Posts com a Tag ‘Direitos civis’
Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920-1945 – MURPHY (THT)
MURPHY, Mary-Elizabeth B.. Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920-1945. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 280p. Resenha de: HYATT, Marshall. The History Teacher, v.52, n.4, p.722-723, ago., 2019.
The recent historiography of the Civil Rights Movement has closely examined the extent to which that struggle for equality had its origins in the nineteenth century. Those studies transcended the traditional focus on the active phase years after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) by returning to the roots in the aftermath of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the early 1900s. Jim Crow Capital is a welcome addition to that scholarship, providing an in-depth history of the activities of African American women in the nation’s capital in the formative years of what became the twentieth-century civil rights protests. At the same time, the book places important emphasis on the intersectionality of race and gender, delineating that nexus as articulated by critical race theorists.
In doing so, the author brings to light the contributions of women in combating all forms of discrimination and segregation, thus expanding the contours of that history.
Fittingly, the work centers on the nation’s capital, where segregation and racism were rampant both locally and federally. The title of the book itself is a direct reference to the perceptions of African Americans living in Washington, who argued “that the discrimination in their city resembled the worst practices of the U.S. South” (p. 144). There were many manifestations of abuse that supported their contentions. Murphy begins with organized protests in support of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which started in the 1920s and culminated during the Depression decade. She underscores the critical importance of the Silent Parade of 1922 and the Rope Protests of 1934, in which “African American women succeeded in generating national attention to the crisis of lynching” (p. 71). Significantly, she argues that women in Washington were ideally suited for these types of protest activities, because “their charged location” allowed them to focus on local and national issues at the same time, and with direct access to the federal government.
Beyond those forays into anti-lynching campaigns, black women also organized protests against police brutality in the city, rioted for economic justice at a time when they were discriminated against in employment, petitioned for voting rights, and engaged in sit-ins and boycotts of department stores that maintained segregationist policies. Surprisingly, in that regard, Murphy only mentions in passing the critical work of women after Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 decision to segregate all offices of government civil service. Early on, she notes that “while activists worked tirelessly with the NAACP to protest segregation, they were unable to integrate the federal government” (p. 6). Yet women, such as Mary Church Terrell, were deeply involved in that effort. Working with Neval H. Thomas, American history teacher at Dunbar High School and NAACP branch president in Washington, D.C., they fought an intensified desegregation campaign in the 1920s and 1930s. The pressure they brought to bear on the federal government achieved some small victories, such as the integration of the Department of the Census and the Bureau of Pensions in the late 1920s. Murphy acknowledges that U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes desegregated his bureau in the late 1930s, which created the impetus for the full government civil service desegregation to come, but does not contextualize that achievement within the earlier activism of the Washington branch.
Jim Crow Capital represents an important addition to the “long history of the civil rights movement” revisionism, appropriate for any course on the struggle for black equality. Reaching back into the immediate post-World War I period, when disillusionment among African Americans was fueled by segregation, lynching, and the Red Summer of 1919, it underscores the birth of the “New Negro,” so poignantly described by Howard University philosophy professor Alain Locke. The black women in Washington, D.C. epitomized his belief that African Americans adopted a “vibrant new psychology” that made civil rights activism a sacred mission. Accordingly, Murphy’s contribution is critical in teaching that African American women were major actors on the stage of civil rights organizing, protesting, and leadership, well before the active phase. They navigated the boundaries of race and gender in their pursuit of racial justice.
Mary McLeod Bethune, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Mary Church Terrell, and countless others in the nation’s capital were significant forerunners in the critical crusade for racial justice. It was their inspiration and commitment that passed the torch to Fannie Lou Hamer, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, Ella Baker, Diane Nash, and others, whose collective activism was a fitting tribute to their legacy.
Jim Crow Capital brings that critical significance to light, while also confirming Martin Luther King Jr.’s belief that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Marschall Hyatt – Geffen Academy at UCLA.
[IF]Provas de liberdade: uma odisseia atlântica na era da emancipação | Rebeca J. Scott, Jean M. Hébrard
Fruto de uma extensa pesquisa realizada ao longo de sete anos por Rebecca J. Scott e Jean M. Hébrard, Provas de liberdade: uma odisseia atlântica na era da emancipação, traz a saga da família Vincent/Tinchant, apresentada ao longo de nove capítulos e um epílogo de tirar o fôlego. Desde já, saliento que não consigo ver de outro modo senão como excepcional o modo como estes experientes pesquisadores conseguiram seguir os rastros deixados por estes “sobreviventes do Atlântico”.
Logo no início do livro, os autores nos informam que não consideraram o itinerário dos Vincent/Tinchant como típico ou representativo, o que podemos constatar ao longo da leitura. O fio inicial para a investigação foi uma carta escrita por Édouard Tinchant, um fabricante de charutos residente da Bélgica, endereçada ao general Máximo Gómez, encontrada no Arquivo Nacional de Cuba, na qual ele solicita a autorização para pôr seu nome na marca de charutos que pretendia lançar e, para tanto, não se furtou em usar sua capacidade discursiva para relatar aspectos de sua vida familiar enfatizando uma conexão entre luta por direitos civis e igualdade racial no mundo atlântico do século XIX – a Guerra Civil e a Reconstrução dos Estados Unidos (1861-1877), a Revolução Francesa (1848) e a Revolução do Haiti (1791-1804). A trilha seguida por eles nos conduziu até o século XX abrindo uma janela para que pudéssemos ver os desdobramentos da Segunda Guerra Mundial (1939-1945) na vida de pessoas que tinham “cor”, como Marie-José Tinchant. Leia Mais
Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture – JOYNER (CSS)
JOYNER, Charles. Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. 361p. Resenha de: SEIXAS, Peter. Canadian Social Studies, v.35, n.3, 2001.
When we think about the major political fault lines in Canada, we tend to think in terms of regions. The recent election was one more example of ideologically defined parties whose strengths and weaknesses divide along stark regional lines. The greatest challenge to national unity in the twentieth century has been Quebec separatism, while resentments in both the Maritimes and the West have been endemic. When we examine the United States in the 20th century, however, racial divisions, and not regional schisms, appear to be the most significant threat to the success of the national project. Since mid-century, moreover, after years of northward migration of the descendents of enslaved African Americans, the problem of race relations is no longer plausibly conceived-if it ever was-as an exclusively Southern regional issue.
Charles Joyner’s collection of essays, most of them previously published, offers at least two challenges to this picture of the American socio-political map. First, he claims that the South continues to be a distinct region, socially and culturally. Secondly, he argues that the apparent racial divisions in the South mask shared traditions which are the product of centuries of interplay among folk traditions which originated in Celtic, west African, Native, and other cultures. Thus, Joyner speaks without hesitation or apology of the essential character of Southerners (p. 150). Region provides a central organizing framework for the otherwise widely disparate essays in the volume.
A second theme helps to unite his chapters: the interplay between folklore study and the discipline of history. Joyner himself, as both a folklorist and a historian, straddles the two fields. Folklore study had its origins in the collection of folk tales, legends, ballads, dances and crafts, and in the study of such products as dialects, vernacular architecture, folk religion, food and labour (p. 152). From these beginnings, it branched into a quest for theoretical foundations and several of Joyner’s essays help the uninitiated (like myself) understand the development of the field. It has been consistent in its concern with the lives and culture of non-elites. It has been less so in paying attention to the larger social and political contexts within which folkways were embedded or in serious study of cultures changing over time. This is where history comes in. Pursuing his study of the South over the course of a lifetime, Joyner promises that two disciplines offer more than either one alone could deliver.
Shared Traditions is organized into five sections. After an introduction that sets the theme of Southern unity in diversity, the first section examines slavery in the old South. While these chapters make an interesting read, they have long been superseded by the work of Jacqueline Jones, Leon Litwack, Eric Foner, and Herbert Gutman (among many others) who do not even get footnotes. Three review essays on David Potter, David Hackett Fischer and Henry Glassie comprise the second section. A third section is a disparate collection of essays on the New South, examining Jews, music, dulcimers, and a local civil rights campaign. The fourth section theorizes folklore study and history. The final section, a single chapter, is a plea for cultural conservation on the Sea Islands, where luxury resort development has largely displaced a vibrant and successful black folk culture.
Will Canadian social studies teachers and educators be interested in this volume? I do not think that any Canadian curriculum is geared in a way that this volume will be of import for its substantive detail on the American South. Nor is the volume an economical way to catch up on recent historiography of the region. Nor, when it comes to exploring the pedagogical possibilities of folklore research, does it offer anything close to what the Foxfire books did in the 1970s. There is, however, a contribution here, on the methodological and theoretical issues surrounding the interplay of capitalist globalization and regional folk cultures. These are key historical forces that touch the lives of our students and their families, whether Canadian-born or newly immigrated. I suspect, though, that hard-pressed teachers will be able to find more economical sources to enrich their approaches to these issues.
Peter Seixas – Canada Research Chair in Education. University of British Columbia.
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