ABOUT THIS BOOK

This collection of nine essays analyzes the people, the protests, and the incidents of the civil rights movement through the lens of gender. More than just a study of women, the book examines the ways in which assigned sexual roles and values shaped the strategy, tactics, and ideology of the movement. The essays deal with topics ranging from the Montgomery bus boycott and Rhythm and Blues to gangsta rap and contemporary fiction, from the 1950s to the 1990s. Referring to groups such as the National Council of African American Men and events such as the Million Man March, the authors address male gender identity as much as female, arguing that slave/master relations from before the Civil War continued to affect Black masculinity in the postwar battle for civil rights. Whereas feminism traditionally deals with issues of patriarchy and prescribed gender roles, this volume shows how race relations continue to complicate sex-based definitions within the civil rights movement.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Peter J. Ling is reader in American history at the University of Nottingham. His publications include Martin Luther King Jr. and The Democratic Party: A Photographic History.

Sharon Monteith is reader in American studies at the University of Nottingham. Her publications include South to a New Place: Region, Literature, Culture and Advancing Sisterhood?: Interracial Friendships in Contemporary Southern Fiction. She was awarded the Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship at the University of Memphis, 2001-2002.

REVIEWS

"The most interesting field for new research on the civil rights movement is in the area of gender. This book breaks new ground by moving beyond a discussion of the contributions of individual women and men and covers the gendered basis of internal civil rights politics."

— Steven Lawson, author of Civil Rights Crossroads: Nation, Community, and the Black Freedom Struggle

"These provocative, wide-ranging analyses offer refreshing perspectives on the persistently troubling question of the role of gender in American racial politics and bring contemporary debates on the relationship between sex and race into much-needed historical perspective."

— Allison Graham, author of Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race During the Civil Rights Struggle

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Gender and the civil rights movement / Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith
Daisy Bates, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and 1957 Little Rock school crisis : a gendered perspective / John A. Kirk
Sex machines and prisoners of love : male rhythm and blues, sexual politics, and the Black freedom struggle / 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 / Marisa Chappell, Jenny Hutchinson, and Brian Ward
Gender and generation : manhood at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference / Peter J. Ling
Women in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee : ideology, organizational structure, and leadership / Belinda Robnett
The "gun-toting" Gloria Richardson : Black violence in Cambridge, Maryland / Jenny Walker
"It's a doggy-dogg world" : Black cultural politics, Gangsta Rap and the "post-soul man" / Eithne Quinn
Revisiting the 1960s in contemporary fiction : "where do we go from here?" / Sharon Monteith
"The struggle continues" : Black women in Congress in the 1990s / Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson