Trauma and testimony in black women's civil rights memoirs: The Montgomery bus boycott and the women who started it, warriors don't cry, and from the Mississippi Delta

Journal of Women's History

Volumn 21, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 84-107

  Berg, Allison ^a  

^a MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77749283304     PISSN: 10427961     EISSN: 15272036     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jowh.0.0099     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock (New York: David McKay, 1962)
2. Septima Poinsette Clark, Echo in My Soul, with LeGette Blythe (New York: Dutton, 1962)
3. Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Doubleday, 1968)
4. Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987)
5. Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High (New York: Washington Square Books, 1994)
6. and Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta: A Memoir (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1997)
7. More recent examples include Winson Hudson and Constance Curry, Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter (New York: Palgrave, 2002)
8. Tananarive Due and Patricia Stephens Due, Freedom in the Family: A Mother - Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (New York: One World, 2003)
9. Dorothy Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir (New York: Public Affairs, 2003)
10. and Mamie Till-Bradley and Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence: The Story of a Hate Crime that Changed America (New York: Random House, 2003)
11. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005): 1233-263, quotation on 1262
12. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)
13. and Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999)
14. See, also, Christina Greene, "What's Sex Got to Do with It: Gender and the New Black Freedom Movement Scholarship," Feminist Studies 32, no. 1 (2006): 163-83
15. Feminist historians have tended to focus on how the larger narrative of the civil rights movement has been constructed, rather than on particular narratives published by black women active in the movement: see, for example, Kathryn Nasstrom, "Down to Now: Memory, Narrative, and Women's Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, Georgia," Gender and History 11, no. 1 (1999): 113-44
16. Of the memoirs considered here, only Robinson's has received any scholarly attention: see Ruth Kocher, "Revisiting a Site of Cultural Bondage: Jo Ann Gibson Robinson's Boycott Memoir," in Women as Sites of Culture, ed. Susan Shifrin (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Press, 2002), 245-56
17. Several other memoirs of women active in the civil rights and black power movements are discussed in articles that identify commonalities among a large number of texts rather than offer close readings of individual memoirs; see Arlyn Diamond, "Choosing Sides, Choosing Lives: Women's Autobiographies of the Civil Rights Movement," in American Women's Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, ed. Margo Culley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 218-21
18. Janice Chernekoff, "Resistance Literature at Home: Rereading Women's Autobiographies from the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements," A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 20, no. 1 (2005): 38-58
19. and Paula Stewart Brush, "The Influence of Social Movements on Articulations of Race and Gender in Black Women's Autobiographies," Gender and Society 13, no. 1 (1999): 120-37
20. Alistair Thompson, Anzac Memories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 8
21. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "'You Must Remember This': Autobiography as Social Critique," Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (1998): 439-65, quotation on 441
22. Darlene Clark Hine, "Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance," in The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy, ed. Roger N. Lancaster and Micaela diLeonardo (New York: Routledge, 1997), 434-39
23. See, for example, Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)
24. Kathryn Nasstrom, "Beginnings and Endings: Life Stories and the Periodization of the Civil Rights Movement," Journal of American History 86, no. 2 (1999): 700-11
25. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods, eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)
26. Peter Ling and Sharon Monteith, eds., Gender in the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Garland Press, 1999)
27. and 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)
28. Marisa Chappell, Jenny Hutchinson, and Brian Ward, "'Dress Modestly, Neatly . . . As If You Were Going to Church': Respectability, Class and Gender in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Early Civil Rights Movement," in Ling and Monteith, eds., Gender in the Civil Rights Movement, 69-100, quotation on 69
29. Chana Kai Lee, "Anger, Memory, and Personal Power," in Collier-Thomas and Franklin, eds., Sisters in the Struggle, 139-70, quotation on 151
30. Lee, For Freedom's Sake, 59
31. King-Kok Cheung, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 3
32. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "To Write Myself: The Autobiographies of Afro-American Women," in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship, ed. Shari Benstock (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 161-80, quotation on 169
33. David J. Garrow, "Foreword," in Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott, ix-xv, quotations on xi, x, xii
34. Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 11
35. and Garrow, "Foreword," xiii
36. Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks: My Story, with Jim Haskins (New York: Dial, 1992), 112
37. Beals, Warriors Don't Cry, xvii, 2, xx
38. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 221
39. Kevin J. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), xiv
40. Holland, From the Mississippi Delta, 21, 24
41. Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 147
42. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York: Bantam, 1969), 142-56
43. Stepto, From Behind the Veil, 147
44. Danielle L. McGuire, "'It Was like All of Us Had Been Raped': Sexual Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African American Freedom Struggle," Journal of American History 91, no. 3 (2004): 906-31, quotation on 914
45. Danielle L. McGuire, Journal of American History Ibid., 910
46. Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford, eds., The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006)
47. Kathryn Nasstrom, "Beginnings and Endings," 700-701