'They finally found out that we really are men': Violence, non-violence and black manhood in the civil rights era

Gender and History

Volumn 19, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 543-564

  Wendt, Simon ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HEIDELBERG   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AFRICAN AMERICAN; BLACK POPULATION; CIVIL RIGHTS; GENDER IDENTITY; HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE; RACISM; VIOLENCE;

EID: 35348873105     PISSN: 09535233     EISSN: 14680424     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2007.00487.x     Document Type: Article

References (136)

1. Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 212.
2. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 80.
3. Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith, 'Introduction: Gender and the Civil Rights Movement', in Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith (eds), Gender and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Garland, 1999), pp. 1-16, here p. 6.
4. Steve Estes, I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), pp. 7-8.
5. Herman Graham, III, Brothers' Vietnam War: Black Power, Manhood, and the Military Experience (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003).
6. Christopher B. Strain, Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), pp. 179-80
7. Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 8-9, 265-8, 318-19
8. Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 2, 94, 139-49.
9. Michael S. Kimmel, The Gendered Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 253.
10. John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800-1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 24, 30-31
11. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941), p. 43; BertramWyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 352-3, 369.
12. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover, 'Rethinking Southern Masculinity: An Introduction', in Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover (eds), Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), pp. vii-xvii, here p. xi.
13. Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 4.
14. Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (Washington, DC: Civitas Counterpoint, 1998), p. xiii.
15. Jacqueline Dowd Hall, '"The Mind that Burns in Each Body": Women, Rape, and Racial Violence', in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (eds), Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 328-49, esp. pp. 332, 335.
16. Friend and Glover, 'Rethinking Southern Masculinity', p. xi
17. Andrea G. Hunter and James Earl Davis, 'Hidden Voices of Black Men: The Meaning, Structure, and Complexity of Manhood', Journal of Black Studies 25 (1994), pp. 20-40, here p. 21.
18. Jim Cullen, '"I's a Man Now": Gender and African American Men', in Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (eds), Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 76-91, here p. 77.
19. Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979), p. 428
20. Gilles Vandal, 'Black Violence in Post-Civil War Louisiana', Journal of Interdisciplinary History 25 (1994), pp. 45-64, here p. 62.
21. Farah Jasmine Griffin, 'Black Feminisms and Du Bois: Respectability, Protection, and Beyond', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568 (March 2000), pp. 28-40, here p. 31.
22. Patricia A. Schechter, 'Unsettled Business: Ida B.Wells Against Lynching, or, How Anti Lynching Got Its Gender', in W. Fitzhugh Brundage (ed.), Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 292-317, here p. 295.
23. Ida B. Wells, 'Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases', in Ida B. Wells, On Lynchings (New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 23. This is a collection of several reprinted pamphlets, which were published separately over the course of the 1890s. 1969 was the first time that these pamphlets were published together in one book.
24. Quoted in Emma Lou Thornbrough, 'T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Editor in the Age of Accommodation', in John Hope Franklin and August Meier (eds), Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 19-37, esp. pp. 22-3.
25. Quoted in Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 234.
26. 'Cowardice', Crisis 12 (1916), pp. 270-71.
27. Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy A Load: BlackWomen in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), p. 140.
28. On Marcus Garvey, see Edmund David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1955)
29. Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976)
30. Judith Stein, The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class inModern Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986).
31. Sudarshan Kapur, Raising Up a Prophet: The African American Encounter with Gandhi (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), pp. 2-7, 40.
32. On Gandhi's philosophy, see Joan V. Bondurant, Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict (rev. edn., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
33. On Randolph and the March onWashington Movement, see Paula F. Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990)
34. Herbert Garfinkel, When Negroes March: The March on Washington Movement in the Organizational Politics for FEPC (1959; repr. New York: Atheneum, 1969).
35. Marie Klein to George Houser, 15 September, 1946, series 3, box 6, folder 9, Congress of Racial Equality Papers (CORE Papers), State Historical Society of Wisconsin (hereafter SHSW), Madison.
36. James Farmer, Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Arbor House, 1985), p. 109.
37. Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 71.
38. Transcript of an interview with Franklin McCain, in Howell Raines (ed.), My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (1977; repr. New York: Penguin, 1983), p. 78.
39. 'Mrs. Johnnie R. Carter', in Wally G. Vaughn and Richard W. Wills (eds), Reflections on our Pastor: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 1954-1960 (Dover,MA: Majority Press, 1999), p. 145.
40. Rosa Parks, with Jim Haskins, Rosa Parks: My Story (New York: Puffin Books, 1992), pp. 174-5.
41. Transcript of an interview with Jodie 'Preacher' Scaffold, in Youth of the Rural Organizing and Cultural Center (Holmes County, Mississippi), Minds Stayed on Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle in the Rural South, an Oral History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), p. 64.
42. Transcript of an interview with Hartman Turnbow, in Raines (ed.), My Soul Is Rested, p. 266.
43. Dave Dennis, interview by Kim Lacy Rogers, tape recording, Jackson, MS, 4 December 1995, Delta Oral History Project, L. Zenobia Coleman Library, Tougaloo College, Tougaloo, MS.
44. On the tactical aspects of nonviolence, see David J. Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).
45. Anne Braden, 'Nonviolent Revolution: An Idea that Wasn't Tried', Southern Patriot 25 (February 1967), p. 7.
46. See Simon Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007)
47. Strain, Pure Fire; Hill, The Deacons for Defense
48. Akinyele O. Umoja, '1964: The Beginning of the End of Nonviolence in the Mississippi Freedom Movement', Radical History Review 85 (2003), pp. 201-26
49. Akinyele O. Umoja, '"WeWill Shoot Back": The Natchez Model and Paramilitary Organization in the Mississippi Freedom Movement', Journal of Black Studies 32 (2002), pp. 271-94
50. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie.
51. Roy Wilkins, with Tom Mathews, Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins (1982; repr. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 247
52. Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir (New York: David McKay, 1962), pp. 94, 96, 111, 162
53. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, pp. 84-9
54. Andrew M. Manis, A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), pp. 110, 117-18
55. Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 141.
56. On the Deacons, see Hill, The Deacons for Defense; Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun, pp. 66-99, 150-52.
57. Robert Hicks, interview by Robert Wright, Bogalusa, LA, 10 August 1969, transcript, p. 16
58. Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, DC.
59. Quoted in memorandum, 'Deacons for Defense and Justice, Incorporated', 8 June 1966, Deacons Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) File 157-2466-137, FBI, Washington, DC.
60. 'The Deacons - and Their Impact', National Guardian, 4 September 1965, p. 4.
61. Quoted in Baltimore Afro-American, 23 October 1965, p. 1.
62. Quoted in Timothy J. Minchin, The Color of Work: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Southern Paper Industry, 1945-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 92.
63. Hicks interview by Wright, p. 15.
64. Quoted in Roy Reed, 'The Deacons, Too, Ride by Night', New York Times Magazine, 15 August 1965, p. 11.
65. A. Z. Young, interview byMiriam Feingold, tape recording, Bogalusa, LA, c.July 1966, Miriam Feingold Papers, SHSW.
66. Reed, 'The Deacons, Too, Ride by Night', p. 22.
67. George Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 96.
68. On armed resistance in Mississippi, see Umoja, 'We Will Shoot Back', pp. 271-94; Umoja, '1964: The Beginning of the End of Nonviolence', pp. 201-26
69. Emilye Crosby, A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), pp. 167-88
70. Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun, pp. 100-30.
71. Transcript of an interview with Robert Cooper, in Minds Stayed on Freedom, p. 94.
72. Transcript of an interview with Hartman Turnbow, in My Soul is Rested p. 266.
73. Quoted in Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 90.
74. Diary entry 14 July 1964, box 2, folder 1; 'Mississippi Negroes Near Violence, Says Knox Grad', newspaper clipping [n.d.], box 1, folder 9, Jo Ann Ooiman Robinson Papers, SHSW; Elizabeth Sutherland (ed.), Letters from Mississippi (New York: McGraw Hill, 1965), p. 45; 'WATS Line Digest', 26 July 1964, p. 2, unprocessed accessions, Mary King Papers, SHSW.
75. Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 266-83.
76. See also John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 127.
77. Myrlie Evers, with William Peters, For Us, the Living (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), p. 124.
78. Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dial Press, 1968), p. 129.
79. Haley quoted in Roy Reed, 'Armed Negro Unit Spreads in South', New York Times, 6 June 1965, p. 25.
80. For a more detailed discussion of the benefits and limitations of armed resistance in the black freedom struggle, see Wendt, The Spirit and the Shotgun, pp.187-99.
81. See Peniel E. Joseph,Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006)
82. Peniel E. Joseph (ed.), The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights - Black Power Era (NewYork: Routledge, 2006)
83. MatthewJ. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)
84. James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)
85. Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 86 A number of new studies provide a more sophisticated understanding of the Black Panther Party. See Curtis J. Austin, Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006)
86. Jama Lazerow and Yohuru Williams (eds), In Search of the Black Panther Party: New Perspectives on a Revolutionary Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006)
87. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (eds), Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy (New York: Routledge, 2001)
88. Yohuru Williams, Black Politics/White Power: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Black Panthers in New Haven (St James, NY: Brandywine Press, 2000)
89. Charles E. Jones (ed.), The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered] (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998).
90. Nikhil Pal Singh, 'The Black Panthers and the "Undeveloped Country" of the Left', in Jones (ed.), The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered], pp. 57-105, here p. 81.
91. P. L. Prattis, 'Non-Violence', Pittsburgh Courier, 30 November 1957, p. 9; P. L. Prattis, 'Non-Violence - II', Pittsburgh Courier 7 December 1957, p. 9.
92. Charles X, 'Law and Buckshot', Baltimore Afro-American, 30 May 1959, p. 4.
93. 'Freedom Riders Go Beyond the New Frontier', Liberator 1 (1961), p. 2.
94. Jimmy McDonald, interview by James Mosby, New York, 5 November 1969, transcript, p. 21, Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection.
95. 'Message to the Grass Roots', in George Breitman (ed.), Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (New York: Pathfinder, 1989), pp. 9, 12.
96. Quoted in M. S. Handler, 'Malcolm X Terms Dr. King's Tactics Futile', New York Times, 11 May 1963, p. 9.
97. 'With Mrs Fannie Lou Hamer', in Breitman (ed.), Malcolm X Speaks, p. 107.
98. Quoted in Bruce Perry, Malcolm: The Life of aMan Who Changed Black America (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1991), p. 282.
99. 'The Founding Rally of the OAAU', in Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary (1970; 2nd edn, New York: Pathfinder, 1992), p. 53.
100. Bruce Perry, 'Malcolm X and the Politics of Masculinity', Psychohistory Review 13 (1985), pp. 18-25, here p. 22
101. Stephen Sandford Estes, Jr, '"I Am A Man": Race, Manhood, and the Struggle for Civil Rights' (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of North Carolina, 2001), pp. 93-4, 103
102. Claude Andrew Clegg III, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (New York: St Martin's Press, 1997), pp. 101, 122
103. Estes, I am a Man!, p. 91.
104. Farah Jasmine Griffin, '"Ironies of the Saint": Malcolm X, Black Women, and the Price of Protection', in Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin (eds), Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001), pp. 214-29, esp. pp. 214-17.
105. 'What We Want', October 1966, in Philip S. Foner (ed.), The Black Panthers Speak (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1970), pp. 2-4.
106. Quoted in David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: W. Morrow, 1986), p. 566.
107. Wallace Turner, 'A Gun is Power, Black Panther Says', New York Times 21 May 1967, p. 66; 'From "In Defense of Self-Defense" II: July 3, 1967', in Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 90.
108. 'Interview with Huey Newton', in August Meier, Elliot Rudwick and Francis L. Broderick (eds), Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century (1965; 2nd edn, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill, 1971), p. 508.
109. Countryman, Up South, pp. 287-8.
110. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1968; repr. New York: Dell, 1992), p. 26.
111. Cleaver, Soul on Ice, pp. 101-6.
112. In Philip Brian Harper, AreWe Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 50.
113. Winifred Breines, The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History ofWhite and BlackWomen in the Feminist Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 56.
114. Cleaver, Soul on Ice, p. 189.
115. 'Playboy Interview: Eldridge Cleaver', Playboy (December 1968), p. 92.
116. Erika Doss, 'Imaging the Panthers: Representing Black Power and Masculinity, 1960s-1990s', Prospects 23 (1998), pp. 483-516, here p. 491.
117. Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 133.
118. Connell, Masculinities, pp. 37-8, 77; Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell and John Lee, 'Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity', Theory and Society 14 (1985), pp. 551-604, esp. pp. 592-4.
119. Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman' Story (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), p. 357.
120. Doss, 'Imaging the Panthers', p. 493; Angela D. LeBlanc-Ernest, '"The Most Qualified Person to Handle the Job": Black Panther PartyWomen, 1966-1982', in Jones (ed.), The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered], pp. 305-34, here p. 307.
121. StephenWard, 'The ThirdWorldWomen's Alliance: Black Feminist Radicals and Black Power Politics', in Joseph (ed.), The Black Power Movement pp. 119-44, here p. 124.
122. Transcript of an interview with Sonia Sanchez, in Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer (eds), Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), p. 255.
123. Quoted in Charise Cheney, '"We Men Ain't We?" Mas(k)ulinity and the Gendered Politics of Black Nationalism', in Charles M. Payne and Adam Green (eds), Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism, 1850-1950 (New York: New York University Press, 2003), pp. 536-64, here p. 547.
124. Gloria Richardson (Dandridge), interview by John Britton, New York, 11 October 1967, transcript, p. 53, Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection.
125. Tracye Matthews, '"No One Ever Asks, What a Man's Role in the Revolution Is": Gender and the Politics of the Black Panther Party, 1966-1971', in Jones (ed.), The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered], pp. 267-304, here p. 270; Ogbar, Black Power, p. 102.
126. Joseph, Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour, p. 244. See also Breines, The Trouble Between Us, p. 75.
127. Kimberly Springer, 'Black Feminists Respond to Black Power Masculinism', in Joseph (ed.), The Black Power Movement, pp. 105-18, here p. 118.
128. See also Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
129. Ward, 'The Third World Women's Alliance', p. 120.
130. See Kenneth O'Reilly, 'Racial Matters': The FBI's Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972 (New York: Free Press, 1989), pp. 293-324
131. Ward Churchill, '"To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy": The FBI's Secret War Against the Black Panther Party', in Cleaver and Katsiaficas (eds), Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party, pp. 78-117
132. Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI's SecretWars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1988).
133. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide, pp. 149-50; John A. Courtwright, 'Rhetoric of the Gun: An Analysis of the Rhetorical Modifications of the Black Panther Party', Journal of Black Studies 4 (1974), pp. 249-67.
134. See Martin Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 4.
135. See, e.g., William Oliver, The Violent Social World of Black Men (New York: Lexington, 1994); Richard Majors and Jane Mancini Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (New York: Lexington, 1992)
136. Ulf Hannerz, Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community (1969; repr. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).