9781607323129
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Staging Migrations toward an American West examines how black women's theatrical and everyday performances of migration toward the American West expose the complexities of their struggles for sociopolitical emancipation. While migration is often viewed as merely a physical process, Effinger-Crichlow expands the concept to include a series of symbolic internal journeys within confined and unconfined spaces.

Four case studies consider how the featured women—activist Ida B. Wells, singer Sissieretta "Black Patti" Jones, World War II black female defense-industry workers, and performance artist Rhodessa Jones—imagined and experienced the American West geographically and symbolically at different historical moments. Dissecting the varied ways they used migration to survive in the world from the viewpoint of theater and performance theory, Effinger-Crichlow reconceptualizes the migration histories of black women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America.

This interdisciplinary study expands the understanding of the African American struggle for unconstrained movement and full citizenship in the United States and will interest students and scholars of American and African American history, women and gender studies, theater, and performance theory.

Index

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Abbott, Robert, 117

Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Lemke-Santangelo), 116

Ackamoor, Idris, 197, 207, 227, 228

Affirming Communities Transformation Program, 225

African American Art and Culture Complex, 180, 227

African American Women Confront the West, 1600–2000 (Moore and Taylor), 6

African Baptist Church (Stockton), 41

Afrikaners, 231

agriculture, migrant labor in, 188–90

Albrier, Frances, 115, 129; on churches, 154–55; civil rights actions, 160, 170(n76), 174(n151); shipyards employment, 133, 134, 135–36

Aldridge, Ira, 91

Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow, 182

“All Coons Look Alike to Me” (Hogan), 68

Alpha Suffrage Club, 50

AME Church convention, 48

AME Church Review, 30

American Lecture and Musical Agency, 65

American Postal Workers, Local 2, 161

amusement parks, 74–75

Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (Kasson), 75

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, 37

Anderson, Karen Tucker, 143, 160

Angela, 192, 193, 200, 208

Angie, 200

anti-Chinese movement, 83

antidiscrimination efforts, defense industry, 134–35, 145–46

anti-lynching crusade, Ida B. Wells’, 20, 48–50, 57(n83), 58(n107)

apartheid, impacts of, 230–31

Appalachia, home and, 195–96...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION
• ONE “Tell My People to Go West”: Ida B. Wells
• TWO “I’d Go [Wherever] They Said ‘Show’ ”: The Black Patti Troubadours
• THREE “Wherever the Opportunity Was Goin’ to Be I’d a Been Gone”: Black Female Migrants in World War II's Defense Industry
• FOUR “I Want to Go Home”: Rhodessa Jones's The Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women
• EPILOGUE Rhodessa Jones's The Medea Project
• CONCLUSION
• Bibliography
• Index