Caroline Fowler, Michael Williamson,  Makenzie Mosby, Virginia Ariail, and Ashley Dill

Dr. McKinney

Group Review 2

Due: 9/30/16

At times the Civil Rights Movement in Memphis is boiled down to a few mainstream actions and key players. However, it is often neglected that there are many facets to the movement and each plays an integral part in its progression. These different facets can be used as a way to analyze and view the movement in its entirety. Evaluation of the way these categories are implemented and deployed brings into focus aspects of the movement that are not always considered. An example of this is the idea of gender and its role in the development of the movement. Both race and gender combined to allowed African Americans to use an all-encompassing approach to combat civil rights issues. Men and women struggled with issues stemming from their race and gender and by handling both they were able to make strides during the Civil Rights Movement. Three facets of society that display these race and gender battles are labor, public spaces and institutions, and police brutality.

The first facet of society that the battle of both gender and race is fully displayed is through labor. During the years of the Second World War, black women in Memphis faced two particularly tough battles in regards to labor struggles. First was the struggle for recognition by society and the other was economic opportunity. During this time, black women, more so than black men, faced a great deal of discrimination and stereotypes. While black men could be at least accepted to a lower status of job for say riveting, black women would be entirely omitted from the occupation. For example, Fischer Aircraft hired 700 white women as riveters, but absolutely no black women. In general, black women would be sidelined to occupations deemed traditionally acceptable for their race and gender, such as maids and laundry workers. Despite that, there was a concerted effort to resist the limitations of segregated society in the labor market. Black women formed so called, ‘Eleanor Clubs,’ which sought to break from the notion that that they were only capable of performing domestic work. Furthermore, society restricted black women’s  ability find jobs, their income—black women were paid the least among blacks and whites—and how they were treated in these jobs. In response to this, black women established and joined unions as a means to exert political power in their daily lives. In particular, black women used the power of an organized strike to fight discrimination in the workplace, for better pay, and working conditions.

In a similar manner to the resistance in labor, the battle of public spaces and institutions also demonstrated the inequality associated with both race and gender. Due to segregation and white supremacy, white popular culture excluded the black community by dominating the many facets of creativity, art, and culture during the Civil Rights struggle. In order to assert their independence and power, black communities created their own black civic universe through music, radio, religion, politics, and the press to explore more deeply ideas about race, gender, and sexuality. This black-oriented infrastructure helped to “create spaces for a cultural consumption by blacks that was grounded in politics of pride, despite their Jim Crow origins.” Like Ida B. Wells’ establishing her printing press on Beale Street, many black business owners took the initiative to establish themselves because of the massive impact it had on morale, and in turn, the influence it had to inspire these communities to react politically. Technological advances came with the movement to the entertainment industry during the movement to Beale Street: radio and movies. Radio, specifically WDIA which reached from Memphis all the way to the Mississippi Delta, became an integral part of black life. WDIA became a center for black music and its culture helping to play the music that was initially ignored by whites on Beale Street and exploring issues of black manhood and womanhood through radio conversation. Movies also became an important way for African-Americans to understand where they stood in the racial hierarchy due to Memphis censorship laws. These laws not only prevented black people from seeing certain movies, but it also cut out black musicians and would not even allow certain movies to be played if they bordered on equal rights. In one particular movie, a nurse who could “pass” as white was engaged to a white doctor and the Memphis censorship laws would not allow it to be played in Memphis theatres for fear of miscegenation.

In a comparable manner to public spaces, the intersection of race and womanhood are prominently reflected in the police brutality occurring against African Americans, particularly in Memphis through the 1940’s. The stereotype of black men as “bestial rapists” was long established in the late 19th and 20th century with the rise of lynching. This led to the continual police questioning of ‘suspicious’ African American men, stopping them on the side of the road merely for the color of their skin. If arrested, many of them were somehow charged with rape, or assault of a white woman. Women, however, were subjected to even more sexualized verbal and physical assaults. Black women were stopped on the basis of insufficient health cards, pointing to the demoralizing view of them as licentious, and immoral.

        A typical evening after work, two young black women, Alice Wright and Annie Mae Williams, were walking home from work when two police officers stopped them, and “accused them of loitering.” Despite the fact that the two women were walking, the accusation implies that they are on the street for other reasons—insulting their womanhood. This occurred not only in Memphis, but throughout the south for African American women in the early to mid-1900’s. They were also questioned about their health cards, which remained at work; the implication of the question further proves the stereotype that black women were promiscuous and therefore more likely to have venereal diseases. In fact, women who were held on the charge of a falsified health card, or of having syphilis, were quarantined within jail. This solidified the idea that black women were wanton beings. It is this exact point one juror made in the case of the two young black women, Williams and Wright, whom Green discusses in Battling the Plantation Mentality. “Given the state’s definition of rape, the outcome of [that] kind of trial usually hinged on whether or not the woman had been forced,” and this juror felt as if the “character” of the two young women determined that” force was not necessary” for the police officers to “accomplish their purpose.” This language wholly hinges on the fact that black women were overtly sexualized, thus defenseless to police brutality against them. Their status, defined by the color of their skin and their gender, created an entirely different space for young black women to navigate. This twisted dynamic forced women of color to grapple with society’s preconceptions of their nature as overtly sexualized beings, while they simultaneously struggled for recognition of their true femininity.

The intersections of gender and race are an necessary lens through which the Civil Rights Movement should be analyzed. These intersections will illuminate the other avenues that black folks used to combat discrimination such as the “Eleanor Clubs”. The relationships between gender and labor and gender and police brutality inform the South’s commitment to maintaining social control. This control is manifested through how black men and women are treated in the workplace, by the state, and how they are socialized. In the face of this oppression, black men and women combated racism through investing in their “black civic universe”. These two weeks readings have emphasized the necessity to delve deeper into understanding the movement through different and alternative lens.