Suffrage and Antisuffrage

Prior to the Civil War the South showed little interest in woman’s enfranchisement. During Reconstruction the issue was raised in several constitutional conventions, but in no state were women granted the right to vote. After Reconstruction woman suffrage became associated with the South’s desire to reduce the importance of the black male vote. A widely discussed proposal was the enfranchisement of women with educational and/or property qualifications. This extension of the franchise would include black as well as white women. Fewer black women would be able to meet these requirements, so the proportion of white voters would be increased. The strength of the black vote would be diluted, and white control of southern politics would be assured.

Proposals to enfranchise women meeting certain qualifications were introduced in constitutional conventions in Mississippi (1890), South Carolina (1895), and Alabama (1901). None of these proposals was adopted, however. Involving women in politics was contrary to southern cultural traditions, and southern men were unwilling to use this stratagem even for the purpose of coping with the vexing race issue.

In 1892 the National American Woman Suffrage Association established a special committee on southern work. Laura Clay of Kentucky chaired the committee, composed of southern women. The committee endeavored to influence public opinion through the distribution of literature and sponsoring lectures. Due largely to its efforts, suffrage organizations formed in all the southern states before the end of the decade.

When crusading for the ballot, southern women followed the guidelines of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. They conducted their agitation with dignity and restraint, avoiding the militant tactics advocated by Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party. This party organized branches in the southern states, but its following there was small. It conducted no militant agitation in the area, but some southern women participated in such activities in the nation’s capital. The oldest of the White House pickets and suffrage prisoners, for example, was a southern woman, 73-year-old Mary C. Nolan of Jacksonville, Fla.

The suffragists assured the public that enfranchisement would enable women to be better wives, mothers, citizens, and taxpayers. They would use their votes for the general betterment of society. The antisuffragists countered by arguing that enfranchisement would constitute a threat to the home and the family. Participation in politics would coarsen women and cause them to lose their femininity. It would also cause them to neglect their household duties and would lead to quarrels between husbands and wives.

The “antis” did little organizing in the South and can hardly be considered to have had a movement there. Their strength lay in their appeal to traditional prejudices and to generally established values. They were endeavoring to maintain the status quo while the suffragists were working for change.

The suffragists established lobbies in state capitals. Bills to enfranchise women were introduced in state legislatures, but they were seldom passed. In only three states were significant gains made. In Arkansas in 1917 the legislature passed a law permitting women to vote in primary elections. The following year Texas passed a similar law. In 1919 Tennessee granted women the right to vote for presidential electors and also the right to vote in municipal elections. No southern state, however, allowed full enfranchisement.

When the federal woman suffrage amendment was submitted to the states for ratification, it encountered its strongest opposition in the South. Many southerners considered suffrage a state, not a federal, matter and feared that ratification would mean federal control of elections. Others held that the enfranchisement of black women would reopen the entire issue of the African American’s role in politics. Some predicted that it would usher in another era of Reconstruction.

Suffragists in early 20th-century Kentucky (Photographic Archives, University of Louisville, Louisville, Ky.)

In June 1919 Texas became the first state in the South to ratify the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. A few weeks later, Arkansas followed. Kentucky ratified in January 1920. In July 1919 Georgia became the first state in the Union to reject the proposed amendment. Georgia’s example was soon followed by Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

By August 1920, 35 states had ratified. The approval of only one more was needed. The governor of Tennessee submitted the question to a special session of the legislature. A bitter controversy ensued. Those opposing ratification called the proposed amendment a peril to the South and urged its rejection. Those in favor maintained that eventual ratification was a certainty and that Tennessee’s refusal could only delay it. After much emotional debate and political maneuvering, both houses of the legislature approved, and on 26 August 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution.

Two southern states refused to accept woman suffrage as the supreme law of the land. Mississippi and Georgia did not allow women to vote in the general election of 1920, claiming that the Nineteenth Amendment had been ratified too late to permit women to comply with state election laws. Georgia’s leading suffragist, Mary Latimer McLendon of Atlanta, telegraphed the secretary of state in Washington, seeking his opinion in regard to her eligibility to vote. Her effort was in vain, however, because he refused to become involved.

During the months that followed, Mississippi and Georgia yielded, and woman suffrage prevailed throughout the South. Women voted and held office. And the fears of the “antis” were not realized. Women did not lose their femininity, nor did they neglect their homes for politics. Only a few aspired to political careers.

The South’s strong opposition to woman suffrage was a result of the South’s basic conservatism, its devotion to the ideal of the patriarchal family, and its fear of federal interference in elections. Having no alternative, the South accepted enfranchisement but remained conservative in its attitude toward women and the family. The advent of woman suffrage apparently resulted in no appreciable change in the fundamental nature of southern culture.

A. ELIZABETH TAYLOR

Texas Woman’s University

Clement Eaton, Georgia Review (Summer 1974); Paul E. Fuller, Laura Clay and the Woman’s Rights Movement (1975); Elna C. Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (1997); Kenneth R. Johnson, Journal of Southern History (August 1972); Suzanne Lebsock, in Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, ed. Nancy Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (1993); Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (1970); A. Elizabeth Taylor, Journal of Mississippi History (February 1968), South Carolina Historical Magazine (April 1976, October 1979), The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee (1957); Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (1998); Mary Martha Thomas, The New Woman in Alabama: Social Reforms and Suffrage, 1890–1920 (1992); Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (1993); Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed., Votes for Women! The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation (1995).

 

Visiting

Human beings have probably “visited” ever since they developed enough language and leisure to communicate about something other than access to food, safety, and a mate, but southern Americans have tended to make visiting especially central to their lives. Joe Gray Taylor quotes an Alabaman who, in the 1920s, described visiting as a “happy recreation,” which was, nevertheless, taken “very seriously.” Southern newspapers still include reports about people visiting from out of town, whether in a society column focused on the local elite or in reports from small-town church congregations. Certain common expressions of hospitality have long reflected the belief that southerners should always give the appearance of being willing to set aside whatever they are doing to visit with someone: “Y’all come to see us sometime”; “Come again real soon”; and “Come set a spell.” Southerners announce that they have “had a good visit” with someone and usually mean that their conversation made them feel closer and that they are looking forward to seeing each other again.

The primary purposes of any visit have usually been to have fun and escape daily worries, to help each other solve problems, and/or to establish and reinforce personal ties. There has not been enough research to determine what visiting traditions, if any, have been exclusively southern, but many practices have been affected by their cultural and historical contexts. Until the 20th century, most southerners lived in relatively isolated rural settings, making them especially appreciative of any opportunity to talk with anyone, whether neighbors or strangers. Until the spread of air-conditioning, people wishing to escape both the summer heat and the isolation of their houses would sit on front porches where they could invite passersby to join them for a chat. The Sunday highlight for many churchgoers has been the chance to visit after the service either outside or in a “fellowship hall.” At weddings, funerals, revivals, and other special gatherings, southerners have talked around tables “groaning” with massive platters of food (or, before football games, by the “tailgates” of each other’s cars and trucks). Small sets of people wishing to be alone, particularly courting couples, have, throughout southern history, “gone for a ride,” whether on horseback, in a carriage, or in an automobile.

The enduring social hierarchies in the South inspired complex regulations about who can see whom under what circumstances and how each individual should behave. Men have staked out special contexts for stag visits, including fishing, hunting, militia musters, political meetings, business luncheons, private clubs, locker rooms, bars, brothels, gambling, and various sports venues. Small-town men have gathered to chat and play cards or checkers in front of courthouses, in barbershops and country stores (sometimes open late to serve as a male community center), and, in recent decades, at a common table in “meat and three” restaurants. Melton McLaurin noticed that men in his grandfather’s store kept rehashing the same subjects rather than approaching topics that might stimulate tensions, but many male conversations have ended in fights, especially when they were fueled by alcohol.

Women have been most apt to visit in each other’s kitchens or parlors, in beauty shops (significantly called “beauty parlors” by many southern women), or while shopping together. Urban ladies of the 18th century followed the English pattern of holding “tea-tables,” at which they discussed fashions and people who were not present. Gossip has often been the special purview of females, allowing them to share opinions on who needed to be helped, reined in, or shunned. The primary “work” for the wives and daughters of wealthy planters, besides making sure that their servants did as bid, was to nurture relationships with other elites through frequent visits. One young antebellum wife complained about having to give up her quiet days at home “to pay morning calls” but acknowledged that it was “a duty we all owe society, and the sacrifice must be made occasionally.”

Heterosexual visits have occurred most often at parties, whether casual and spur of the moment or formal and planned. Each generation of southerners in each class has set standards for what kind of visiting was suitable for young men and women with romance on their minds. Until they were ready to court seriously one special female, 19th-century young males tended to gather in small groups and then visit a series of young women. Young people of the New South spent entire evenings riding a streetcar, much as their great grandchildren would “hang out” at a mall. For most of the 20th century, however, couples went on formal “dates,” during which the young women were expected to feign interest in whatever fascinated their male companions.

Although visiting has never been an exclusive class privilege, access to particular gatherings has often been restricted. The wealthy have always had more leisure time, as well as more money to spend on food, drink, servants, and congenial private and public spaces in which to entertain, but this may have made opportunities to visit more precious to people who had to spend most of the day working. Zora Neale Hurston, in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), describes members of an all-black community who “had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long” enjoying “the time for sitting on porches” when they might “hear things and talk.” Members of the lower classes have faced restrictions on their ability to unify through visiting since the earliest slave traders prevented Africans with the same language from being chained next to each other. Mills and other workplaces have been decorated with “no talking” signs. In spite of this, workers have met clandestinely in the woods and swamps of plantations, at times when overseers were out of sight, in workplace and school bathrooms, and during coffee and smoking breaks. Such visits have often included making jokes about the authorities.

The most significant visiting taboo in southern history has been against people of different “races” interacting as if they were peers. White men could have sex with both willing and unwilling black women, but they were never to be caught eating at the same table with African Americans. White women and their enslaved or free black servants might gossip together and help each other in childbirth, but they were never to let their “friendships” develop to a point that might challenge their social differences. Byron Bunch, in Faulkner’s Light in August (1932), criticized Lena Grove, the daughter of humanitarian carpetbaggers, for visiting sick black people “like they was white.”

In the 20th century, historical developments such as the civil rights movement and the migration of northerners to the South eroded some of the restrictions concerning who can interact with whom. Visiting practices among 21st-century southerners are probably less distinctive than in earlier times, but visiting, for whatever reasons and in whatever form, remains a favorite pastime across the South.

CITA COOK

State University of West Georgia

John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community (1979); Joyce Donlon, Swinging in Place: Porch Life in Southern Culture (2001); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (1988); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987); Crandall A. Shifflett, Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia (1991); Joe Gray Taylor, Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the South (1982).

 

Womanism

The majority of African Americans live in the South, and African American communities throughout the United States are influenced substantially by southern culture and its racialized history. Movements for social change and organizations advancing African American interests often survive and succeed because of the presence of black southerners, usually women. African American women are recognized as consummate organizers in their churches and communities, and it is said that one civil rights leader commented, “If the women ever leave the Movement, I’m going with the women because nothing is going to happen without the women.”

The civil rights movement brought a variety of activists to the South, including large numbers of white women. In its aftermath, white women, including some civil rights activists, sparked a feminist movement that challenged patriarchy and generated new modes of thinking about gender and women’s experience. Although white feminists claimed black southern women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Gloria Richardson, Rosa Parks, and Daisy Bates as their role models, feminism emerged as a primarily white movement. In the words of some black feminist critics, “All the women are white.” Consistent with American racial hierarchies, white women’s experiences provided the foundation for feminist thought; the problem of racism was presumed to be subsumed within the problem of patriarchy.

Alice Walker (b. 1944), black woman and southern writer, created the term “womanist” in 1981. Novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, and feminist, Walker discovered the limits of feminism as she sought to relate the issues and ideas identified by white women to the lived experience of black women. Seeking to integrate human liberation and self-definition, Walker eventually fashioned a succinct but very rich dictionary-style definition of her new term as a preface to In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, her 1983 book of essays. With that definition, she provided the foundations for a theory of black women’s history and experience that highlighted their significant roles in community and society. Heavily and enthusiastically appropriated by black women scholars in religious studies, ethics, and theology, womanist ideas became important tools for understanding black women’s perspectives and experiences from a standpoint that was self-defined and that resisted the cultural erasure that not only was a destructive component of American racism but was also rapidly being replicated in American feminism.

In all of her writings—fiction, poetry, and prose—Walker struggled against the invisibility of black women. She brought ordinary southern black women into the foreground in her novels and recovered the writings about black southern women by black writers like Zora Neale Hurston, a southerner, and Jean Toomer, a traveler in the South. Inspired by Hurston, who was not only a novelist but also an anthropologist, Walker’s novels and poems offered close and thick descriptions of southern black culture and connected that culture to national and global issues. In her short stories, especially in the volume You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, Walker used issues raised by white feminists to raise questions about the contradictions surrounding gender in African American life and culture. At the same time, Walker also examined the intricate contradictions of white and black women’s behavior in a system of white privilege, most dramatically in a short story titled “The Welcome Table” in In Love and in Trouble.

Walker used black women’s history, black women’s various forms of solidarity, and African American spirituality to construct her very complicated novel The Color Purple. That novel contains a tremendous amount of detail about black southerners and the complicated world they faced as they sought to survive with a degree of economic self-sufficiency, autonomy, and self-respect in the face of the violent opposition of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Walker was critical of the ways in which white feminists used their own experiences to interpret black women’s experiences, thus ignoring or misinterpreting black women’s history.

Walker first used the term “womanist” in a 1981 review of Jean Humez’s book, Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress. The review was reprinted in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Shakers built a religious movement that required its members to be celibate. On becoming a Shaker, Rebecca Cox Jackson left her husband and assumed a life of celibacy. Because, like most black women missionaries, evangelists, and club women of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Jackson traveled with a woman partner, Humez chose to call Jackson’s lifestyle “lesbian.” Walker objected to Humez’s use of a term that was not grounded in Rebecca Cox Jackson’s definition of the situation. Walker questioned “a non-black scholar’s attempt to label something lesbian that the black woman in question has not.”

Within the review, Walker laid the foundations of her definition. She rejected a term for women’s culture based on an island (Lesbos) and insisted that black women, regardless of how they were “erotically bound,” would choose a term “consistent with black cultural values”—values that emphasized communality—“regardless of who worked and slept with whom.” “Womanist,” as defined by Alice Walker, clearly “affirmed connectedness to the entire community and the world, rather than separation.” Humez’s choice of labels was an example of the ways white feminists perpetuated an intellectual colonialism. This intellectual colonialism reflected the differences in power and privilege that characterized the relationships between black and white women.

With the term “womanist,” Walker provided a word, a concept, and a way of thinking that allowed black women to name and label their own experiences. The invention of the term was an act of empowerment and resistance, which addressed and challenged the dehumanizing erasure of black women’s experience. Walker’s more elaborate definition provided a more extensive view of Walker’s understandings of the experiences and history of black women as a distinctive dimension of human experience and a powerful cultural force.

First of all, Walker defined a “womanist” as a “black feminist or feminist of color,” thus including the liberationist project of feminism in her definition. However, Walker gave the term an etymology rooted in the African American folk term “womanish,” a term African American mothers often used to criticize their daughters’ behavior. Traditionally “womanish” meant that girls were acting too old and engaging in behavior that could be sexually risky and invite attention that was harmful. Walker, however, co-opted “womanish” and used it to highlight the adult responsibilities that black girls often assumed in order to help their families and liberate their communities. Rebecca Cox Jackson lost her mother at age 13 and helped raise her brothers and sisters along with one of her brother’s children. As a civil rights worker in Mississippi Freedom Schools, Walker taught women whose childhoods ended early, limiting their educations. Walker also observed the participation of young people in civil rights demonstrations and was aware of the massive resistance of children in places like Birmingham and Selma, Ala. Walker described the term “womanish” as being opposite of “girlish,” subtly hinting that the pressures of accelerated development were the facts of black female life, which were not understood by white women’s experiences or their meaning of “feminist.” Walker’s term “womanist” implied a desire to be “responsible. In charge. Serious.”

A womanist, according to Walker, loves other women and prefers women’s culture, a very antipatriarchal orientation. However, womanists also evince a commitment “to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.” A womanist is “not a separatist, except periodically, for health,” and, as a “universalist,” a womanist transcends sources of division, especially those dictated by color and class. Walker offered a new approach to the antagonisms of class and color among African Americans, problems often overemphasized by black nationalists. For a womanist, these issues were differences among family members. A womanist also has a determination to act authoritatively on behalf of her community. Walker evoked very specific black women role models, like Mary Church Terrell, a club woman whose politics transcended color and class, and Harriet Tubman, famous for her exploits on the underground railroad and the Civil War battlefield.

Finally, Walker offered a description of black women’s culture that was at odds with some major emphases in white culture. Walker’s key word was “love,” and she linked it to spirituality, creative expression, and political activism. Her definition included a love of “food and roundness,” which stood in stark contrast to the body images and gender norms of the dominant culture, a culture that celebrated pathologically thin white women and socially produced eating disorders. Finally, Walker emphasized self-love, a woman “loves herself, regardless,” a direct challenge to the self-hatred that was a consequence of racism.

Although “womanist” has not displaced the terms “feminist” and “feminism,” the womanist idea resonated with many black women as a grounded and culturally specific tool to analyze black women’s experiences in community and society. Walker’s idea was particularly useful for black women in religious studies and theology, where the confrontation between black and white theologies, in the context of debates over liberation theologies, was particularly vibrant and direct. In normative disciplines such as ethics, theology, and biblical studies, the idealism and values in Walker’s idea were especially helpful. Ironically, all of the pioneering black women scholars who first used the term “womanist” in their work were southerners: Katie Geneva Cannon, author of Black Womanist Ethics; Jacqueline Grant, author of White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response; Renita Weems, author of Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible; and Delores S. Williams, author of “Womanist Theology: Black Women’s Voices” and Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. These scholars used Walker’s perspective to explore the relationship of African American women’s experiences to the construction of ethics, to theological and Christological ideas, and to the meaning and importance of biblical stories about women.

Although bell hooks (also a southerner), in her book Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, suggested that some women used the term “womanist” to avoid asserting they are “feminist,” the issue is more complex. Many black women who were self-identified as feminists found that the emphases of late 20th-century white feminists did not match their own concerns and experiences.

Although Walker did not indicate a desire to create a womanist movement, the term “womanism” was a natural corollary and extension of “womanist.” Walker’s writings and ideas, however, emphasized black women’s creativity, enterprise, and community commitment, and “womanist” linked these specifically to feminism. Womanism was used to identify both the activism consistent with the ideals embedded in Walker’s definition, as well as the womanist scholarly traditions that have grown up in various disciplines, especially religious studies. “Womanism is,” as Stacey Floyd-Thomas points out, “revolutionary. Womanism is a paradigm shift wherein Black women no longer look to others for their liberation.”

CHERYL TOWNSEND GILKES

Colby College

Stacey Floyd-Thomas, ed., Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society (2006); Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983).

 

Workers’ Wives

Although attention has been given to upper-class southern women (for example, the “southern belle”) and slave women (for example, the “black mammy”), the wife of the southern worker has often been neglected. Not bound by the restrictions of racism or social demands to appear “ladylike,” the worker’s wife has been a significant contributor to southern history and society.

On the southern colonial farm, work was divided along gender lines. In addition to cooking, cleaning, and rearing children, women had responsibility for small animals, the dairy, gardening, and the orchard. Men cared for large animals, planted and harvested crops, and did general field work. But, in times of need, for example, during harvest season, sex roles on the colonial farm merged, as children and wife helped the husband bring in the crops.

The preindustrial work patterns continued into the antebellum South. As Frank L. Owsley noted in Plain Folk of the Old South, the wife of the yeoman farmer “hoed the corn, cooked the dinner or plied the loom, or even came out and took up the ax and cut the wood with which to cook the dinner.” The Civil War revealed both her productivity and her endurance; after her husband went off to fight, often with her encouragement, she took over the farms and shops, and women provided the bulk of the urban labor force.

As scholars have discovered, southern women have had a more active and important role in southern politics than has been traditionally assumed. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), antilynching crusades, and the progressive reform movements of the 19th and 20th centuries involved wives of southern workers, as well as middle- and upper-class women. But their role as political activists dates back even further. Workers’ wives, for example, were politically active in the 1600s in Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, and women such as Harriett Tubman were later involved in resistance to the slave system.

The industrialization of the South transformed to some extent the economic and social functions of women as well as men. In order to support their families, both husband and wife left the farm and took factory jobs. In Alabama, the number of men drawn into industry between 1885 and 1895 increased 31 percent, but the number of women increased 75 percent. In 1890 women constituted 40 percent of the workforce in the four largest southern textile plants. But their level of political activity did not change. Women, particularly wives of workers, were active in protesting child labor, and, like Ella May Wiggins of the Gastonia strike, they were heavily involved in southern industrial struggles.

Rural married couple, Bateville, Miss., 1968 (William R. Ferris Collection, Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Nowhere was the importance and influence of workers’ wives more vividly revealed than in the southern coalfields. By law and superstition (a mine would supposedly explode if a woman entered it), women were prohibited from industrial work, that is, working in the coal mines. And because southern coal towns were usually in isolated, rural areas, women were not able to find employment in other industries, as did miners’ wives in northern coalfields. They hardly submitted, however, to the life of Victorian domesticity.

In the era before unions (1880–1933) men worked in the mines 10–14 hours a day, 6 days a week. Hence, their wives essentially controlled the domestic economy and ran the family. To assist the husband in supporting the family, wives continued their preindustrial roles of caring for the family garden, taking in boarders, and doing the laundry of company officials and single miners. And it was the wife who dealt with the daily frustration of keeping the house clean and sanitary in a town filled with coal dust and grime because the company refused to install sanitary facilities such as running water and sewers.

In the company towns that predominated in the southern coalfields, the home was hardly a “separate sphere” sheltering women from the cruelties of the competitive, “public” world, as was said to have been the case in northern urban areas. With her husband down in the coal mines, a wife dealt with the company store and had direct, day-to-day contact with company officials. Consequently, she most keenly and intensely felt the coal company’s abuse of power, especially its exploitation in the form of low wages, monopolistic prices, and the lack of sanitary facilities.

Women expressed their anger toward the coal operators in a number of ways, including song. Florence Reece, who wrote the classic labor song “Which Side Are You On?” after company police had driven her husband out of their company town, was but one of many female coalfield troubadours, a list that includes Aunt Molly Jackson, Sarah Gunning, and, more recently, Hazel Dickens.

Women expressed their desire for improved living and working conditions in the coalfields, as well as their anger, by becoming major advocates for unionization. The exploits of the legendary union organizer Mother Jones are well known. But Ralph Chaplin (author of “Solidarity Forever”) captured Jones’s appeal when he wrote, after hearing her speak: “She might have been any coal miner’s wife filled with righteous fury.” The miner’s wife helped ease the effects of labor strife by planting larger gardens and canning more food. Wages stopped, the usual source of food and clothing (the company store) was gone, and shelter was denied (miners were thrown out of company houses during strikes), and miners could not have succeeded in any coal strike without this extensive preparation.

Miners’ wives formed auxiliaries to the United Mine Workers of America to promote the union cause. These organizations, sometimes denigrated as separate, sexist, and unequal, nevertheless increased social awareness and camaraderie among coalfield women and provided needed moral and financial support for organizing the southern coalfields. And wives of miners fought, often violently, for the union. After witnessing a gun battle during a coal strike in West Virginia in 1912, a San Francisco journalist reported, “In West Virginia women fight side-by-side with the men.” Indeed, the wife’s hostility to the company and her role in strikes were so important that coal company officials often took elaborate measures to encourage women’s involvement in company-town life.

As the Academy Award–winning movie Harlan County, USA revealed, wives of miners still play a significant role in the unionization of the coalfields. The relative ease with which women have entered the coal mines as workers suggests that the coalfields may be a less “macho” culture than once assumed. Wives of workers in other southern industries and occupations have faced obstacles similar to those faced by miners’ wives and have made similar contributions.

DAVID A. CORBIN

Washington, D.C.

David A. Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922 (1981); Margaret J. Hagood, Mothers of the South: Portraiture of the White Tenant Farm Woman (1939, reprint 1977); Lu Ann Jones, Mama Learned Us to Work: Farm Women in the New South (2001); Lorraine Gates Schuyler, The Weight of Their Votes: Southern Women and Political Leverage in the 1920s (2006); Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (1970); Julia Cherry Spruill, Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies (1938); Melissa Walker, All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919–1941 (2000).

 

Ali, Muhammad

(b. 1942) BOXER.

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” are the words most often attributed to Muhammad Ali, the Olympic gold medalist and three-time World Heavyweight Champion boxer. Graceful yet powerful, as his catchphrase implied, Ali became just as famous for his stance against racial intolerance and his outspokenness against American society—in which he felt black men and women were treated as less than equal to whites—as he did for his outstanding success in the ring. Named Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. when he was born—Ali’s father was named after the ardent 19th-century, Madison County, Ky., abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay—Ali’s destiny as social critic seemed fated from birth. Ironically, however, Ali changed his name to Muhammad Ali after embracing the Nation of Islam, insisting that Cassius Clay was his “slave name.”

Ali began his boxing career as a 12-year-old boy in his hometown of Louisville, Ky. When his new bicycle was stolen, he reported the theft to the first police officer he found, crying, and claiming that he would beat up whoever it was who had stolen the bike. As it happened, that officer was Joe Martin, a boxing coach at the Columbia Gym in Louisville. Martin told the distraught boy, “Well, you’d better come back here and learn how to fight,” thus beginning his and Ali’s trainer/boxer relationship.

“I was Cassius Clay then,” Ali said years later in a Sports Illustrated story. “I was a Negro. I ate pork. I had no confidence. I thought white people were superior. I was a Christian Baptist named Cassius Clay.” But by the time Ali was a high school senior he had begun exploring Islam, writing a senior paper on Black Muslims that nearly kept him from passing the class. He boxed as an amateur for six years, winning the Light Heavyweight gold medal in the 1960 Olympics in Rome, turning professional that same year and winning his first Heavyweight Boxing Champion title in 1964 against Sonny Liston. Shortly thereafter he changed his name to Muhammad Ali, symbolizing his new identity as a member of the Nation of Islam.

The shift in Ali’s religious faith came at a volatile time in American civil rights history. Ali became famous after winning the gold medal in Rome, and after winning his first boxing championship and announcing his conversion to Islam, Ali became an outspoken critic of American racial injustice, a message in line with his new Muslim faith. Ali’s obvious prowess in the ring made him a highly visible symbol of black masculinity, and his comments outside the ring became a source of black pride, propelling him into the role of a strong, straight-talking black leader. At a time when violence across the South was raging, Muhammad Ali was speaking out unambiguously against racism, violence, and injustice, and he often preached against social integration as a means to equality: “We who follow the teachings of Elijah Muhammad don’t want to be forced to integrate. Integration is wrong. We don’t want to live with the white man; that’s all.” His rhetoric was often so exaggerated, going so far as to condone lynching as a way to keep the races separate, that he sometimes offended both sides of the race argument, from white supremacists to members of the NAACP.

President Jimmy Carter greets Muhammad Ali at a White House dinner, 1977 (Marion S. Trikosko, photographer, Library of Congress [LC-U9-35102-20], Washington, D.C.)

In 1967, Ali refused to fight in the Vietnam War, claiming conscientious objector status on the basis of his religious beliefs. He later said to a Sports Illustrated reporter, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?” As a result of his refusal to serve, Ali lost his boxing license and was stripped of his Heavyweight Boxing Champion title.

In 1970, Ali regained his boxing license, and although he made millions in the ring, he was ostensibly opposed to the sport: “We’re just like two slaves in that ring. The masters get two of us big old black slaves and let us fight it out while they bet: ‘My slave can whup your slave.’ That’s what I see when I see two black people fighting.” Nevertheless, Ali went on to fight in some of the most famous and highly promoted boxing matches in history, such as “The Fight of the Century,” fought in Madison Square Garden against Joe Frasier; “The Rumble in the Jungle,” fought in Zaire, Africa, against George Foreman; and “The Thrilla in Manila,” fought in the Philippines, again against Joe Frasier. Ali lost the first bout by unanimous decision but won the latter two, further cementing his reputation as the epitome of black masculinity.

In time, as public support waned for the war in Vietnam and as the pace of violence against blacks in America slowed, Ali’s antiwhite rhetoric diminished. But his passion for racial justice continued. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he remarked, “As a man who never looked down on those who looked up to him and who helped as many of his people as he could—financial and also in their fight for freedom, justice, and equality. As a man who wouldn’t embarrass them. As a man who tried to unite his people through the faith of Islam that he found when he listened to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. And if all that’s asking too much, then I guess I’d settle for being remembered only as a great boxing champion who became a preacher and a champion of his people.”

JAMES G. THOMAS JR.

University of Mississippi

Gerald Early, ed., The Muhammad Ali Reader (1998); Thomas Hauser, Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times (1991); Hunt Helm, “The Making of a Champ,” Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal (14 September 1997); David Remick, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (1998).

 

Ames, Jessie Daniel

(1883–1972) SOCIAL REFORMER.

Jessie Daniel Ames, born 2 November 1883, had moved three times within Texas by the time she was a teenager. Her father, a stern Victorian eccentric, had migrated from Indiana to Palestine, Tex., where he worked as railroad station master, and in 1893 the Daniels moved to Georgetown, Tex., the site of Southwestern University, from which Ames later graduated.

The brutal Indian Wars and vigilantism of the period created a violent atmosphere, which strongly affected the sensitive young Jessie. A strong-willed child, she had resisted the perfect table manners expected of her and often was sent to the kitchen. In the Daniel kitchen, young Jessie heard about a lynching nearby in Tyler, an event she remembered for years and that influenced her lifelong efforts to abolish lynching.

In June 1905 Jessie Daniel married a handsome army surgeon, Roger Post Ames, who later died in Guatemala. In 1914 she rose to prominence in Texas as an advocate of southern progressivism and woman suffrage. Unlike most suffragists in the early 1920s, she understood the grave injustice against blacks in this country. She served as a vital link between feminism and the 20th-century struggle for black civil rights.

In 1924 she became field secretary for Will Alexander’s Atlanta-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation, and immediately began organizing against lynching in Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Alexander brought her to Atlanta in 1929 as Director of Women’s Work for the Commission, and in 1930 she founded Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, which within nine years had 40,000 members. Alerted by sympathetic law officers and her contacts in the press when a lynching threatened, Ames contacted women in that county who had pledged to work against violence. Her work was not always appreciated, and opposition came from women as well as men—the Women’s National Association for the Preservation of the White Race claimed that Ames’s women “were defending criminal Negro men at the expense of innocent white girls.”

Ames did not support the federal antilynching law in 1940, believing it to be impractical. She said the bill would pass the House and southern senators would then defeat it. She was soon at odds with her boss, Dr. Alexander, as well as her old allies in the NAACP.

From May 1939 to May 1940 in the South, for the first time since records had been kept, not a single lynching occurred. World War II, however, meant the end of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, just as it did to the attempt to abolish the hated poll tax in the South. The alliance between women and victimized blacks, which Ames had hoped for, was postponed.

In 1943 Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching was absorbed by the newly formed Southern Regional Council, as was the Interracial Commission. Ames wanted to work for the new agency but found that her services were not needed.

In the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Ames set about rebuilding her life. Elected superintendent of Christian Social Relations for the Western North Carolina Conference of the Methodist Church, she welcomed the opportunity “to get back into public life and be remembered.” She later returned to Texas and was honored in the 1970s as a pioneer who combined feminism with civil rights activism. Jessie Daniel Ames died on 21 February 1972 at the age of 88.

MARIE S. JEMISON

Birmingham, Alabama

Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching and Commission on Interracial Cooperation Papers, Trevor Arnett Library, Atlanta University; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching (1979); Jessie Daniel Ames Papers, Texas Historical Society, Dallas, Texas State Library, Austin, and Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Jon D. Swartz and Joanna Fountain-Schroeder, eds., Jessie Daniel Ames: An Exhibition at Southwestern University (1986).

 

Atkinson, Ti-Grace

(b. 1939) FEMINIST.

Ti-Grace Atkinson captured public attention between 1966 and 1972 as one of the most articulate and radical speakers for the women’s movement in the United States. She was a protégé of Betty Friedan, who promoted her in the National Organization for Women (NOW) because her “lady-like blond image would counter-act the man-eating specter.” Yet Atkinson, who was described by the media as “softly sexy,” “tall,” and “elegantly feline,” came to stand for all that Friedan saw as most damaging to the movement: total separation from men, advocacy of abortion on demand, and the destruction of marriage and the family.

Atkinson was born in 1939 to an established Baton Rouge family. Had she remained at home, she might have become the family eccentric, an acceptable, though not desirable, role for southern women of her class. But she was one of those southerners whom Roy Reed described as born afire, who spend their days looking elsewhere for something to ease the burning. Although Atkinson virtually disowned and never discussed her southern upbringing, she always insisted that interviewers record her name as the Cajun “Ti-Grace.”

Married at 17, Atkinson went to Philadelphia. By the time she was divorced five years later, she had earned a B.F.A. degree at the University of Pennsylvania and was establishing a career as an art critic, writing for Art News and acting as the founding director of the Philadelphia Institute for Contemporary Art. Then Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex converted her to a new philosophy. In 1966 Atkinson joined the nascent NOW, where her appearance, manners, and genteel Republican connections were put to use in national fund-raising.

A year later, Atkinson moved to New York City to pursue graduate study in political philosophy at Columbia University. As president of the local NOW chapter, she generated conflict within the group with her demands for changes not only in the organization’s goals and programs but also in its internal structure. Failing to achieve her aims within NOW, she resigned in 1968 to start the October 17th Movement, later modestly renamed the Feminists—a small group of 15 to 20 women who were to separate totally from men. Although frequently described as a lesbian, Atkinson was in fact an advocate of celibacy. It was, she acknowledged, a model for which most women were not ready.

Atkinson’s distinctive position in the women’s movement was characterized by her exceptional intelligence, her uncompromising radicalism, and her willingness to follow any position to its logical conclusion. She took the Mafia as a model of resistance, living outside the law, and formed an alliance with the Italian American Civil Rights League of reputed mobster Joseph Colombo. This affiliation was widely attacked, and on 6 August 1971 Atkinson separated herself from the rest of the women’s movement.

Despite this breach, in November 1971 she helped organize the Feminist Party, which attempted to get the major political parties to incorporate feminist positions into their 1972 platforms. After publication in 1974 of Amazon Odyssey, a collection of her speeches and other writings from 1967 to 1972, Atkinson faded from public view. She continues to live in New York City.

JORDY BELL

Croton-on-Hudson, New York

Ti-Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey: The First Collection of Writings by the Political Pioneer of the Women’s Movement (1974); Maren Lockwood Carden, The New Feminist Movement (1974); Betty Friedan, New York Times Magazine (4 March 1973); Martha Weinman Lear, New York Times Magazine (10 March 1968); Newsweek (23 March 1970).

 

Baker, Ella Jo

(1903–1986) CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST.

Ella Jo Baker, the daughter of Georgianna and Blake Baker, was born in 1903 in Norfolk, Va. When she was seven, Baker’s family moved to Littleton, N.C., to live with her maternal grandparents, who owned a plantation where they had previously worked as slaves. The absence of adequate public school for blacks in rural North Carolina and her mother’s concern that she be properly educated resulted in Baker’s attending Shaw University in Raleigh. There she received both her high school and college education. Following her graduation in 1927, she moved to New York City to live with a cousin, working as a waitress and then in a factory.

The product of a southern environment in which caring and sharing were facts of life and of a family in which her grandfather regularly mortgaged his property in order to help neighbors, Baker soon became involved in various community groups. In 1932 she became the national director for the Young Negroes Cooperative League and the office manager of the Negro National News. Six years later, she began her active career with the NAACP, working initially as a field secretary in the South. In 1943 she was appointed national director of the branches for the NAACP. In both capacities Baker spent long periods in southern black communities, where her southern roots served her well. Her success in recruiting southern blacks to join what was considered a radical organization in the 1930s and 1940s may be attributed, in part, to her being a native of the region and, therefore, able to approach southern people. Baker, who neither married nor had children of her own, left active service in the NAACP in 1946 in order to raise a niece. A short while later she reactivated her involvement with the NAACP, becoming president of the New York City chapter in 1954.

In 1957 Baker went south again, this time to work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a newly formed civil rights organization. The student sit-in movement of the 1960s protested the refusal of public restaurants in the South to serve blacks and resulted in Baker’s involvement in still another civil rights group. As the coordinator of the 1960 Nonviolent Resistance to Segregation Leadership Conference, which brought together over 300 student sit-in leaders and resulted in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Baker is credited with playing a major role in SNCC’s founding. Severing her formal relationship with SCLC, she worked with the Southern Conference Educational Fund. In recognition of her contribution to improving the quality of life of southern blacks and to the founding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, she was asked to deliver the keynote address at its 1964 convention in Jackson, Miss.

Baker spent the remainder of her life in New York City, where she served as an adviser to a number of community groups. Prior to the release of Joanne Grant’s film Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker, few people outside of the civil rights movement in the South knew about Baker’s long career as a civil rights activist, but since then a number of leadership programs and grassroots organizations, such as the Children’s Defense Fund’s Ella Baker Child Policy Training Institute and the Bay Area’s Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, have been named in her honor. Nevertheless, she is probably less well known than many other civil rights workers, because she was a woman surrounded by southern men, primarily ministers, who generally perceived women as supporters rather than as leaders in the movement, and because of her own firm belief in group-centered rather than individual-centered leadership.

SHARON HARLEY

University of Maryland

Ellen Cantarow and Susan Gushee O’Malley, Moving the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change (1980); Clay-borne Carson, In Struggle: sncc and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981); Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (1999); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2003).

 

Bethune, Mary McLeod

(1875–1955) EDUCATOR.

On 10 July 1875, future educator, federal government official, and club woman Mary McLeod Bethune was born near Mayesville, S.C., one of 17 children born to former slaves and farmworkers Samuel and Patsy (McIntosh) McLeod. In 1882 Bethune left behind many of her farm chores to attend the newly opened Presbyterian mission school for blacks near Mayesville. With the help of a scholarship, she left South Carolina in 1888 and continued her education at Scotia Seminary (later Barber-Scotia College) in Concord, N.C., completing the high school program in 1892 and the Normal and Scientific Course two years later. Hoping to become a missionary in Africa, she studied at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, but in 1895 the Presbyterian Mission Board turned down her application for a missionary post.

A disappointed Mary McLeod returned to her native South Carolina and began her first teaching job at Miss Emma Wilson’s Mission School, where she had once been a student. Shortly thereafter, the Presbyterian Board appointed her to a teaching position at Haines Normal and Industrial Institute, later transferring her to Kindell Institute in Sumter, S.C.

Following her marriage to Albertus Bethune in May 1898, she and her husband moved to Savannah, Ga., where their only child, Albert McLeod Bethune, was born in 1899. Later that year, the family moved to Palatka, Fla., where she established a Presbyterian missionary school. Five years later, after separating from her husband, Bethune realized her lifelong ambition to build a school for black girls in the South and with her son moved to Daytona Beach, Fla., where in October 1904 the Daytona Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls opened with Bethune as its president. Like most black educators in the post-Reconstruction South, Bethune emphasized industrial skills and Christian values and appealed to both the neighboring black community and white philanthropists for financial support. As a consequence of Bethune’s unwavering dedication, business acumen, and intellectual ability, the Daytona Institute grew from a small elementary school to include a high school and a teacher training program. In 1923 Bethune’s school merged with Cookman Institute, a Jacksonville, Fla., college for men, and became the Daytona-Cookman Collegiate Institute. Six years later, the school’s name was changed to Bethune-Cookman College, in recognition of the important role that Mary McLeod Bethune had played in the school’s growth and development.

As an educator in the South, Bethune had concerns that extended beyond campus life. In the absence of a municipally supported medical facility for blacks, the Daytona Institute, under Bethune’s guidance, maintained a hospital for blacks from 1911 to 1927. During much of this same period she also operated the Tomoka Mission Schools, for the children of black families working in the Florida turpentine camps. Ignoring threats made by members of the Ku Klux Klan, Bethune organized a black voter registration drive in Florida, decades before the voter registration drives of the 1960s. As a delegate to the first meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, Bethune voiced her opposition to degrading southern racial customs.

Bethune joined and held official positions in a number of organizations, but she is best known among club women and the public at large for her monumental work with the National Council of Negro Women, which she founded at age 60 in 1935, serving as its president until 1949. Dedicated to meeting the myriad needs of blacks in all walks of life, the council grew under Bethune’s leadership to become the largest federation of black women’s clubs in the United States. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., and with chapters throughout the country and abroad, this association published the Aframerican Woman’s Journal, established health and job clinics throughout the South, and educated a number of black youths from poor families in the South.

In 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Bethune as one of his special advisers on racial affairs, and four years later she served as the director of black affairs for the National Youth Administration. In May 1955, at the age of 79, one of the South’s most well-known women died. The unveiling of a statue of Bethune in a federal park located in the nation’s capital in 1974 and the opening of the Mary McLeod Bethune Museum and Archives for Black Women’s History in Washington, D.C., in 1979 are lasting testaments to Bethune’s intelligence and determination.

SHARON HARLEY

University of Maryland

James J. Flynn, Negroes of Achievement in Modern America (1970); Rackham Holt, Mary McLeod Bethune: A Biography (1964); Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period: A Biographical Dictionary (1980); Emma Sterne, Mary McLeod Bethune (1957).

 

Boggs, Lindy

(b. 1916) POLITICIAN.

Marie Corinne Morrison Claiborne (“Lindy”) was born 13 March 1916 at Brunswick Plantation, near New Roads, in Pointe Coupee Parish, La. She graduated from St. Joseph’s Academy at New Roads in 1931 and earned her B.A. degree from Sophie Newcomb College of Tulane University in 1935, after which she became a teacher. She married Thomas Hale Boggs Sr., and, after his presumed death in an airplane that disappeared, she was selected in a special election in 1973 to succeed him as Democratic U.S. representative from the Second District in New Orleans. Boggs was elected, with 82 percent of the vote, to a full term in 1974 and served nine terms. Boggs had 30 years of behind-the-scenes political activism before her election, working with her husband to raise money, run campaigns, and manage his Washington office.

While in Congress, Boggs served on the House Appropriations Committee and the Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families, and she chaired the Joint Committee on Bicentennial Arrangements and the Commission on the Bicentenary of the U.S. House of Representatives. Boggs promoted legislation on civil rights, children and families, and equal pay for women. She was one of the founders of the Women’s Congressional Caucus and was the first woman to chair the Democratic National Convention. President Bill Clinton appointed her the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, where she served from 1997 to 2001. In 2006 Boggs received the Congressional Distinguished Service Award. Her political and family life is documented in Lindy Boggs: Steel and Velvet, a 2007 film by Louisiana Public Broadcasting and Blackberry Films.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

Lindy Boggs, with Katherine Hatch, Washington through a Purple Veil: Memoirs of a Southern Woman (1994); Thomas H. Ferrell and Judith Haydel, Louisiana History (Fall 1994).

 

Brown, Charlotte Hawkins

(1883–1961) ACTIVIST AND EDUCATOR.

Regarded as the “First Lady of Social Graces,” Charlotte Hawkins Brown spent more than 50 years guiding the education and social habits of southern black youth at her Palmer Memorial Institute in North Carolina. The descendant of slaves, Brown was born Lottie Hawkins on 11 June 1883 in Henderson, N.C. Lottie’s grandmother, Rebecca Hawkins, descended from English navigator Sir John D. Hawkins. At an early age, Brown saw the importance of education and cultural aspirations as embodied in her mother and grandmother. Lottie’s 18-member family moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1888 for better social, economic, and educational opportunities. At Cambridge, the young Brown attended the Allston Grammar School and cultivated a friendship with Alice and Edith Longfellow, children of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who lived in her neighborhood near Harvard University. Demonstrating early proclivities for leadership, Brown, at age 12, organized her church’s Sunday school kindergarten department. At Cambridge English High School, moreover, she proved herself an excellent scholar and artist, rendering several crayon portraits of classmates. Considering “Lottie” too ordinary, she changed her name to Charlotte Eugenia Hawkins upon graduation. Observing Brown in 1900 reading Virgil while babysitting two infants, Alice Freeman Palmer, humanitarian and president of Wellesley College, became her benefactor.

Influenced by educator and power broker Booker T. Washington, Brown sought to teach blacks in the South. To further this goal, she enrolled, with the help of Palmer, in the State Normal School at Salem, Mass., in the fall of 1900. Having been approached by a field secretary of the American Missionary Association, a white-led group that administered and financed southern black schools, Brown eagerly accepted an invitation to teach in her native state. Barely 18 years old, Brown emerged from a Southern Railway train in the fall of 1900, where she was confronted with the unfamiliar terrain of Guilford County, N.C. Suspending her junior college education at State Normal School, she began her first teaching job at Bethany Institute in Sedalia—a small, dilapidated, rural school for African Americans. Securing money from northern friends and donations from the Sedalia community, Brown soon raised funds to erect a campus with more than 200 acres and two new buildings. Alice Freeman Palmer Institute, named in honor of her benefactor, opened on 10 October 1902. It was later renamed the Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute upon Palmer’s death.

Distinguished among its contemporaries, Brown’s private finishing school for rural African Americans provided college preparatory classes for upper-level high school students. Such instruction fitted the school’s dual ambitions: to undo common assumptions of African American inferiority and to provide an expansive education beyond vocational studies. At Palmer, classes included art, math, literature, and Romance languages.

In addition to academic training, Brown outlined an exacting program of etiquette, involving lessons in character and appearance, for black boys and girls. Brown expected her students to abide by a strict code of Victorian moral conduct. She worked to smooth “the rough edges of social behavior” by producing graduates who were educationally sound, religiously sincere, and “culturally secure.” This cultural regime, in part, took the form of small discussion groups for boys and girls, the boys led by an adult male counselor and the girls by an adult female counselor, in which students received individual attention in matters of etiquette. In one boys’ session, discussion centered on the best manner in which to obtain “culture,” along with clean minds and bodies. Students also participated in “wholesome” fitness activities designed to nurture habits of self-reliance, self-control, and fair play. Palmer girls played basketball and volleyball. The young men’s sports repertoire was more expansive and included basketball, football, baseball, and track and field.

Perhaps Brown’s most noted contribution to her student’s cultural education was her etiquette manual, The Correct Thing to Do, to Say, to Wear. In it, she succinctly defined good manners for boys and girls, at home and outside of the home. Proper introductions, boy-girl relationships, and dress were also addressed. Palmer’s curriculum and Brown’s writings mirrored her race philosophy, which sought a holistic education for black youth based on the uplift of the individual. Charlotte Hawkins Brown and fellow black educators Mary McLeod Bethune and Nannie Helen Burroughs became collectively known as the “Three B’s of Education,” stressing liberal arts and cultural training for race uplift. The school’s political and cultural legacy largely hinges on Palmer’s credo, “Educate the individual to live in the greater world.” Brown’s shepherding of Palmer, which survived a major fire in 1917, ended in 1952. She died in 1961 and is buried on the Palmer campus, now a state historic site.

ANGELA HORNSBY-GUTTING

University of Mississippi

Charlotte Hawkins Brown, The Correct Thing to Do, to Say, to Wear (1941); Colonel Hawkins Jr., in The Heritage of Blacks in North Carolina, vol. 1, ed. Philip N. Henry and Carol M. Speas (1990); Tera Hunter, Southern Exposure (September/October 1983); Marsha Vick, in Notable Black American Women, ed. Jessie Carney Smith (1992); Charles Wadelington, Tar Heel Junior Historian (1995); Charles W. Wadelington and Richard F. Knapp, Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Palmer Memorial Institute: What One Young African American Woman Could Do (1999).

 

Burroughs, Nannie Helen

(1879–1961) EDUCATOR AND SOCIAL ACTIVIST.

As a church and organization leader, school founder and educator, women’s advocate and race champion, Nannie Helen Burroughs was a pragmatic warrior and outspoken public intellectual who defied conventional female confinements of her era. Through her newspaper commentary, speeches, and writings, she inserted herself into the male-centered discourse on race advancement. Her work paralleled that of better-known black women predecessors and contemporaries, including Annie Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Mary McLeod Bethune, and her accomplishments and zeal for race uplift were equally impressive. She brought into the public sphere a deep concern for black workers who lacked “social or economic pull” and a belief in self-help that caused people to compare her to Booker T. Washington. Burroughs, however, was more like W. E. B. Du Bois in her belief that blacks must demand their full rights, including woman suffrage, and must keep agitating for justice. “Hound dogs are kicked, not bull dogs,” she wrote.

Burroughs’s unique contribution to black female empowerment was in her understanding that black women needed both “respectability”—sometimes oversimplified by scholars as a middle-class notion—and economic self-sufficiency. In her view, one was not possible without the other. Her school, the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C., was the realization of her dream of providing a practical education that would make black women economically self-sufficient and beyond spiritual and moral reproach. It was founded in 1909 with the help of the Women’s Auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention, where Burroughs was the long-serving corresponding secretary. Graduates were expected to become community-minded wage earners who would counter the prevailing negative stereotypes of the black race—particularly of its women. Burroughs’s grand vision was reflected in the fact that in naming the school she left out “Baptist,” although she was supported by that denomination, and included “National” to signify the school’s nonsectarianism and her own independence. Women wrote to Burroughs from across the nation seeking admission for themselves or their daughters and expressing delight in the prospect of living in such a protective enclave and reaping its many benefits.

Burroughs believed that women were the linchpins of race progress, and the curriculum stressed Christian-inspired precepts about the dignity of all work. By training black women to be skilled workers and “professionalizing” their work, including domestic work, she sought to raise women’s self-esteem, race pride, and wages. Her school offered a mandatory black history course, courses in music, public speaking, secretarial skills, the Bible, and hygiene, plus nontraditional courses in shoe repair and printing. Using student labor, successful commercial ventures such as the Sunlight Laundry were launched. The school’s creed—the three B’s, “the Bible, the Bath, and Broom, clean life, clean body, clean house”—was infused into every aspect of school life. So was Burroughs’s defiant certitude about black female education, captured in the famous declaration that became the school’s motto: “We specialize in the wholly impossible.”

In establishing the National Training School for Women and Girls (renamed the National Trade and Professional School for Women and Girls in 1939), Burroughs challenged the male leadership of the National Baptist Convention, which was wary of women leaders, and Booker T. Washington, who opposed locating black schools outside of the South for fear of losing support from white northerners. Burroughs realized the importance of having a black female presence in the nation’s capital and used that visibility to attract a national and international student body. In addition to her long tenure as founder and principal of the National Training School for Women and Girls, Burroughs helped to organize the National Association of Wage Earners in 1921 to support better wages and living conditions for domestic workers.

Following her death in 1961, the school was renamed in her honor, and it continues as a kindergarten through sixth grade Christian day school on that same Washington, D.C., hillside from which Burroughs looked out into the world and sought to change it.

AUDREY THOMAS MCCLUSKEY

Indiana University

Sharon Harley, Journal of Negro History (Winter/Autumn 1996); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1993); Audrey Thomas McCluskey, Signs (Winter 1997); Nannie Helen Burroughs Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division; Victoria W. Wolcott, Journal of Women’s History (Spring 1997).

 

Carter, Rosalynn

(b. 1927) FORMER FIRST LADY OF THE UNITED STATES.

Like First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosalynn Smith Carter played a major role in national affairs during her tenure in the White House. Since then, she has acted as a partner in many of former president Jimmy Carter’s political and business endeavors, and she has strongly promoted mental health and women’s rights issues. Her autobiography, First Lady from Plains (1984), has been warmly received by political analysts and literary critics.

Born in Plains, Ga., on 18 August 1927, Rosalynn Smith enjoyed a relatively carefree childhood until her father died of leukemia when she was 13. The following years were lean ones for her family—her mother, Allie Smith, was forced to make ends meet by taking in sewing and selling extra eggs and butter from the family’s farm. Rosalynn helped her mother by working part time after school in a beauty salon. After her graduation from Plains High School as valedictorian of her class, Rosalynn Smith entered Georgia Southwestern College, a two-year college in Americus, Ga. In 1944, while visiting her best friend, Ruth Carter, Rosalynn spied and admired a picture of Ruth’s brother Jimmy, a U.S. Naval Academy student. The couple married two years later. Ambitious and intelligent, she viewed her husband’s naval career as her ticket out of Plains. Jimmy Carter’s career took the young couple as far as Hawaii before his father died in 1953, when he resigned his commission to return to Plains to take over the family peanut business. Although she opposed his decision to return to Plains, Rosalynn Carter soon plunged into keeping books for the business, raising her family, and, eventually, taking accounting courses.

Politics has been the lifeblood of the Carter family. Rosalynn Carter’s first taste of public life occurred in the early 1960s during her husband’s stint on the local school board. His liberal political stances often brought threats to her family and the peanut business from area residents. In Jimmy Carter’s 1962 bid for the Georgia state Senate, Rosalynn Carter handled all of his campaign correspondence. By 1970, when Carter was elected governor of Georgia, she had gained experience and, thereby, a reputation as a “steel magnolia”—a warm, gracious woman who was also politically astute. Eager to move beyond the boundaries of the governor’s mansion, she worked with the Georgia Governor’s Commission to Improve Service for the Mentally and Emotionally Handicapped, as a volunteer at the Georgia Regional Hospital in Atlanta, and as honorary chairman of the Georgia Special Olympics, and over the next four years she helped establish 134 day-care centers for the mentally retarded.

From 1973 to 1976 Rosalynn Carter campaigned independently in 96 cities and 36 states in Governor Carter’s bid for the presidency. Once the Carters reached the White House, the new first lady took an active interest in national policy making, attending cabinet meetings, holding weekly working lunches with President Carter, heading a diplomatic mission to South America, and attending the Camp David Mideast Peace Summit. She continued to pursue mental health reform on a national level while serving on the President’s Commission on Mental Health and on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Mental Health. Her support of the Equal Rights Amendment won her a merit award from NOW.

Rosalynn Carter, first lady of the United States, 1977–81 (Carter Presidential Library, Atlanta)

Rosalynn Carter again took to the campaign trail in President Carter’s reelection drive of 1980. His defeat was particularly devastating for her, and after two decades of public service she initially found it difficult to adjust to private life. After her return to Plains, she renewed her focus on mental health and women’s rights. Numerous speaking engagements and promotions of her autobiography, First Lady from Plains, and of Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life, written with her husband, allowed Rosalynn Carter to talk publicly and candidly about her life as first lady and to raise social and political issues of concern to her. In 1982 the Carters founded the Carter Center, a not-for-profit, nongovernmental organization whose mission it is to “wage peace, fight disease, and build hope” worldwide. She has worked to promote the mental health and well-being of individuals, families, and caregivers through the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregiving at Georgia Southwestern State University, an institute founded in her honor on the campus of her alma mater in Americus, Ga., and she continues to contribute her time and efforts to Habitat for Humanity, a network of volunteers who build homes for the needy, and Project Interconnections, a public/private nonprofit partnership to provide housing for homeless people who are mentally ill. Rosalynn Carter has received countless honors for her work. In August 1999 President Clinton awarded Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, and in 2001 Rosalynn was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

ELIZABETH MCGEHEE

Washington Post

Carl Sferrazza Anthony, in American First Ladies: Their Lives and Legacy, ed. Lewis L. Gould (2001); Patricia A. Avery, U.S. News and World Report (25 June 1984); Rosalynn Carter, First Lady from Plains (1984); Phil Gailey, New York Times Book Review (15 April 1984); Who’s Who in America (1980–81).

 

Chesnut, Mary Boykin

(1823–1886) DIARIST AND AUTHOR. Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut was born 31 March 1823 in Stateboro, S.C., the eldest child of Mary Boykin and Stephen Decatur Miller, who had served as U.S. congressman and senator and in 1826 was elected governor of South Carolina, as a proponent of nullification. Educated first at home and then in Camden schools, Mary Miller was sent at age 13 to a French boarding school in Charleston, where she remained for two years, broken by a six-month stay on her father’s cotton plantation in frontier Mississippi. In 1838 Miller died and Mary returned to Camden. On 23 April 1840 she married James Chesnut Jr. (1815–85), the only surviving son of one of South Carolina’s largest landowners.

Chesnut spent most of the next 20 years in Camden and at Mulberry, her husband’s family plantation. When James Chesnut was elected to the Senate in 1858, his wife accompanied him to Washington, where they began friendships with many politicians who would become the leading figures of the Confederacy, among them Varina and Jefferson Davis. Following Lincoln’s election, James Chesnut returned to South Carolina to participate in the drafting of an ordinance of secession and subsequently served in the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America. He served as aide to Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard and President Jefferson Davis, and he achieved the rank of general. During the war, Mary accompanied her husband to Charleston, Montgomery, Columbia, and Richmond, her drawing room always serving as a salon for the Confederate elite. From February 1861 to July 1865 she recorded her experiences in a series of diaries, which became the principal source materials for her famous portrait of the Confederacy.

Following the war, the Chesnuts returned to Camden and worked unsuccessfully to extricate themselves from heavy debts. After a first abortive attempt in the 1870s to smooth the diaries into publishable form, Mary Chesnut tried her hand at fiction. She completed but never published three novels and then in the early 1880s expanded and extensively revised her diaries into the book now known as Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (first published in truncated and poorly edited versions in 1905 and 1949 as A Diary from Dixie).

Although unfinished at the time of her death on 22 November 1886, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War is generally acknowledged today as the finest literary work of the Confederacy. Spiced by the author’s sharp intelligence, irreverent wit, and keen sense of irony and metaphorical vision, it uses a diary format to evoke a full, accurate picture of the South in civil war. Chesnut’s book, valued as a rich historical source, owes much of its fascination to its juxtaposition of the loves and griefs of individuals against vast social upheaval and much of its power to the contrasts and continuities drawn between the antebellum world and a war-torn country.

ELISABETH MUHLENFELD

Sweet Briar College

Mary A. DeCredico, Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Confederate Woman’s Life (1996); Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography (1981); C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (1981); C. Vann Woodward and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld, eds., The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries (1985).

 

Conroy, Pat

(b. 1945) WRITER.

Pat Conroy has spent his career crafting personal trauma and abuse into rich, romantic, and often painfully autobiographical fiction. Along the way, he has become famous nearly as much for his contentious battles and reconciliations with his alma mater and his father as for his artistic and phenomenal commercial accomplishments.

Born in 1945 to Donald N. Conroy, a Marine fighter pilot, and Frances “Peggy” Peek, a native Georgian with a love for Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, Donald Patrick Conroy was the eldest of seven children, nearly all of whom would struggle with the legacy of their domineering father’s physical and psychological abuse.

The itinerancy of military life ended for Conroy in Beaufort, S.C., where he spent his final two years of high school. Here, Conroy discovered Thomas Wolfe, the writer to whom his fiction is most indebted. He also excelled in athletics and earned a basketball scholarship to the only school his father would allow him to attend, the Military Institute of South Carolina, popularly known as The Citadel.

Failing to rise above the rank of private, Conroy found far more success with a basketball in his hand than with a rifle on his shoulder. As a senior, Conroy started at point guard and received the dubious honor of being named Most Valuable Player for the disappointing 1966–67 season, an experience described in the memoir, My Losing Season (2003).

The Citadel was fertile ground for Conroy. His first book, The Boo (1970), was a self-published collection of essays celebrating Lt. Col. Thomas N. Courvoisie, the recently fired assistant commandant of cadets at The Citadel. The publication of The Lords of Discipline (1980) drew the ire of the institution, blowing open the secrets of the lightly fictionalized “Carolina Military Academy” with the same veracity—and not dissimilar reaction—with which his other works described the Conroy family. The novel was awarded the Lillian Smith Book Award in 1981.

Following his graduation in 1967, Conroy returned to Beaufort as a teacher and coach. In the fall of 1969, Conroy met and married Barbara Jones, a Vietnam War widow pregnant with her second child. He also accepted a position at the two-room elementary school on nearby Daufuskie Island, an impoverished African American community that was accessible only by ferry and long neglected by the school district. Daufuskie became “Yamacraw Island” in The Water Is Wide (1973), a memoir that was a modest success and was adapted as the film Conrack (1974).

Conroy followed up the memoir with his first novel, The Great Santini (1976), the autobiographical tale of the traumatic abuse suffered by a teenaged boy and his family at the hands of a bullying Marine father. Its publication nearly destroyed both Conroy and his family. He collapsed in a parking lot on his book tour, his father’s family quit speaking to him, and his marriage ended, as did his parents’. Peggy Conroy even entered the novel as evidence in her divorce proceedings.

In The Prince of Tides (1986), Conroy again used his and his family’s tragic history, this time exploring the adult consequences of abuse, particularly in his sister’s manic depression and his own history of depression. The novel became a national phenomenon, riding a wave of momentum from instant best seller to Academy Award–nominated film.

Conroy’s next novel, Beach Music (1995), drew from subjects as disparate as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, Conroy’s first divorce, his time in Rome with his second wife and their children, and the depression and eventual suicide of his youngest brother, Thomas. Highly anticipated and long delayed, Beach Music was another commercial success, if not a critical one.

Throughout the 1990s, Conroy remained in the headlines, vocally and financially supporting attempts to force The Citadel to accept women into its corps of cadets. Ultimately, women were admitted into the institution, and Conroy even received an honorary degree. Likewise, Conroy reconciled with his father: “My father answered my first novel by setting out to prove I was a liar of the first magnitude,” he wrote in Atlanta Magazine in 1999, shortly after his father’s death. “He worked night and day in turning himself into a father even his own children could love.”

He has returned to Beaufort and lives on nearby Fripp Island with his third wife, the author Cassandra King. Conroy has revealed that he had been engaged with the Margaret Mitchell estate in protracted discussions to write a sequel to Gone with the Wind, the novel worshipped by his mother, but that the negotiations broke off over issues of editorial control.

ANTHONY D. HOEFER JR.

Louisiana State University

John Berendt, Vanity Fair (July 1995); Landon C. Burns, Pat Conroy: A Critical Companion (1996); Robert W. Hamblin, Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature (Fall 1993); David Toolan, Commonweal (February 1991).

 

Cooper, Anna Julia Haywood

(1858?–1964) WRITER.

Annie Julia Cooper’s extraordinary energy and long productive life propelled her from being the daughter of a bondwoman to a place among the most educated and articulate voices in America. She devoted her 105 years in North Carolina, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., to education, language, and social change.

Cooper’s education in rhetoric at St. Augustine’s Normal and Collegiate Institute in Raleigh, N.C., at Oberlin College, and in her faculty position as a teacher of Latin at the renowned M Street School in Washington, D.C., paved the way for her writings. Her education also created the subject and method she used to stand for asserting rights in the educational and gender politics of African American women.

Cooper’s father was reputed to be her mother’s owner. After the Civil War, at age nine, she attended a school founded as an outgrowth of the Freed-men’s Bureau, St. Augustine’s Normal School, and made it her “world.” At St. Augustine’s, Cooper ignored school rules limiting Latin and Greek instruction to boys and finagled her way into classes. By the time she enrolled at Oberlin College in 1881, she had read a wide array of Greek and Latin texts, and Oberlin stoked those interests in classical literature. In 1887, Cooper began teaching Latin and Greek at the M Street School and taught there for nearly 40 years. Cooper used education to prepare students for leadership roles. Her focus on cultivating the minds of black children put her at odds with Booker T. Washington and those who believed blacks were suited only for manual work, and she temporarily lost her job at the M Street School when she insisted on an intellectually based curriculum for her students.

Cooper used her argumentative skills at a time when American racial ideologies and educational institutions specifically excluded blacks from the power of oratory and rhetoric. Popular culture framed blacks as incapable of delivering useful information or shaping the public discourse. Nevertheless, in A Voice from the South (1892), Cooper built tight deductive arguments using the skills of classical rhetoric that she had learned in her youth. She would quickly convince her audience to agree with her on some point about general moral standards, and then, with a swift turn of phrase, she would hijack the audience’s assumptions governing women’s rights and even the definition of race. Cooper’s collection of orations and essays demonstrates her command of argument and prose that she used to redefine the very foundations of race and gender in the United States.

While teaching at M Street, Cooper took a leave from her job and attended the University of Paris–Sorbonne, earning a Ph.D. in French with a 1925 dissertation on slavery and the French Revolution. In her 70s, Cooper served as the president of Frelinghuysen University in Washington, D.C. For 10 years she oversaw the school that offered adult education at night to working people in the city. She remained committed to education and the power to speak throughout her long life.

TODD VOGEL

University of Washington

Anna Julia Cooper, The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including “A Voice from the South” and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters, ed. Esme Bhan and Charles Lemert (1998), Slavery and the French Revolutionists, 1788–1805, Studies in French Civilization, vol. 1 (1925, 1988); Leona C. Gable, From Slavery to the Sorbonne and Beyond: The Life and Writings of Anna J. Cooper (1982); Todd Vogel, Rewriting White: Race, Class, and Cultural Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (2004).

 

Davis, Jefferson, Capture of

When the Union army at last took possession of Richmond, Va., on 3 April 1865, the Confederate government, if not yet completely decimated, certainly could no longer function in its onetime capitol. Indeed, the previous evening, the Confederacy’s chief executive, Jefferson Davis, along with members of his cabinet and other Confederate officials, departed Richmond for points farther south. First, they decamped to Danville, Va., in a feeble attempt to reconstitute a seat of command. But as Confederate armies everywhere began to surrender, Davis and his diminishing entourage—still vowing to continue the fight—were forced to keep moving. By May, Davis and those who remained in his party had crossed into Georgia. By this time, too, Union soldiers began to search more intensively for the former Confederate president, who was now wrongly suspected of having participated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s capture by Union cavalry on 10 May 1865. Here the artist shows a camp in the woods, where Davis, wearing a dress, shawl, and bonnet and carrying a water bucket labeled “Mom Davis” and a Bowie knife, is accosted by Union soldiers. One Union soldier (center) lifts Davis’s skirt with his saber, mocking, “Well, old mother, boots and whiskers hardly belong to a high-toned Southern lady.” Davis implores, “I only wish to be let alone.” At right, another soldier, speaking in a German accent, says, “Mein Gott, ter olt mutter vears ter pig gavalrie poots!” He may be intended to represent the Norwegian-born tanner who first spotted Davis. The soldier at left exclaims, “Jerusalem! her old Mother, hey! Its Leach in petticoats—That’s so.” Behind Davis, a woman warns, “Do not provoke the President, he might hurt some one.” A black youth, presumably Davis’s servant, looks on, exclaiming, “Golly Marse Yank, de old Missus is done gone shu-ah!” (Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-89591], Washington, D.C.)

Union soldiers, specifically the members of the Fourth Michigan Cavalry, came upon Davis’s party on 10 May 1865, near the town of Irwinville in southern Georgia. Although historians disagree as to the details, the ex-Confederate leader apparently made some attempt to evade his captors and donned some type of garment that he may have hoped would conceal his identity. Reports quickly circulated, however, that Jefferson Davis had put on one of his wife’s dresses (Varina Davis, in fact, was not with the captured party) and so tried to flee by disguising his sex. The extreme hostility that northerners felt toward Davis, the tradition of cross-dressing stories that had already become part of Civil War folklore, and the desire that many in the North felt to ridicule the previously highly touted manhood of southern men almost guaranteed the rumors that would fly during May and June of 1865 regarding “Jeff in Petticoats” and “Jeffie Davis—the Belle of Richmond.” Stories, cartoons, even a display in P. T. Barnum’s museum, all portrayed the Confederate president as arrayed in feminine finery but then discovered and subdued by his Union captors. The accounts offered war-weary northerners a moment of humor and a way to express their outrage at the South, now pictured as ludicrously defying all proper gender conventions. Moreover, this portrayal of Davis in drag did double duty in allowing northerners to give vent to feelings of hostility toward southern women, whom many believed had been unnaturally aggressive in their defense of the Confederacy, and toward white southern men, who had once bragged of having courage that was superior to their Yankee counterparts.

Confederates, for their part, no doubt felt an intense humiliation, not only from the ultimate defeat of their national enterprise, but also from the shameful depictions of their onetime national leader. Indeed, the desire to defend the honor and manhood of defeated southerners and his own manhood specifically prompted Jefferson Davis to have a photograph taken in 1869, in which he attired himself in the clothes he allegedly wore at his capture.

NINA SILBER

Boston University

Gaines Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South (1987); Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (1993); Jay Winik, April 1865: The Month That Saved America (2001).

 

Designing Women

The hit television series Designing Women aired on CBS from 1986 to 1993. The popular sitcom revolved around the work and personal lives of four feisty southern women and one African American man who worked together at Sugarbaker and Associates design firm in Atlanta. The principal characters were two sisters, Julia (Dixie Carter) and Suzanne Sugarbaker (Delta Burke), Mary Jo Shively (Annie Potts), Charlene (Jean Smart), and Anthony (Mesach Taylor). Smart and Burke left the show after the 1990–91 season and were replaced by Julia’s cousin, Allison Sugar-baker (Julia Duffy) and Karlene (Jan Hooks), Charlene’s younger sister. The series was nominated for several Emmy and Golden Globe awards and remained in or near the Top 10 in viewer ratings for much of its run.

Designing Women was particularly notable for its focus on four women and their friendship as well as for its pronounced political point of view. Much of the sitcom’s appeal lay in its female characters: its plotlines revolved around the spaces they convened in, around their very southern ways of talking, around their interests in femininity, and around their friendships. The series also tackled a number of hot-button issues of its time, including domestic violence, sexual harassment, divorce, equal pay, weight gain, pornography, and the nomination hearings of Clarence Thomas. Like Maude before it and Murphy Brown and Roseanne after it, the show came to be seen as espousing a liberal feminist point of view, particularly through the lengthy monologues Julia was prone to deliver. But, unlike these other series, the soft-pedaled feminism of Designing Women adopted a distinctly southern perspective. The characters’ accents, looks, and mannerisms consistently signified “southernness” and referred to the region. The character Suzanne, a former pageant queen, served as perhaps the most stereotypically southern of the women. She was often the catalyst for the show’s explorations of femininity, an ongoing theme of the show that positioned femininity as a site of both oppression and potential power. Designing Women thus reworked southern womanhood for wider, national consumption.

Indeed, the series mediated the region for the United States as a whole and took up the New South almost as a character on the show, revamping a “moonlight-and-magnolia” take on southern femininity as well as the demonizing representations of the region popular in the 1970s in films such as Deliverance. The sitcom’s representation of Atlanta, and the South more broadly, was adroitly designed to showcase the region’s recent growth (in both economic and “moral” terms) via a focus on progress and liberal values. Several key episodes addressed southern themes, including southern tourism, historical memory, and the lingering impact of earlier popular portraits of the South, including Gone with the Wind. The inclusion of Anthony also reworked certain stereotypical images of regional black masculinity, although the series was perhaps more successful in challenging certain images of gender than in dealing with race or class.

Designing Women was created by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who produced the series with her husband, Harry Thomason. The pair and the core cast are all native southerners, and the production company’s strategy was to market its sitcom by region. The approach proved successful, as the series had notably higher rating averages in urban southern areas. The executive producers were also avowed Democrats with close ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton. The exterior shots of Suzanne’s home in the series actually featured the Arkansas governor’s mansion, home to the Clintons for much of the sitcom’s airing, and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason created Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign film, The Man from Hope. Clinton’s inauguration was worked into the plotline of one episode, and Charlene claimed in another to have worked for Clinton while he was governor.

The show narrowly escaped cancellation in its first season and was saved only after the executive producers and stars encouraged audience members to protest. This campaign, led by Viewers for Quality Television, generated 50,000 letters of support, and the series was renewed. By the end of Designing Women’s final season, reruns of the sitcom had been sold to 200 television stations in the United States, which at that time was the widest syndication distribution in history. It continues to air in rerun rotation, particularly on Lifetime Television, which hosted a reunion celebration of the series in 2003. During its run the series garnered several Viewers for Quality Television awards and even prompting a parody in MAD Magazine. Its legacy continues among an active fan base, ranging from women who write fan fiction based upon the series to gay men who have developed drag routines reviving the characters.

TARA MCPHERSON

University of Southern California

Bonnie Dow, Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement since 1970 (1996); Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (2003); Lauren Rabinovitz, in Television History and American Culture, ed. Mary Beth Haralovich and Lauren Rabinovitz (1999).

 

Dixon, Thomas, Jr.

(1864–1946) WRITER.

Thomas Dixon’s views on gender cannot be separated from his repugnant ideas on race. Throughout his adult life he fixated on the apocryphal notion that black men yearned to commit sexual violence against white women, and that black temptresses lured white men into their embrace. In his mind, the mulatto children that resulted from white men and women’s “forced” unions with black sexual predators spelled the death of American civilization and the Anglo-Saxon race. To Dixon, the decline of the United States rested upon the North’s insistence on granting bestial black men political rights during Reconstruction, thereby unleashing their libidinous desires for white women and facilitating the transformation of the white nation into a “mongrelized” and vulnerable state.

Although Dixon’s notions of gender were profoundly shaped by a rabid racism rooted in his southern heritage, he was piercingly attuned to the cultural beats of his time. Steeped in the moral intensity of both his Baptist background and Victorian America as a whole, he plied his cautionary tales about white and black men and women acting outside their gendered roles and racial hierarchies within the easily digested forms of popular romance and melodrama.

Dixon was born in 1864 in Cleveland County in the southwestern corner of North Carolina. His father was a minister and farmer, who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, as did his father’s Confederate veteran brother. Thomas Dixon Sr. seems to have been the source of many of his son’s psychosexual perceptions. Not only did his son decry his mother’s ostensible rape as a child-bride in his autobiography, but Dixon Sr. was rumored to have fathered a son with the family’s African American cook.

Thomas Dixon Jr. attended the Baptist-run Wake Forest College at the age of 15, where he excelled academically. He attended Johns Hopkins University for four months in 1883, studying under Herbert Baxter Adams, who provided Dixon with a scholarly apparatus for embracing white superiority. After a series of false starts as an actor, state legislator, and lawyer, Dixon eloped with Harriet Bussey, a Georgia minister’s daughter, had a conversion experience at Wrightsville Beach, and became an ordained Baptist minister known for his gilded tongue, serving in Goldsboro and Raleigh, before being called to the prestigious Dudley Street Church in Boston and the Twenty-third Street Church in New York City.

Dixon embraced the principles of white superiority that rationalized Jim Crow disfranchisement, segregation, and brutality against African Americans in the turn-of-the-century South. He believed that thousands of years of development separated Aryans from Africans, and that African Americans believed they could bridge that gap through interracial marriage. White men, Dixon argued, must stop this black press for miscegenation at all costs. Dixon’s beliefs reflected a wider culture in which white southern manhood seemed under siege. A developing market economy and interracial political alliances, combined with a changing population in which young single white women could move to the cities for employment and black men could become urban entrepreneurs and businessmen, challenged traditional white patriarchal authority and served as a crucible for the myth of the black beast rapist.

Dixon played an unparalleled role in disseminating that myth throughout American culture. He portrayed black men as innate barbarians unable to restrain their lust for white virgins, a theme hammered home in his bestselling trilogy, The Leopard’s Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907). He used inflammatory scenes of black men stalking unprotected white women to justify the resurrection of the chivalric Ku Klux Klan, charged with saving not only southern ladyhood but the country as a whole. America’s future, Dixon was suggesting, depended on the heroism of southern white men, a point literally writ large in the sensationalistic film he cowrote with D. W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation (1915).

Dixon did not write exclusively about the South. As an advocate of the Social Gospel movement, he addressed the social problems of modernity. He condemned society’s blind eye on poor working women’s desperate lives and wished they were honored as mothers of civilization instead. Interestingly, Dixon did not see white women as passive victims in all contexts. He celebrated women’s strong leadership in church, even as he sought more exemplifiers of Christian manhood in his pews. He believed strong women could prevent men from pursuing the twin dangers of radicalism and promiscuity, a theme he explored in several of his books, including his first best seller, The One Woman (1903). For Dixon, a white man and white woman’s romantic love, made sacred by having a child, ensured a man’s highest morality, and modern white women who pursued careers and independence must give up those aspirations to “save” their men. Black men and women, by comparison, lacked the capacity for romantic love, and therefore the capacity for true piety.

Dixon’s preoccupation with the dangers of black sexuality never waned. In his final book, The Flaming Sword (1939), he tied the rape of a white Piedmont wife by a savage black man to Communist efforts to overthrow the United States with the support of a black army. Throughout his long career, Dixon appealed to a national audience of white men and women anxious about modernization and its impact on manliness, race, and white authority. In the end, it is important to recognize that Dixon’s horrific stereotypes ultimately reflected the collective anxieties of white America as much or more than Dixon’s own warped imagination.

MICHELE K. GILLESPIE

Wake Forest University

Michele K. Gillespie and Randal L. Hall, eds., Thomas Dixon Jr. and the Birth of Modern America (2006); Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (1996); Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (2004); Joel Williamson, Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (1984).

 

Earnhardt, Dale

(1951–2001) NASCAR DRIVER.

Born in Kannapolis, N.C., Dale Earnhardt became one of the most successful stock car drivers in NASCAR Nextel (formerly Winston) Cup series history. The son of NASCAR driver Ralph Earnhardt, Dale Earnhardt grew up working on his father’s cars, racing his own automobiles, and fighting to become a successful stock car driver. His struggles were compounded as Earnhardt dropped out of school, married and had children at an early age, and had to regularly borrow money to fund his race team.

In 1975 he made his first Winston Cup start, racing in the series infrequently until 1979, when, thanks to improved funding and equipment, he won one race and the Rookie of the Year award. Tremendous on-track success followed as Earnhardt won 76 races (now seventh all-time in the series) and a record-tying seven Winston Cup championships (1980, 1986, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1993, and 1994). He was recognized in 1998 by NASCAR as one of the 50 greatest drivers in the circuit’s history.

His success on the track, aggressive driving style, unique charisma, and black number “3” Chevrolet earned Earnhardt the nickname “The Intimidator.” Legions of fans, particularly blue-color southern males, embraced Earnhardt’s style, success, and humble southern roots and made him one of the most popular Winston Cup drivers. Even though some fans detested his rough driving style and consistent success, Earnhardt became the face of NASCAR beginning in the late 1980s. He usually appeared in advertisements and promotional material dressed in all black, with a steely gaze encouraging viewers to buy Chevrolets, Wrangler jeans, Coca-Cola, or a host of other products.

In 2001, when Earnhardt died during a last-lap wreck at Daytona International Speedway, NASCAR fans reacted with an outpouring of mourning and memorialization efforts, repeatedly stating that Earnhardt was one of them—an unassuming, hardworking southerner. Ironically, widespread national media coverage of Earnhardt’s death attracted new fans to NASCAR, including nonsoutherners, females, minorities, and high-income followers.

Dale Earnhardt Way, an exit off of Interstate 35, is one of the entrances to the Texas Motor Speedway. (Courtesy Douglas Hurt, photographer)

Earnhardt’s legacy includes his business, Dale Earnhardt Incorporated, which fields Nextel Cup race cars; his son, Dale Earnhardt Jr., who replaced his father as one of NASCAR’s most popular drivers; and many media events chronicling his life and death, including two full-length films, several country music songs, and a romance novel about mourners taking a pilgrimage to NASCAR tracks in memory of Earnhardt. Since his death, Dale Earnhardt’s name has been imprinted on the southern landscape in the form of roads, racetrack grandstands, and businesses in North Carolina. Even after death, his racing merchandise continues to be a best seller among his loyal fans.

DOUGLAS A. HURT

University of Central Oklahoma

Peter Golenbock and Greg Fielden, eds., Stock Car Racing Encyclopedia (1997); Mark D. Howell, From Moonshine to Madison Avenue (1997); Douglas A. Hurt, Southeastern Geographer (May 2005); Joe Menzer, The Wildest Ride: A History of nascar (2001); Frank Moriarty, The Encyclopedia of Stock Car Racing (1998); Neal Thompson, Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of nascar (2006).

 

Edelman, Marian Wright

(b. 1939) CIVIL RIGHTS LAWYER.

Marian Wright Edelman is founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, based in Washington, D.C. Born 6 June 1939 to a Bennettsville, S.C., Baptist minister and his wife (who also raised her four brothers, her sister, and 14 foster children), Edelman in 1983 was named by Ladies’ Home Journal as one of the “100 most influential women in America.” In 1985 she received a MacArthur Foundation award of $228,000, which she promptly devoted to her Children’s Defense Fund to make the needs of children—especially poor children—a top priority on America’s agenda. She is a voice for children who cannot vote, lobby, or speak out for themselves. Edelman is concerned with every aspect of childhood health and education, infant mortality, teenage pregnancy, and child abuse. Her work graphically details the effect of poverty on the minds and future of America’s children.

Awards and accolades for Marian Wright Edelman have cascaded in a steady stream since her undergraduate days at Spelman College in Atlanta, where a Merrill Scholarship afforded her a year’s study at the University of Paris and the University of Geneva. She has served as chair of Spelman’s Board of Trustees.

In the intervening years, she has fulfilled her early promise as one of Mademoiselle magazine’s “four most exciting young women in America” (1965) and as Vogue’s “Outstanding Young Woman of America” (1965–66). During those years, many pieces of civil rights legislation were written under the force of her determination and penchant for detail. Her brilliant congressional testimony, her lobbying for and drafting of legislation, and her highly focused intellect and energy led former vice president Walter Mondale to call Marian Wright Edelman “the smartest woman I have ever met.”

Marian Wright grew up in a close-knit southern family, for whom civil rights represented an American ideal. Her father’s final days in 1954 were spent with a radio at his side, listening to Brown v. Board of Education being argued before the Supreme Court. His last words to Marian, a week before the decision came down, were “Don’t let anything get between you and your education.”

Edelman graduated from Spelman as valedictorian in 1960, won a John Hay Whitney Fellowship to Yale University Law School, received her L.L.B. in 1963, and joined the NAACP Legal and Education Defense Fund as staff attorney in New York. From 1964 to 1968 she served as director of the fund’s Jackson, Miss., office, where in 1965 she became the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar.

In Mississippi, during the height of the civil rights movement, she organized Head Start programs throughout the state for the Child Development Group of Mississippi and developed a keen awareness of the effect of poverty and hunger on the lives of young children. Her advocacy drew national attention to children suffering from hunger and malnutrition in America. As a Field Foundation Fellow and partner in the Washington research project of the Southern Center for Public Policy, she became a principal architect of and successful lobbyist for the Food Stamp Act of 1970. That year she became an honorary fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and won the Louise Waterman Wise Award, and in 1971 Time magazine named her one of 200 outstanding young American leaders. From 1971 to May 1973 she served as director of the Center for Law and Education at Harvard University—a position she left to form the Children’s Defense Fund.

Edelman’s research on the plight of children in America is quoted in the major media, cited by congressional committees, and used in state and federal programming. She is the author of three books, Children out of School in America (1974), School Suspensions: Are They Helping Children? (1975), and Portrait of Inequality: Black and White Children in America (1980), all published by the Children’s Defense Fund, as well as numerous articles and scholarly papers.

MARY LYNN KOTZ

Washington, D.C.

Harry A. Ploski and James Williams, eds., The Negro Almanac (1983); Psychology Today (June 1975); Who’s Who in America (43d ed., 1984–85); Who’s Who in Black America (4th ed., 1985).

 

Felton, Rebecca Latimer

(1835–1930) POLITICIAN AND WRITER.

Rebecca Felton embodied many of the tensions and contradictions of the New South, a crusader for women’s equality who retained all the outward grace of a southern lady, a plantation mistress who supported industrial expansion, and an advocate for Progressive-era reforms who bitterly championed white supremacy. Felton was born in 1835 near Decatur, Ga., the first child of a wealthy slaveholder and proprietor, Charles Latimer. She was educated at the Madison Female College, where she graduated at the top of her class. At age 18, she married William Felton, a widower in his 30s, who was, at various times, a physician, a Methodist minister, and a prosperous planter in Cartersville. Before the Civil War, Felton confined herself to managing the household and raising her children.

The Civil War shocked her out of this world. With their plantation devastated and two sons dead from disease, the Feltons worked to remake their lives. They had five children in all, only one of whom survived into adulthood. In addition to rebuilding their plantation, they established a Methodist school and entered the postwar political fray. Her husband served in the U.S. Congress as an Independent from 1874 to 1880 and then served three terms in the Georgia state legislature. In these years, she began her public life, managing her husband’s political career, helping him draft bills and write speeches, and penning biting critiques of the Bourbon Democrats for numerous newspapers. In 1885 she took over the Cartersville Free Press (renamed the Courant) and became the first woman in Georgia to edit her own newspaper.

Felton’s reputation soon eclipsed her husband’s. She represented Georgia as a “lady manager” at the 1893 World Exposition in Chicago and wrote a regular column on women for the Atlanta Journal, from 1899 through the 1920s. She became most renowned for her reform campaigns on behalf of Georgia’s women, beginning with an effort to outlaw Georgia’s convict lease system in the 1870s and to establish separate prison facilities for women. In 1886 Felton joined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and soon became a leading spokeswoman for prohibition in Georgia. She also was an advocate for compulsory education in Georgia’s common schools, for vocational education for poor white girls, and for agricultural reforms that would give women control over a portion of the family economy. She argued that marriage was a partnership that should accord women all the rights and liberties of their husbands. These beliefs led to her fervent support for woman suffrage in the 1910s, against widespread condemnation from conservative lawmakers. In September 1922, when U.S. senator Tom Watson died unexpectedly, Governor Thomas Hardwick selected Felton to take his seat, though the Senate was not in session at the time. When the Senate did reconvene after the November elections, Watson’s elected successor, Walter George, agreed to be sworn in a day late. Felton thus became the first female senator to sit in the Senate chambers, albeit for only one day, largely as a symbolic affirmation of the Nineteenth amendment.

But Felton’s progressive politics did not extend to race. Her advocacy on behalf of white women stemmed in large part from her desire to protect white southerners from the prospect of black equality. She believed that the white race needed the strengthening that white women’s suffrage, educational reform, and economic uplift could bring. She defended her feminism against conservative attack by claiming that white women needed to forge their independence because white men had abdicated their chivalric roles as protectors—by bringing suffering upon white southern households in seceding from the union, by abandoning their paternal and marital duties by turning to drink and by satisfying their sexual desires with black women, and by fostering what she saw as a misguided sense of black equality in cynically courting the black male vote after the war. This view led to the most notorious statement of her career. In 1897, Felton made national news when she defended lynching in a speech to the Georgia Agricultural Society, declaring that if lynching could protect white women from black male rapists, “then I say lynch a thousand a week, if necessary.”

Rebecca Felton, the first female senator to sit in the Senate chambers, standing on the steps of the Georgia Senate, November 1922 (Library of Congress [LC-F8-21357], Washington, D.C.)

Despite her advocacy for southern farmers and her defensiveness against northern criticism and intrusion, she strongly supported industrial expansion in the South, believing that sectional progress would come from capitalist growth. She herself was a shrewd and wealthy businesswoman.

Felton remained active in Georgia politics well into old age. She died in 1930 at the age of 94.

AMY LOUISE WOOD

Illinois State University

Rebecca Latimer Felton, Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth (1919); John Talmadge, Rebecca Latimer Felton: Nine Stormy Decades (1960); Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (1993); LeeAnn Whites, Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South (2005); Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (1986).

 

Gibbons, Kaye

(b. 1960) WRITER.

While a student in Louis Rubin’s southern literature class at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Kaye Gibbons showed him a manuscript of her novel, Ellen Foster. Shortly thereafter, in 1987, Rubin’s Algonquin Press published the book. Its spare and focused scope reopened the interrogation of what John Crowe Ransom might call the “economy of the household” in southern life. With each subsequent novel, Gibbons continues to chronicle the voice of southern women speaking “in place.”

Matriarchal lines ground Gibbons’s novels. The women here, in the author’s words, “remember conversations” and practice a creed of “self-reliance.” Ellen Foster (Ellen Foster) matures through her own wits as well as in conversations with her friend, Starletta, the Brontë sisters, and a “laughing Middle Ages lady,” in the “old stories” given to her by the librarian. Hattie Barnes (Sights Unseen, 1995) discovers the means to live with her mother’s mental illness, as her mother stares down the men’s family relationships, which are defined by pride, violence, and power. This self-reliance is a continual touchstone for Gibbons’s women, a constant reassertion of the intrinsic value of their social place in the face of history.

In a Gibbons novel, each narrator seems “insulated” in life’s domestic spheres; each account feels “overheard.” Yet this is not a self-obsessed, regionalized fiction. Instead, examining Gibbons’s On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon (1998), Matthew Guinn calls the novelist’s project “deconstruction from within.” For instance, although one has examined the “official account” of a story in the newspaper or history book, Gibbons gives the reader a way of narrating the South—one that does not simply throw the region back on itself in self-absorption. The narration never pretends to escape place, personal or social history, or even the body. Slowed of narrative momentum, the Gibbons narrator often finds herself in the position of Margaret Birch (Charms for the Easy Life, 1993), who, after her grandmother’s death, “l[ies] down, rest[s] her head by her [grandmother’s] feet, and wait[s]) to be found.” In this densely textured “waiting,” Gibbons delves into the layers of accumulated psychological experience. Here, she engages myths of the unity of that experience. Her “South” geographically breaks into region and neighborhood. Her women are rooted in voices and bodies in which they move through domestic and historical spaces, retell, and disappear. For example, a school counselor challenges Ellen Foster to recall her experiences of poverty and fear. She recounts, “I used to be [afraid] but I am not now is what I told him. I might get a little nervous but I am never scared. Oh but I do remember when I was scared.”

When Gibbons was nine years old, her mother committed suicide. Gibbons herself has faced manic depression, but it is too easy to say that she simply chronicles her own experiences with the disease in her novels, marking some journey toward psychological wholeness. Instead, her characters move from experience to storytelling, with this sense of living as distant observers of their own lives. The effect is of a narrator intent on getting all the details right in the face of a generalized and misremembered story line.

In Sights Unseen, Hattie tells the story of her own naming. While the woman who shares her mother’s room in the obstetrics ward joins “the various voices from [her] mother’s [psychologically broken] life now in unison, telling her how much joy she could have if she were normal, happy, and sane,” Maggie Barnes insists that the child’s name be “Hattie,” in a defiant stance against the accumulated stubborn and racial angers of the men around her. Each novel’s story is obsessively told within these subsumed histories. The force of southern economics and society moves along, the mills and migrant farmworkers working in place. This is a reality of which Gibbons’s narrators never lose sight. No one would presume to disturb the region’s unbroken pastoral appearance. In Margaret Birch’s telling of her neighbors’ suicide threats, “they would walk fifty miles and jump in some other person’s river, but not their own.” Similarly, each narrator tells her story with full awareness of that stasis, speaking with a sense of deflected memoir, as she reconstructs these subsumed domestic histories.

Kaye Gibbons was born Bertha Kaye Batts on 5 May 1960 in Nash County, N.C. As of 2009, she continues to write, living with her three daughters in Raleigh, N.C.

GARIN CYCHOLL

University of Illinois–Chicago

Suzanne Disheroon-Green, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Twenty-First-Century American Novelists, ed. Lisa Abney and Suzanne Disheroon-Green (2004); Jan Nordby Gretlund, South Atlantic Review (Fall 2000); Matthew Guinn, After Southern Modernism (2000).

 

Grimké Sisters

(SARAH, 1793–1874; ANGELINA, 1805–1879) ABOLITIONISTS.

The Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, were unique in the American antislavery movement. They were southerners, women, and members of a family known to own slaves. Sarah was born in 1793 and Angelina in 1805, the last of 11 Grimké children. Sarah virtually adopted her new baby sister, and they remained close throughout their lives. The Grimké family belonged to Charleston’s elite upper class, whose children were reared in luxury and served by many slaves. They were city dwellers, but their large plantation in upper South Carolina and its numerous slaves were an important source of family wealth. The sisters’ education in a select girls’ academy stressing the social graces was slight and superficial. They were expected to marry well, bear children, and become successful matrons. However, the sisters lost interest in conventional life as each grew into adulthood.

Religion led them to reject slavery. Though the Grimké family church was St. Philip’s Episcopal, each sister experienced conversion in revivals of other churches. Sarah, in time, became a member of the Society of Friends, Angelina an enthusiastic Presbyterian. Sarah came to know Friends during her father’s final illness. In 1821, following his death, she moved to Philadelphia and joined the Friends’ Society. She accepted the Friends’ firm tenet opposing slavery as a sin and eventually won over her sister to the Quaker faith and the antislavery conviction. After her efforts failed to convert family and friends, Angelina left Charleston to make her home with Sarah in Philadelphia.

In early 1853 the more activist Angelina began to make contact with the antislavery movement. After William Lloyd Garrison published her letter in the Liberator, Angelina began to write her first tract, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. The American Anti-Slavery Society rushed it into print and then urged her to aid the cause by addressing women’s groups in “parlor meetings”—Sarah went with her and remained at her side.

They were the only women asked to the Convention of the Seventy, which met in October of 1836 for the training of new agents to spread abolitionism. Theodore Weld, whom Angelina later married, was the leader in the sessions and gave the sisters special training for their coming lecture tours. They went from this convention to their crowded “parlor meetings,” held in churches, and accepted invitations from other localities. The two sisters were swept into preparations for a forthcoming Convention of American Anti-Slavery Women, held in March of 1837. When it ended, the Grimkés had come to know most of the abolitionist leaders in the East, men and women, and were themselves regarded as belonging to the circle of female leaders. The Grimkés arrived in Boston in May 1837 and began their historic antislavery crusade. They also increasingly spoke out in favor of women’s rights, despite criticism from antislavery leaders.

The spring months of 1838 saw Angelina Grimké’s greatest triumphs. Twice in a crowded Massachusetts legislative hall she addressed a committee of the legislature, a sensational occasion headlined in the press. Also, Boston’s antislavery women rented the Odeon Theater, and for five meetings, one a week, Angelina addressed an overflowing hall on the abolition of slavery. In Philadelphia, she calmly addressed a mass meeting of a convention of American Anti-Slavery Women with a threatening mob outside.

Angelina and Weld were married the day before the convention. When the sessions ended, Sarah accompanied them to their new home, and she stayed with them for the remainder of her life. Angelina fully expected to return to her work for the antislavery cause but did not do so. She and Sarah assisted Weld on his best-known tract, American Slavery As It Is (1839). Three children were born between 1839 and 1844, two boys and a girl.

In the late 1850s both sisters taught in the Eagleswood School, which Weld headed. Later the family lived near Boston, where Weld and Angelina continued to teach. When the Civil War came in 1861, Angelina Grimké, at the age of 56, returned to part-time public life. Garrison had persuaded Weld to lecture again, this time in aid of the war effort. Angelina now rejoined her old friends in forming an organization, Loyal Women of the Republic, and once again she was speaking for freedom of the slaves. Sarah was over 70 years old when the end of the war brought full emancipation. She died in 1874. Angelina suffered two strokes, the first of which occured in 1875, and was ill until her death in 1879.

KATHERINE DU PRE LUMPKIN

Angelina Emily Grimké, Walking by Faith: The Diary of Angelina Grimké, 1825–1835, ed. Charles Wilbanks (2003); Gerda Lerner, The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké (1997), The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels against Slavery (1967); Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké (1974); Weld-Grimké Collection, Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

 

Hamer, Fannie Lou

(1917–1977) CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST.

The youngest of 20 children born to Jim and Ella Townsend, black sharecroppers in Montgomery County, Miss., Fannie Lou Townsend moved with her family to Sunflower County, in the heart of the Delta, just after her second birthday. She picked her first cotton harvest as a six-year-old. Townsend was a gifted student, but she left Sunflower County’s inferior black schools after the sixth grade to work on the Brandon plantation because her family desperately needed the money. She married Perry “Pap” Hamer in 1944; they sharecropped on the Marlow plantation just outside of Ruleville, not far from the plantation of U.S. senator James O. Eastland.

Thousands of African American women in the Mississippi Delta had similar family and educational histories and therefore her life prospects. Taught by their own public school systems that educating them would be a waste of money, they certainly were not expected to bear the responsibilities of citizenship. Hamer, however, rose far above the expectations held by the white supremacist society into which she was born. By the time of her untimely death in 1977, Hamer had become the most influential poor person in America. The absolute embodiment of the mantra of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), “Let the People Decide,” Hamer voiced a homegrown critique of the American political system that made Mississippi’s white supremacy possible. In the process she became a standard bearer for the disfranchised and ignored black poor and provided an effective challenge to Mississippi elected officials, the leaders of the national Democratic Party, and President Lyndon B. Johnson. Millions of Americans came to appreciate her as what a fellow activist called the “prophet of hope for the sick and tired.”

Fannie Lou Hamer at the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, N.J., August 1964 (Warren K. Leffler, photographer, Library of Congress [LC-U9-12470B-17], Washington, D.C.)

Hamer was 44 years old when she attended a SNCC workshop in Ruleville and learned she was eligible to vote. She was one of dozens of Ruleville-area blacks who attempted to register in 1962 and became an indefatigable canvasser for black voters. Hamer’s initial application was denied, along with the others, but she attempted to register again; she learned in 1963 that Sunflower County’s registrar had accepted her application on her second attempt, though other would-be voters had to return to the county courthouse multiple times. Such was Hamer’s determination and so fast was the pace of change during Mississippi’s Freedom Summer that the first vote she cast, in 1964, was for herself—in a Democratic primary race against incumbent U.S. representative Jamie Whitten. Hamer lost that race, but she, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine challenged Whitten and the rest of Mississippi’s delegation to the House, on the grounds that African Americans had systematically been denied the ballot throughout the state.

Hamer was the recognized spokes-person of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), the integrated but majority-black group that organized during Freedom Summer to challenge the lily-white “regular” Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Party Convention in Atlantic City in August 1964. Hamer and the MFDP lost the challenge, but, in a nationally televised, highly charged address before the party’s Credentials Committee, Hamer rattled off a litany of injustices she had suffered simply because she wanted to vote. “All of this is on account [of] we want to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America,” she concluded. Hamer’s electrifying testimony laid bare the radically democratic enterprise at the heart of the civil rights movement as she knew it. Her further challenge of the congressional delegation kept Mississippi racism in the nation’s consciousness after the conclusion of Freedom Summer and highlighted black disfranchisement, which kept pressure on Johnson and Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Hamer remained a nationally recognized philosopher of the black freedom struggle and a darling of the Left even after much of the civil rights movement disintegrated. She was an effective fund-raiser for civil rights and voting rights causes and a sought-after speaker among social justice and feminist organizations throughout the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. The feminists, it must be said, were not quite sure what to make of Hamer when she told them she was not “hung up on this thing about liberating myself from the black man. . . . I got a black husband, six feet three, 240 pounds, with a 14 shoe, that I don’t want to be liberated from.” She also departed from feminist orthodoxy on abortion but was fully committed to the principle that women should control their own lives and persons.

Hamer came to this position via hard-lived experience. She had spent her life in a society with an inhumanly racist healthcare system, and being a civil rights activist had taken a tremendous physical toll on her. She had suffered from polio as a child and later wrote of recurrent childhood dreams about food, in which she found a piece of cornbread or an apple or orange to relieve her persistent hunger. Hamer saw a local doctor for treatment of a stomach cyst in 1961; he performed a hysterectomy without her knowledge or permission. She suffered with pain and walked with a limp for the rest of her life following a beating she received in a Winona, Miss., jail on the way home from a citizenship education school in 1963. One of Hamer’s adopted daughters died from the effects of malnutrition at the age of 22; her life might have been saved had not a local hospital refused to treat her because she was black. Hamer herself succumbed to the effects of diabetes, hypertension, cancer, and heart troubles at the age of 59, in 1977.

J. TODD MOYE

University of North Texas

Ed King, Sojourners (December 1982); Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (1999); Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (1994); J. Todd Moye, Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Organizing in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 1945–1986 (2004); Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995).

 

Home Extension Services

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) developed the Home Extension Services to disseminate information to the farming community. Home Extension has its roots in the Progressive era and the Country Life movement. Theodore Roosevelt authorized the Country Life Commission to investigate rural life. The committee’s report paid special attention to farm women, finding that they were overworked and lacking in modern technologies, and recommended improving their conditions. In order to improve agricultural scientific study, Congress passed the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, which established land-grant colleges. Agricultural reformers eager to spread helpful information to farmers published bulletins and spoke at farmers’ institutes, conferences, and agricultural fairs. Still, only a minority of farmers gained access to new scientific knowledge. Eventually, reformers realized they had to take the information to the farmer.

Seaman A. Knapp, a professor at what is now Iowa State University, was instrumental in developing the concept of demonstration work. Knapp helped draft the first experimental station bill, which was the precursor to the Hatch Act of 1877. This legislation appropriated federal funding for experimental stations to gather and disseminate practical scientific knowledge to farmers. In 1903 the Mexican boll weevil threatened Texas cotton production. Using five demonstration farms in Texas and Louisiana, Knapp was able to convince farmers that using good farming practices—crop rotation, deeper plowing, fertilizers, and improved seed selection—could prevent crop destruction. Seeing that these improved techniques worked, farmers immediately implemented them and saved their cotton crops. Impressed by Knapp’s success, the USDA earmarked $40,000 to expand demonstration programs and created the Cooperative Demonstration Work of the USDA.

Knapp saw the advantages of expanding the demonstrations work for women, boys, and girls. In the early 1910s, agriculture agents organized girls into Tomato Clubs, boys into Corn Clubs, and women into Canning Clubs. The benign names of these organizations belie the lofty and transforming goals of the reformers, who wanted to educate the rural populations and lift them out of poverty through scientific farming, efficiency, mechanization, and improved profits. Later the organizations were renamed as Home Demonstration and 4-H Clubs.

In 1914 Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act, which provided federal money to land-grant universities to establish and administer the Extension Services. The universities provided training in the latest agricultural scientific knowledge to agents, who then educated the rural population, using demonstrations and USDA publications. The agents were assigned to counties, with the expectation that local governments would pay up to 50 percent of their salaries. The Rockefeller General Education Board also provided substantial funding. County agents reported to district agents, who in turn reported to state directors, who were usually responsible to the dean of the agricultural state college. Smith-Lever shared the goals of the Country Life movement of rural uplift and efficiency, working to improve the living conditions of rural women. Importantly, Smith-Lever mandated policies based on a gendered division of labor—men as farmers growing crops, women as homemakers taking care of domestic needs. But this division did not reflect the reality of farm life.

Tuskegee Institute pioneered demonstration work for African Americans, but this work developed slower because many county governments refused to fund demonstration programs for blacks. Authority over black extension work was centered in three black colleges, Tuskegee and Hampton Institute and briefly at Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College in Texas. Programs directed at black southerners had contradictory goals. In the segregated South, the Extension Service wanted to improve conditions for blacks without developing greater independence. Throughout the first decades of extension work for blacks, the programs were underfunded and agents were overworked, with responsibility for much larger districts than those of their white counterparts.

Today the Extension Service works with local governments and community leaders to improve rural life through a broad range of educational programs in agriculture, community resource development, nutrition, family issues, lawn and garden programs, and youth development. Membership in Home Demonstration Clubs has declined as women have left the farm to work outside the home. 4-H clubs are still an important aspect of rural life, adapting and changing to stay relevant.

MINOA D. UFFELMAN

Austin Peay State University

Laurie Winn Carlson, William J. Spillman and the Birth of Agricultural Economics (2005); Mary S. Hoffschwelle, Rebuilding the Rural Community: Reformers, Schools, and Homes in Tennessee, 1900–1930 (1998); Jeannie Whayne, in African American Life in the Rural South, ed. R. Douglas Hurt (2003).

 

“I AM A MAN”

When black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn., went on strike in 1968, they carried placards with the slogan “I AM A MAN.” The strike and slogan would capture national attention at a time when the civil rights movement was evolving from a quest for social equality to a more comprehensive campaign for economic justice.

In the context of the labor movement, the men in Memphis were demanding a living wage, one that would enable them to support their families as traditional male breadwinners. In 1968 many of the black sanitation workers in Memphis qualified for welfare, despite the fact that they worked full-time for the city (and many held second jobs). Racial divisions in the Memphis labor market and antiunion policies kept wages low, not only for black workers in the city but for whites as well. The sanitation strikers hoped that their demands for recognition of black manhood and of a union for city employees might break the hold that paternalistic politicians and employers had long had on the city.

In the context of the civil rights movement, the Memphis sanitation strikers’ demand for respect and recognition as men tapped into a long history of African American dissent. Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass demanded that black men be allowed to serve in the U.S. army and vote during the Civil War era. A generation later, scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois recognized that black manhood was under direct attack because of the lynching in the Jim Crow era. The civil rights movement brought issues of race and masculinity to the forefront of America’s consciousness once again in the 1950s and 1960s. The “I AM A MAN” slogan captured this moment perfectly, calling attention to the ways that racism and poverty undercut black men’s ability to achieve the American ideal of manhood.

Sanitation workers on strike in Memphis, 1968 (Courtesy Mississippi Valley Collection, University of Memphis Libraries)

At the request of labor and civil rights activists in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. linked the 1968 sanitation strike to his nationwide Poor People’s Campaign. King traveled to Memphis twice in the spring of 1968 to support the strike. A march that he led during his first visit ended in violence and rioting. Shaken but undeterred, King promised to return to Memphis to lead a nonviolent march. In early April he did return. Speaking to thousands about the future direction of the civil rights movement, King said that he had been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land of freedom. Yet King’s optimism was tempered by an eerie, almost prophetic, sense that he might not live long enough to get to the Promised Land himself. The next day King was assassinated.

Still, the sanitation workers soldiered on, despite the loss of King’s leadership. By the end of the spring, the city agreed to address many of the sanitation workers’ demands. The workers received higher pay, a guarantee of safer working conditions, an end to racist promotion practices, and a memorandum of understanding regarding the union’s ability to bargain collectively with the city.

The quest for recognition and definition of black manhood continued. With the Million Man March in 1995, black leaders characterized the struggle for racial uplift in the gendered language of claiming manhood once again. There were questions from feminists (both women and men) about framing the struggle for racial equality and uplift in terms of masculinity, specifically the implication that traditional (and perhaps unequal) gender roles might be the foundation for such a movement. But few would debate the fact that this march and the “I AM A MAN” slogan point to complex relationships between race and manhood in southern culture—and, for that matter, in American culture.

STEVE ESTES

Sonoma State University

Joan Turner Beifuss, At the River I Stand (1985); Steve Estes, I AM A MAN! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (2005); Michael Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: Martin Luther King, Black Workers, and the Memphis Sanitation Strike (2007).

 

Jordan, Barbara

(1936–1996) LAWYER AND POLITICIAN.

Barbara Charline Jordan first came to national prominence in November 1972 when she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the 18th Congressional District in Houston, Tex. She and Andrew Young, who was elected that same year from Atlanta, Ga., were the first two blacks from the Deep South to win national office since the turn of the 20th century.

Born 21 February 1936, the youngest of three daughters, to Ben and Arlyne Jordan, in Houston, Barbara Jordan grew up in a devoutly religious environment. Her parents and grandparents were lifelong members of the Good Hope Baptist Church in Houston’s predominantly black Fifth Ward. As a child, she was a bright student with a natural flair for speaking. Her high school teachers encouraged her to develop her talent by participating in various oratorical contests. Although the Houston school system was segregated, the precocious youngster took many honors in citywide matches. She graduated magna cum laude from Texas Southern University and earned her law degree at Boston University in 1959.

Returning to Houston, the fledgling barrister worked three years before being able to open her law office, but politics was already drawing her, and she became active in the local Democratic Party. In 1966, following redistricting, Barbara Jordan was elected to the Texas Senate, the first woman to win a seat in the upper chamber of that legislature. During her six years in the Senate, she earned the admiration of her white male colleagues for her many accomplishments, which included setting up the Texas Fair Employment Practices Commission, improving the Workmen’s Compensation Act, and sponsoring the state’s first minimum wage law. In 1972 Barbara Jordan made history when the Senate unanimously elected her president pro tempore. On 10 June 1972, in the traditional “Governor for a Day” ceremonies, she became the first black woman governor in U.S. history.

Barbara Jordan, U.S. representative from Texas and educator, 1980s (News and Information Service, University of Texas at Austin)

In 1971 her supporters in the state Senate carved out a new congressional district to include a majority mixture of blacks and Hispanics. In November 1972 that electorate gave her a sweeping victory as their representative to Congress from the 18th District. She was assigned to the important House Judiciary Committee. In the wake of the scandals growing out of the Watergate break-in on 17 June 1972, the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaigning, under the chairmanship of Sam Ervin of North Carolina, began holding hearings in May of 1973. One year later, on 9 May 1974, the House Judiciary Committee under Peter Rodino opened impeachment hearings against President Richard Nixon.

During the House hearings, Barbara Jordan became a household name throughout America. As Time magazine said, “She voiced one of the most cogent and impassioned defenses of the Constitutional principles that emerged from the Nixon impeachment hearings.” Opinion polls soon listed her as among the 10 most influential members of Congress, and Democratic Party leaders chose her, along with Senator John Glenn, to give a keynote address to its 1976 national convention.

Always realistic, Barbara Jordan firmly resisted all efforts to draft her as a candidate for the vice presidential nomination that year. She believed the country was not ready for such a development, although it was slowly inching toward the goal of equality in race relations. For personal reasons, Jordan retired from politics in 1978, accepting a position as the Lyndon B. Johnson Centennial Chair in National Policy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Barbara Jordan has left a legacy of great accomplishments in public service, both legislatively and personally. President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Honor in 1994. She died in 1996. Texas Monthly magazine in 1999 named her the Role Model of the Century for the state she served.

ETHEL L. PAYNE

Washington, D.C.

Ira B. Bryant, Barbara Charline Jordan: From the Ghetto to the Capitol (1977); Ebony (February 1975); Houston Post, 21 July 1976; Sandra Parker, ed., Barbara C. Jordan: Selected Speeches (1999); Mary Beth Rogers, Barbara Jordan: American Hero (1998).

 

Loving v. Virginia

In the 1950s Richard Perry Loving was a white man in the Jim Crow South, and thus it was not among his choices to marry Mildred Dolores Jeter, a woman classified under Virginia law as non-white. On the surface, the law was evenhanded in its treatment of interracial couples, imposing the same rules and penalties on a black man and a white woman wishing to marry. Across time and space, in law and in culture, such dominant attitudes and behavior embodied a fundamental premise underlying the regulation of social life: racial equality was not to be demonstrated in so graphic a way as by an interracial couple’s formal marriage. Nor were the benefits of marriage available. In a variety of states across the nation, not just in Virginia, white men had long faced impediments in passing along property to their mixed-race children, and white women had long been denied inheritance under a marriage to a non-white man.

When the couple wanting to be Mr. and Mrs. Loving drove from their native Caroline County, Va., north to Washington, D.C., in June 1958 to get married, they violated a Virginia statute that made it a felony to go out of state to marry, if they then returned to Virginia, in evasion of the law against their marrying in Virginia. Back home in Virginia, asleep in bed late one night the next month, the couple awoke to find three law officers in their room. Arrested for the felony of their marriage and subsequently convicted, they accepted an offer of exile rather than prison. Eventually they contested the constitutionality of the law, their convictions, and their exile. In March 1966 the Virginia Supreme Court upheld the law—and the Lovings’ convictions—against this challenge. On 12 June 1967, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Virginia law could not meet the Fourteenth Amendment’s demands of due process and equal protection of the law. The Lovings could live as husband and wife, together with their three young children, back home in Virginia. The same ruling struck down similar laws across the South.

Laws of this sort dated back as far as the 17th century—Virginia first enacted such a law in 1691. The statute under which the Lovings were charged dated in its essentials from 1878, though some important modifications had taken place in 1924 and 1932. At the time that the Lovings had their marriage ceremony in the nation’s capital in 1958, 24 of the nation’s 48 states (down from 30 as late as 1948) had laws against interracial marriage, though these laws ranged widely in their definitions of interracial marriage and in the penalties prescribed. By the time of the Lovings’ court victory nine years later, only 16 states retained such laws, all of them in the South. (From the 1890s into the 1960s, the South was solid in its maintenance of laws against interracial marriage, but many states outside the South had such laws as well, so they were hardly a uniquely southern phenomenon.)

In the 1970s, same-sex couples went to court (in Kentucky as well as in some northern states) in efforts to have the reasoning and law of Loving v. Virginia applied to them, but nowhere did they prevail. The Supreme Court had emphasized racial identity as a uniquely privileged category, on the basis of which states could no longer discriminate. The 1967 decision left intact all other powers of the states to regulate marriage. The federal courts’ new interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment trumped state legislatures’ efforts to control marriage, but with regard only to race and not gender.

PETER WALLENSTEIN

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Phyl Newbeck, Virginia Hasn’t Always Been for Lovers: Interracial Bans and the Case of Richard and Mildred Loving (2004); Peter Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law—An American History (2002).

 

Lumpkin, Katherine Du Pre

(1897–1988) WRITER AND ACTIVIST.

Born on 22 December 1887 in Macon, Ga., to Annette and William Lumpkin, a Confederate Civil War veteran and lawyer, Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin grew up in a household that adamantly embraced the ideology of the Lost Cause. Her memoir, The Making of a Southerner (1946), portrays a southern tradition that she herself was very much a part of, and as such, it provides unique insights into the perspectives of white, southern, elite families, detailing the system of slavery, the hardships of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the rationale behind Jim Crow from their point of view. After laying out this mentality and how it affected her childhood, Lumpkin then describes how she, as an individual, came to question and then to ultimately reject the mythology of the Lost Cause, which had served to buttress southern hierarchies of gender, race, and class.

In Richland County, S.C., where she and her family moved to farm when she was 11 years old, Lumpkin came into close contact with economically exploited working-class whites. Her contact in South Carolina with white poverty ignited what would later become her critical stance toward the ideology she was taught as a child. Additionally, her education played a large role in her thoughtful analysis of oppression in the South. From 1912 to 1915, Lumpkin attended Brenau College, in Gainesville, Ga., where she earned a bachelor’s degree, before attending Columbia University to study sociology. After earning a master’s degree from Columbia, Lumpkin moved to the University of Wisconsin and earned a doctorate in economics in 1928. Although she received her postgraduate education outside of the region, Lump-kin periodically returned to the South, and for a time she worked as the national student secretary for the southern region of the YWCA, an interracial organization that further challenged many of the biases and taboos Lumpkin learned as a child.

After earning her doctorate, Lump-kin lived most of her adult life in the northeastern United States, and she taught economics and social science at several women’s colleges, including Mount Holyoke and Smith. Much of her academic research and writing deals with labor issues and social reform, and Lumpkin herself spent periods of time working in mills and factories in order to inform this research. She used her position as a social scientist to argue against white supremacy, the devalued status of women, and economic exploitation in the United States.

Lumpkin’s memoir, The Making of a Southerner, remains an essential work for anyone seeking to understand the ways in which white supremacy was justified and accepted by elite white southerners, as well as the roles white women played in this process. As such, her memoir is often compared to Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, as it not only provides insight into this process but also details the difficulties of rejecting an ideology that was so thoroughly ingrained.

AMY SCHMIDT

University of Arkansas

Darlene Clark Hine, foreword, in Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner (1991); Fred Hobson, But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative (1999); Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks, eds., The History of Southern Women’s Literature (2002).

 

Lynn, Loretta

(b. 1937) ENTERTAINER.

Country music is an essential accompaniment to contemporary images of the South and is the source for regional mythology. Loretta Lynn is a rural southerner who celebrates the traditional values of the South through her original compositions and her authentic folk style. She has created and portrayed the “coal miner’s daughter,” a popular myth of the working-class southern woman that may become as pervasive as the myth of the antebellum southern belle, Scarlett O’Hara.

Born in the small community of Butcher Holler, Ky., on 14 April 1937, Loretta Lynn is the second of eight children born to Clara Butcher and Ted Webb. When she was 13, she married Mooney Lynn, a soldier who had recently returned from World War II. The first of her six children was born when she was 14, and she was a grandmother by 28. Loretta Lynn had been married over 10 years before she began singing for audiences other than her family. She was successful almost immediately after the release of her first record, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” (1960), which was her own composition. Neither the small recording company, Zero, nor the Lynns could finance promotion of “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” so Loretta and Mooney mailed copies of the record, along with a short letter of explanation, to disc jockeys across the nation. When they realized that the record was a hit, the Lynns sold their home in Washington state and drove to Nashville in a 1955 Ford to sign a contract.

Since then, Loretta Lynn has written over 160 songs and released 70 albums. Based upon Billboard’s year-end charts of hit songs, among her most successful singles have been “Success” (1962), “Wine, Women, and Song” (1964), “Blue Kentucky Girl” (1965), “Happy Birthday” (1965), “You Ain’t Woman Enough” (1966), “Dear Uncle Sam” (1966), “If You’re Not Gone Too Long” (1967), “Fist City” (1968), “You’ve Just Stepped In (From Stepping Out on Me)” (1968), “Woman of the World—Leave My World Alone” (1969), “That’s a No, No” (1969), “You Want to Give Me a Lift” (1970), “I Know How” (1970), “I Wanna Be Free” (1971), “You’re Looking at Country” (1971), “One’s on the Way” (1972), “Rated X” (1973), “Hey, Loretta” (1974), “She’s Got You” (1977), and “Out of My Head and into My Bed” (1978). Her most recent Top 20 hit was “Making Love from Memory” in 1985. Loretta Lynn has won a number of awards, including four Grammy Awards, three awards from the Country Music Association for top female artist, 10 awards from the Academy of Country Music, two awards from Record World, three from Billboard, and four from Cash Box. In 1961 she received an award as the Most Promising Female Artist, and by 1972 she had become the first woman to be honored as the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year. In 1980 the album soundtrack of the film Coal Miner’s Daughter, which featured Loretta’s hit songs sung by actress Sissy Spacek, was named Album of the Year by the Country Music Association. She was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1989.

Lynn did not tour or record during much of the 1990s, but she returned to performing after her husband died in 1996. She wrote or cowrote the songs on her latest album, Van Lear Rose. She is the author, with George Vecsey, of Coal Miner’s Daughter (1976) and wrote another memoir, Still Woman Enough (2000), and a cookbook, You’re Cookin’ It Country (2000).

RUTH A. BANES

University of South Florida

Ruth A. Banes, Canadian Review of American Studies (Fall 1985); Nicholas Dawidoff, In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music (1998); Peter Dogget, Are You Ready for the Country? Elvis, Dylan, Parsons, and the Roots of Country Rock (2001); Dorothy A. Horstman, Stars of Country Music, ed. Bill C. Malone and Judith McCulloh (1975); Loretta Lynn with George Vecsey, Coal Miner’s Daughter (1976); Vertical file, “Loretta Lynn,” Country Music Foundation Library and Media Center, Nashville.

 

McCord, Louisa S.

(1810–1879) WRITER.

Paradox pervades attempts to understand and weigh properly Louisa S. McCord. All wish to claim her; none knows how. She tempts irony at every turn. Like Dr. Sloper in Henry James’s Washington Square, she addresses to us what the doctor addressed to his daughter Catherine—utterances shrewd, wise, valuable, but “with portions left over, light remnants and snippets of irony, which she never knew what to do with.” Literary historians, especially historians of women’s literature, should be glad to have her, but the poems filling her single book of verse, My Dreams (1848), are slyly, cunningly enigmatic, full of striving intellect, but from what and for what always kept hidden. She wrote a tragedy, Caius Gracchus (1851), irreproachably classical and thus, surely, safely southern, but women did not write plays in the Roman republic (the few others we have are snug in the domestic calamities of imperial Rome). She seems to be a conservative writer—favoring woman’s traditional role and lauding slavery—but what conservative writer would exalt a hero of Roman radicalism, who, like his equally radical brother Tiberius, was murdered by ferocious and frightened aristocrats? And what kind of conservative woman was this who subscribed to the Journal des économistes from Paris, who translated a work of French laissez-faire economics, and who wrote her own essays on political economy in the Southern Quarterly Review?

McCord defended slavery and the life that could not live without it, seeing slavery as good for the slave, whom its laws and conventions protected from abuse by a more powerful race, but not good for the slaveholder. Although her own plantation—as a northern visitor reported—was “considered rather a model place even in South Carolina where there are so many fine ones,” McCord confessed to another admiring visitor, from Rhode Island (where she and her family frequently summered), that “she would prefer to have $25,000 in good bank stock rather than $100,000 in negroes and plantations.”

McCord saw woman’s lot as an exploited one in her slave society. “The positions of women and children are in truth as essentially states of bondage as any other,” necessitated by the superior strength and, at their will, the brutality of men. “Many a woman of dominant intellect is obliged to submit to the rule of an animal in pantaloons, every way her inferior,” although her marriage might be a coequal one. Of a planter neighbor, however, Louisa McCord wrote: “He died horribly, (raving mad), I am told. Poor Mrs. Stark was up at her sister’s here for a week or two after his death, looking wretchedly. . . . I was sorry for her but really thought some kind of illumination or rejoicing would have been more suited to the circumstances.”

McCord had begun life not unlike Scarlett O’Hara, for her father was a self-made man and her mother was the beautiful and sheltered daughter of a wealthy Charleston merchant. Exhausted by the birth of 14 children, her mother died young, and Louisa, left in charge of the household, soon came to know various claims of duty, for her father was successful at everything he did, law in South Carolina, politics in Philadelphia, where Louisa was schooled, and planting back home, and the plantations were many. One, Lang Syne, not far from Columbia, became Louisa’s portion and remained so even after she married, unfashionably late, in 1840. Three children followed, and after them the literary career—poems, drama, essays—was battered, then terminated, by her husband’s death in 1855 and the death, prolonged by senile dementia, of her revered father, Langdon Cheves, in 1857. Her sight had been failing for some time; a trip to Europe brought a partial cure and, as her daughter said later, the only accurate likeness of her mother, a bust carved by Hiram Powers in Florence. She supported South Carolina’s secession and earned glory in the hospitals of Columbia, but she saw no romance in war. The war took her only son and devastated her property. Unable to endure Reconstruction, she spent five years in exile in Canada, before returning to her birthplace, Charleston, to live with her surviving daughter. Her own death, which was hard, she bore as the Romans she admired would have.

RICHARD C. LOUNSBURY

Brigham Young University

Leigh Fought, Southern Womanhood and Slavery: A Biography of Louisa S. McCord, 1810–1879 (2003); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (1988); Jessie Melville Fraser, “Louisa C. McCord” (M.A. thesis, University of South Carolina, 1919); Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Washington and Lee Law Review (Winter 1984); Archie Vernon Huff Jr., Langdon Cheves of South Carolina (1977); Richard C. Lounsbury, ed., Louisa S. Mc-Cord: Selected Writings (1997), Louisa S. McCord: Poems, Drama, Biography, Letters (1996), Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays (1995); Richard C. Lounsbury, in Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston, ed. Michael O’Brien and David Moltke-Hansen (1986); Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (2004); Margaret Farrand Thorp, Female Persuasion: Six Strong-Minded Women (1949).

 

Moon, Charlotte Digges “Lottie”

(1840–1912) SOUTHERN BAPTIST MISSIONARY.

For four decades Lottie Moon was a pioneer missionary in China of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Her life is celebrated by denominational literature, which has described her as the most famous individual in Southern Baptist history and the human symbol of her church’s ongoing commitment to overseas missionary work.

Growing up on a plantation near Charlottesville, Va., Lottie Moon developed marked interests in religion and in the study of foreign languages and cultures. Following the Civil War, she taught school in Kentucky and Georgia, until 1873, when a deepening spirituality led her to enter missionary service. From that point until her death 40 years later Moon worked as an evangelist and teacher at Tengchow (known today as Penglai) and at other Southern Baptist stations in Shandong province, northeast China. In addition to demonstrating compassion for the Chinese and skill in adapting to their culture, she displayed considerable courage and professional resourcefulness. All these qualities were particularly evident in her life during the late 1880s at Pingdu, an isolated city in the Shandong interior. Working alone under difficult circumstances, Moon initiated at Pingdu a successful mission at a time when Baptist efforts in north China were otherwise near collapse.

Charlotte Digges “Lottie” Moon, Southern Baptist missionary, 1840–1912 (© International Mission Board)

Moon’s unique reputation among Southern Baptists, however, is a product of the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for Foreign Missions. Inspired by an 1888 effort to raise money in the United States to help her work at Pingdu, the Christmas Offering became a church-wide institution and in 1918 was named specifically for her. An extensive promotional literature developed, which over the years has idealized Moon in books, poems, pamphlets, motion pictures and filmstrips, portraits, photo albums, tape cassettes, dramatic scripts and impersonations, greeting cards, and website features and even a Lottie Moon cookbook. The Christmas Offering, with annual collections now well over $100 million, has long provided over 40 percent of the annual funding of the SBC’s Foreign Mission Board (renamed the International Mission Board in 1995) and is indispensable to American Protestantism’s largest foreign missionary program.

Any explanation of Lottie Moon’s status among Southern Baptists is inevitably subjective. Her story, as told by the SBC, however, contains at least two themes that are interesting in terms of southern culture. One is a traditional theme that W. J. Cash called southern gyneolatry, or the “pitiful Mother of God” image, centering on white women of intelligence, courage, and high capacity for self-sacrifice. The other theme, also strongly present, is of Lottie Moon as an undeclared feminist—single, self-reliant, wiser, and stronger than male associates, pushing in “her own way” (the title of one of her SBC biographies) to advance Christianity and the status of women, both in China and within the Southern Baptist Convention. Rather than being mutually exclusive, these contrasting themes seem instead to have extended Lottie Moon’s range and enduring influence.

Within the SBC, Lottie Moon has always been linked particularly to the Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), the denomination’s most important organization for women and for broad support of mission work. New scholarship by Regina D. Sullivan details how in the 19th century Lottie Moon’s story tied into the birth of the WMU as a woman’s movement within the male-dominated SBC and how, a century later in the 1990s, control of Moon’s image became part of a new struggle between SBC moderates, represented by the WMU, and a conservative denominational leadership represented by the International Mission Board. Reshaped to fit changing needs and times, the Lottie Moon story is shown by Sullivan to be “endlessly malleable” and a lieu de memoire, or memory site, where Southern Baptists continue to define their identity and future.

IRWIN T. HYATT JR.

Emory University

Catherine B. Allen, The New Lottie Moon Story (1997); Irwin T. Hyatt Jr., Our Ordered Lives Confess: Three Nineteenth-Century American Missionaries in East Shantung (1976); Una Roberts Lawrence, Lottie Moon (1927); Regina D. Sullivan, “Woman with a Mission: Remembering Lottie Moon and the Woman’s Missionary Union” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 2002).

 

Moynihan Report

Published in 1965 by a group in the U.S. Department of Labor, the Moynihan Report, officially entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” raised controversial questions about the relationships among gender, family life, and African American life that lasted for more than a generation. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a committed anti-poverty activist in the Lyndon Johnson administration, viewed the report as a way to dramatize serious problems that plagued African Americans, even after the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Responses to the report ultimately had more significance than the report itself. Critics condemned it for blaming poverty and other social problems that so many African Americans faced on the weaknesses among African Americans themselves.

The report was a short document with succinct writing, containing statistics comparing African Americans to other groups in the United States and occasional references to works by historians Stanley Elkins and Frank Tannenbaum and sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and Nathan Glazer. According to the report, African Americans were struggling economically and becoming more involved in crime because of a combination of centuries of injustice and exploitation and—the real emphasis of the report—the increasing instability of family life in urban ghettoes. The report emphasized high divorce rates, the large numbers of children born to unmarried couples, and the resulting high numbers of households headed by women as the immediate cause of the continuing and growing struggles that African Americans faced in cities.

The report mentioned the South primarily in its depiction of slavery as an institution that damaged people’s psyches, worked against ambition and innovation, divided families, and gave men no role in leading those families. Thus, a weakened institution had never recovered in the decades after slavery and, according to the report, had become even weaker amid multiple migrations, poverty, and criminal behavior in northern cities. Moynihan and other figures in the Labor Department called for national action to help strengthen African American family life by some kind of unspecified guarantee of a family income.

Appearing at a time when much of the civil rights movement was turning away from optimistic national action and toward community empowerment and varieties of Black Power, the report came off as condescending toward African Americans. Critics offered two main responses to the report. Many argued it confused the causes of social problems with their consequences and insisted that the real causes of poverty were present and past forms of discrimination—not a flawed family structure. Some critics were incensed that a government report that was ostensibly on the side of African American improvement could blame, or seem to blame, those problems on African Americans themselves. Sociologists such as Joyce Ladner and Carol Stack and historians, most obviously Herbert Gutman, took up the challenge to write a counternarrative, producing studies arguing that the history of African American family life, far from a story of crises and instability, showed the resiliency to adapt to various challenges. A second criticism addressed the assumption that men needed to be in charge of families, and that all families, to be successful, should aspire to middle-class norms of small numbers of children living with two permanent parents in individual homes. In 1971, for example, Albert Murray showed his scorn for the patriarchal and condescending elements of the report by twice referring to Big Daddy Pat Moynihan in his book South to a Very Old Place.

Support for the report came from a surprising and unwanted source. The Citizens’ Councils claimed that the Moynihan Report documented a moral weakness and social breakdown among African Americans and dramatized why white children should not be forced to attend school with black children. Although criticizing the policy conclusions of the report, the Citizens’ Councils bought numerous copies to distribute to their members.

Debates of course continue over welfare policy, a living wage, and the definition of family life, but the significance of the Moynihan Report continues almost exclusively in the irony of a leftist effort that failed because it blamed problems on the people it intended to be helping.

TED OWNBY

University of Mississippi

Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (1976); Robert A. Katzmann, ed., Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The Intellectual in Public Life (1998); Joyce A. Ladner, The Death of White Sociology (1973); Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, eds., The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (1967); Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (1997); Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (1974) .

 

National Association of Colored Women

The National Association of Colored Women (NACW) was founded in 1895 to provide a national structure for African American women’s organizations. Established as a federation of local and state women’s clubs, NACW developed an agenda for improving conditions within African American communities and provided a forum for black women to promote national programs on parenting, antilynching, and education.

The NACW grew out of the organizational experiences of African American women in the 19th century. In northern and some southern towns and cities, black women established mutual aid and social welfare societies, as well as literary and cultural clubs, to respond to the needs of their communities. Three centers of organizational strength had emerged by the late 19th century: Washington, D.C., Boston, and New York. Educated and professional women from the middle and upper classes generally led the clubs in their communities, although working-class women headed some church clubs or mutual aid societies. Prominent clubwomen included Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Hallie Q. Brown, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Josephine Bruce, and Anna Julia Cooper in Washington, D.C.; Victoria Earle Matthews, Maritcha Lyons, Sarah Smith Garnet, and Susan Smith McKinney in New York; and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, her daughter Florida Ridley, and Maria Baldwin in Boston.

In 1892, three events led clubwomen to create a national federation that could serve as the voice of black women—the exclusion of African American women’s groups from the Board of Lady Managers of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago; the appearance of Woman’s Era, the first monthly magazine by and for black women; and the publication in that magazine of an inflammatory letter from James Jacks, the white president of the Missouri Press Association, to British antilynching activist Florence Belgarnie.

In 1893 clubwomen in Washington, D.C., led by Hallie Q. Brown and Josephine Bruce, organized the Colored Women’s League (CWL). Two years later, an alliance of clubwomen from Boston, Washington, D.C., and Tuskegee, Ala., convened the First National Conference of Colored Women, which met in Boston, with 104 delegates from 54 clubs in 14 states and the District of Columbia attending the conference. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin served as conference president, with vice presidents Helen Cook of Washington, D.C., and Margaret Murray Washington of Tuskegee; Elizabeth Carter of New Bedford, Mass., served as secretary. The conference led to the organization of the National Federation of Afro-American Women (NFAAW). Its principal goal was to stand up to assaults on the popular image of black women.

The NFAAW and the CWL both held their 1896 national conventions in Washington, D.C., and a joint committee, chaired by Mary Church Terrell, voted to merge the two organizations into the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Terrell served as the first president, with vice presidents from Boston, Kansas City, New Orleans, and Philadelphia. The second convention, held in Nashville the following year, established the structure of the organization and created the national publication, National Notes. Biennial meetings over the next four decades charted the focus for the organization and created or consolidated its departments. NACW’s work was similar to that of the national organization of white clubwomen, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC). But NACW’s activities consistently centered on self-help, the protection of women, and the mission of elite, educated black women to foster “racial uplift.” White clubwomen assumed no special mission to protect or improve conditions for their race as a whole. However, despite the unifying nature of NACW’s goals, conflicts emerged within the organization over issues of the regional domination of the organization’s leadership, personality, and color consciousness.

In 1924, under the presidency of Mary McLeod Bethune, NACW established a national headquarters at Twelfth and O Streets in Washington, D.C. The organization also assumed responsibility for saving and restoring the Frederick Douglass home and created a junior division to attract younger members. Although the biennial conferences in the 1930s attempted to address the needs of black women during the Great Depression, the organization continued to focus on its traditional mission to “standardize the home; create a good environment for the child; train girls to be industrious, artistic and gracious; improve working conditions for women and girls; and increase community service.” But Bethune, now head of the Negro division of the National Youth Administration, was convinced that black women’s organizations needed a united coalition that could represent their issues on the political front. NACW’s tenure as the premier national organization of African American women’s clubs ended in 1935 with Bethune’s creation of the National Council of Negro Women.

BEVERLY GREENE BOND

University of Memphis

Alfreda Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1970); Tullia Hamilton, “The National Association of Colored Women, 1896–1920” (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1978); Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds., The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (1978); Dorothy Salem, “National Association of Colored Women,” in Black Women in America, vol. 2, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (1993), To Better Our World: Black Women in Organized Reform, 1890–1920 (1990); Mary Church Terrell, Colored Woman in a White World (1940); Charles H. Wesley, The History of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs: A Legacy of Service (1984); Debra Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (1999).

 

Newcomb, Josephine

(1816–1901) PHILANTHROPIST.

Josephine Louise Newcomb was the founder of H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, the first degree-granting college for women established within a previously all-male major university. Born in Baltimore, Md., on 31 October 1816, she was the daughter of Alexander Le Monnier, a prominent Baltimore businessman. Orphaned in 1831, Josephine Louise moved to New Orleans to live with her only sister. While summering in Louisville, Ky., she met and married Warren Newcomb, a successful businessman who lived in New Orleans most of the summer because his wholesale business was located there.

In 1866 Warren Newcomb died, leaving to his wife and daughter, Harriott Sophie, born to the couple in 1855, an estate valued at between $500,000 and $850,000. Under her own direction Josephine Newcomb increased her inheritance to over $4 million by her death in 1901. In 1870, at age 15, Harriott Sophie died of diphtheria. Devastated by the loss of her child, Newcomb began to search for a suitable memorial to her daughter. An Episcopalian, she donated generously to the support of her church. A native southerner, she gave to numerous causes to assist in the recovery of the war-torn South. She contributed to the library of Washington and Lee University. She founded a school for sewing girls and supported a Confederate orphans’ home, both in Charleston, as well as a school for deaf children in New York. In 1886, at the behest of Ida Richardson, a wealthy New Orleans woman, and Colonel William Preston Johnson, president of the recently established Tulane University of Louisiana, Newcomb agreed to found a college for women as a memorial to her daughter.

Although coeducational colleges and independent women’s colleges existed, the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College was a unique experiment, the design of which influenced Barnard at Columbia, Radcliffe at Harvard, and the Women’s College of Western Reserve. Part of, and yet separate from, Tulane University, the college had a separate administration and faculty and was empowered to formulate its own academic policy. The college’s stated aim—to offer a liberal arts education for women equal to that available for men—represented a departure in the history of female education in the South. In an age when higher education for women was viewed with indifference, Josephine Louise Newcomb initiated significant change in the patterns of women’s education.

Tulane University dissolved New-comb as a separate entity in 2006, in the reorganization that took place in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The heirs of Josephine Newcomb have mounted legal challenges to this plan, hoping to keep Newcomb a degree-granting college within the university.

SYLVIA R. FREY

Tulane University

Brandt V. B. Dixon, A Brief History of H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, 1887–1919 (1928); John P. Dyer, Tulane: The Biography of a University, 1834–1965 (1966).

 

Pringle, Elizabeth Allston

(1845–1921) PLANTATION MISTRESS.

Elizabeth Allston Pringle exemplified the resourcefulness of elite southern women during and after the Civil War. She was born near Pawley’s Island, S.C., to Robert Allston, a successful rice planter and future governor of the state, and Adele Petigru Allston. In her memoir, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, Pringle devoted no fewer than 100 pages to her family background, demonstrating the concern with lineage and heritage characteristic of wealthy 19th-century southerners.

Initially taught at home by a governess, Pringle was sent at age nine to join her sister at a small, select Charleston boarding school, which “finished off” young ladies by teaching them the fine arts and French, as well as basic subjects. The Allstons displayed considerable ambivalence about the education of their daughters, insisting that the girls study at home during the summer yet acknowledging that by age 16 “balls, receptions, and dinners” made it “impossible” for a young girl to “keep her mind on her studies.” Elizabeth Pringle was too young to attend social events before the Civil War, but she recalled her sister’s gowns and beaus and parties with keen interest.

The war, of course, was a central experience in Pringle’s life. Through her youthful eyes, the excitement of seeing the men march off with banners waving was a strong early impression. But she also recalled her father’s death, the steady reduction in food and clothing, the looting of the family residence, and tense confrontations with the now-free blacks on the family’s various plantations. Clearly, Elizabeth Allston derived much of her later strength and independence from watching her mother cope with these trying circumstances and from facing up to them herself.

In the fall of 1865 Elizabeth Allston’s mother decided to support herself by opening a school in Charleston. Initially afraid to teach, her daughter was ashamed of her weakness. “Am I really just a butterfly?” she asked herself. “Is my love of pleasure the strongest thing about me? What an awful thought.” After three months of teaching, she was ecstatic about her work and confident in her abilities.

In 1868 she accompanied her family back to Chicora Wood, where she married John Julius Pringle two years later. Her memoir is characteristically discreet on the subject of their relationship, but the marriage appears to have been a happy one, until Pringle’s untimely death in 1876. In a bold move, Elizabeth Pringle acquired her husband’s plantation and elected to run it herself, growing rice and fruit and raising livestock. When her mother died in 1896, she took over Chicora Wood as well. Thus, she became a substantial rice planter, an unusual venture for a woman to undertake alone.

Elizabeth Allston Pringle pursued this occupation with vigor. She became deeply involved in agricultural techniques and in the often frustrating management of her workers. She enjoyed years of prosperity, but she succumbed to failure early in the 20th century, when severe weather and competition from other regions ruined many Low-country rice planters. But she voiced no regrets. “I have so loved the freedom and simplicity of the life, in spite of its trials and isolation,” she asserted, noting too “the exhilaration of making a good income myself.” In the last two decades before her death, in 1921, she turned to writing, and her gracefully penned recollections add much to the understanding of southern womanhood and southern life during the important transitional period in which she lived.

LAURA L. BECKER

University of Miami

Patience Pennington, A Woman Rice Planter (1961); Elizabeth A. Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood (1922).

 

Prostitution (New Orleans)

In the antebellum period, numerous travelers commented on New Orleans’s reputation as the South’s Babylon. Many of them, like James Davidson and Rachel Jackson, referred to the city’s well-known culture of sensual excess in biblical terms. The first lines Davidson wrote after arriving in the city in 1836 were “I am now in this Great Southern Babylon—the mighty receptacle of wealth, depravity and misery.” Fifteen years earlier, Jackson had expressed strikingly similar sentiments while on a visit to the city with her husband, Andrew. She wrote, “Great Babylon is come up before me. . . . Oh the wickedness, the idolatry of the place! Unspeakable the riches and splendor.” Many other writers captured the contradictory nature of the city’s appalling appeal as well, pointing out the city’s sins and scandals while simultaneously being charmed by its aura of disorder and its culture of sexual permissiveness and sensual excess.

For most antebellum visitors, New Orleans’s reputation as the South’s Babylon sprang from its reputation as a center of tolerated prostitution and its position as the region’s largest slave market. And, as many antislavery writers were anxious to point out, those two functions sometimes overlapped in the city’s notorious fancy girl auctions, which featured the sale of light-skinned female slaves for implicitly sexual purposes. The city’s reputation as a bastion of commercial sexuality and sex across the color line survived the Civil War and emancipation and, in the years that followed, generated enormous economic dividends and considerable controversy.

The city’s reputation, combined with its location in an otherwise overwhelmingly rural and Protestant region, set it apart from the rest of the South, as did numerous attempts by local authorities to control prostitution while still profiting from it. Between 1857 and 1897 the city acted at least eight times to establish vice district boundaries. Ironically, the last and smallest of these districts, which came to be known as Storyville in mock-homage to the city councilman who drafted the ordinance, became its most notorious and well known. Storyville, which existed from 1897 to 1917, became an economic powerhouse that generated graft, enhanced the city’s erotic reputation, and helped it to become one of the South’s most popular tourist destinations.

Even as debates about the necessity of racial segregation raged, whites from all over the region and the rest of the nation descended on New Orleans in droves. Storyville provided a space where almost anyone might indulge in activities that were taboo outside the vice district’s boundaries, including crossing the color line sexually and socially. The district was one of the few places in the turn-of-the-century South where people from all social classes, ethnicities, and races mingled so intimately, casually, and freely in the pursuit of sex and leisure activities. In fact, the existence of a ribald, racially mixed place like Storyville allowed white visitors to take a vacation from the so-called requirements of Jim Crow, yet maintain the pretension that white supremacy and racial segregation were absolute necessities in their own communities. In many ways, Storyville was a geographical expression of the 19th-century belief that male sexuality required an outlet in order to protect respectable white women. Like the city’s reputation as the South’s Babylon, Storyville has remained an icon of the city’s sybaritic appeal and a sexually alluring beacon to tourists from the Bible Belt and beyond.

ALECIA P. LONG

Louisiana State Museum

Alecia P. Long, The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865–1920 (2003).

 

Richards, Ann

(1933–2006) TEXAS POLITICIAN.

Ann Richards, the energetic and quickwitted feminist Texas Democrat, first burst onto the national political stage when she delivered the keynote address during the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. Speaking of the wealthy incumbent U.S. vice president, George H. W. Bush, also a Texan, Richards quipped, “Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” The line would become one of her most memorable, and the popularity she gained from it perhaps helped propel her to the highest office in the state of Texas.

Born Dorothy Ann Willis in Lake-view, Tex., to a father who, Richards always claimed, came from Bugtussle and a mother who, as she also claimed, came from Hogjaw, Richards moved with her family to Waco so she could attend Waco High School. While at Waco High School, Richards attended Girls State, a summer citizenship and leadership conference, in Austin. She also attended Girls Nation in Washington, D.C., where she toured the White House and met President Harry Truman.

After high school, Richards dropped the name Dorothy and married her high school sweetheart, Dave Richards. The couple enrolled at Baylor University in Waco the following fall, and Richards earned her B.A. degree in 1954. The couple moved to Austin following graduation, where Richards taught government at a junior high school and her husband attended law school at the University of Texas. After her husband earned his law degree, the couple moved again to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and then to Dallas, where she settled in as a homemaker and became politically active as a campaigner for gubernatorial candidates Henry B. Gonzalez and Ralph Yarborough.

In the early 1970s, Richards went on to do campaign work for Texas candidates, including Sarah Weddington, a lawyer running for a seat in the Texas House who had successfully argued Roe v. Wade before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1976 Richards decided to stage her own campaign for public office when she ran for Travis County commissioner and won. She was reelected to the position in 1980, won an election for state treasurer in 1982, and was reelected in 1986. But during this period of political ascension, Richards’s personal life was plummeting into ruin. Her marriage had ended in divorce, and her drinking grew out of control. She entered and completed rehabilitation, and in 1990 Richards succeeded in becoming the second-ever woman governor of Texas (the first being Miriam “Ma” Ferguson in the 1920s and 1930s). During the first few years of her governorship, “a New Texas,” Richards claimed, had been born.

Ann Richards, the boisterous Texas governor, obtained a license to ride a motorcycle at the age of 60. (Courtesy Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Austin)

A slew of achievements characterized Richards’s term as an effective, progressive, and culturally liberal Texas governor, including increasing the number of women and minorities appointed to state government posts, revitalizing the Texas economy, instituting the state lottery, introducing insurance and environmental reform, establishing a substance-abuse program for inmates, and lowering the number of violent inmates released.

In what was widely considered an uninspired reelection campaign, Richards lost the governorship to the son of the vice president whom she had jokingly put down in 1988, George W. Bush. Although George W. Bush was inexperienced as a politician, despite his paternal background, he ran a cunning and successful campaign that used a number of Richards’s liberal, still-popular, achievements against her. Republicans who had crossed the party line to elect her as governor returned to their GOP roots, citing fiscal irresponsibility and a lax attitude toward criminal punishment as among their reasons for abandoning her.

After leaving office, Ann Richards worked as a public speaker and as a lobbyist for a high-profile Washington, D.C., law firm. In 2006 she died of esophageal cancer and was laid to rest in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.

JAMES G. THOMAS JR.

University of Mississippi

Ann Richards and Peter Knobler, Straight from the Heart: My Life in Politics and Other Places (1989); Mike Shropshire and Frank Schaeffer, The Thorny Rose of Texas: An Intimate Portrait of Governor Ann Richards (1994); Sue Tolleson-Rinehart and Jeanie R. Stanley, Claytie and the Lady: Ann Richards, Gender, and Politics in Texas (1994).

 

Scottsboro Boys

In the Depression-era South, an Alabama rape case tried in Scottsboro came to symbolize to much of the world the racism and injustice afforded blacks in southern society. The case galvanized protest among not just Americans but the international community as well. On 31 March 1931 several white men riding the Southern Railroad from Chattanooga to Memphis told authorities in Jackson County, Ala., that blacks had thrown them off the train. The sheriff telegraphed ahead to the next stop, Paint Rock, and when the train stopped the authorities arrested the nine youths. Two white women dressed in men’s clothing also got off the train and told the sheriff that they had been raped by the group. The teenagers were taken to the county seat of Scottsboro and charged and jailed. Southern society considered the rape of a white woman by black men to be a most heinous atrocity and often used the charge as justification for lynching. That night the local white community rose up in outrage, but the sheriff called the governor for guardsmen to protect the youths from the mob.

The nine youths represented the lowest rungs and least powerful of southern society: black, transient, illiterate, and impoverished. Their trial was held within three weeks, and the defendants received inadequate legal council. They met only briefly with the two attorneys minutes before the trial. Despite the prosecution’s lack of witnesses and the testimony of two doctors that there was no physical proof of rape, the all-white jury swiftly convicted all nine. White supremacy dictated that the honor of white women, even of questionable moral standing, trumped a black man’s life. Outside of the South, the Scottsboro case caused immediate protest, due to the number of participants, their youth, the swiftness of the trial, the lack of evidence, the obvious insufficient defense, and their death sentences. Additionally, both the NAACP and the legal branch of the Communist Party—the International Labor Defense (ILD)—wanted to defend the youths in the appeal. The Communists convinced the boys’ parents that they would mount a vigorous defense, and the ILD hired a talented northern Jewish lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz. Although indisputably a brilliant attorney, Leibowitz came to represent the southerners’ animosity toward the North.

Throughout the next several years, a series of trials at both the state and federal levels wound through the legal system. In 1932 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Powell v. Alabama, overturned the convictions because the defendants had received inadequate counsel. Undeterred, Alabama retried and convicted one of the defendants. In Norris v. Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned this conviction because Alabama systematically excluded African American jurors. Both the rulings chipped away at legal injustice long practiced by southern courts.

Eventually, one of the accusers recanted her story and went on a speaking tour with a defendant’s mother. By 1937 the public had tired of the series of state and federal trials, and the prosecution settled with the defense to free four of the defendants. They traveled north and were feted as heroes. The other five received long prison terms, and four were quietly released through the 1940s. In 1950 the last prisoner escaped and traveled to Michigan, where the governor refused to extradite him to Alabama. The defendants grew from youth to manhood in the brutal Alabama penal system and were denied even the most basic education. Most worked low-paying menial jobs, drifted, and were in and out of jail. In 1976 Clarence Norris traveled to Alabama, where Governor George Wallace issued him a full pardon.

The Scottsboro case had tragic consequences for the nine innocent young men. Significantly, the case represented the worst aspects of southern racism and demonstrated the region’s extreme regional animosities. Throughout the years, the case inspired poems, songs, plays, short stories, and novels.

MINOA D. UFFELMAN

Austin Peay State University

Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (1979); James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (1994); Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (2004); Hugh T. Murray Jr., Phylon (1st Qtr., 1977).

 

Smith, Lillian

(1897–1966) WRITER AND SOCIAL CRITIC.

Internationally acclaimed as author of the controversial novel Strange Fruit (1944) and the autobiographical critique of southern culture Killers of the Dream (1949, rev. 1961), Lillian Eugenia Smith was the most outspoken white southern writer in areas of economic, racial, and sexual discrimination during the 1930s and 1940s. When other southern liberals—Ralph McGill, Hodding Carter, Virginius Dabney, and Jonathan Daniels—were charting a cautious course on racial change, Smith boldly and persistently called for an end to racial segregation. Furthermore, her work for social justice continued throughout her life. In 1955 she wrote Now Is the Time, urging support for the Supreme Court’s decision on school desegregation. Her last published book, Our Faces, Our Words (1964), reflects her personal knowledge and experience with the young black and white civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s.

Lillian Smith was born on 12 December 1897, the seventh of nine children of Anne Hester Simpson and Calvin Warren Smith, and grew up in Jasper, Fla., where her father was a prominent business and civic leader. Some of the richness of that childhood is portrayed in Memory of a Large Christmas (1962). Her life as daughter of upper-class whites in the small-town Deep South ended rather abruptly when her father lost his turpentine mills in 1915 and moved the family to their summer home near Clayton, Ga. Financially on her own, Smith attended the nearby Piedmont College for one year, was principal of a two-room mountain school, and helped her parents manage a hotel before she was able to pursue her interest in music. During the school terms of 1916–17 and 1919–22, she studied piano at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, spending summers working in the family’s summer lodge and teaching music at Laurel Falls Camp for Girls, opened by her father in 1920.

In the fall of 1922 Smith accepted a three-year position as director of music at Virginia School in Huchow, China. But her ambitions for a career in music ended when her parents’ ill health necessitated her return to direct Laurel Falls Camp. Under her direction, from 1925 through 1948, the camp became an outstanding innovative educational institution, known for its instruction in the arts, music, theater, and modern psychology. It was also a laboratory for many of the ideas informing Smith’s analysis of southern culture, especially her understanding of the effects of child-rearing practices on adult racial and sexual relationships.

Through the camp, Smith also met Paula Snelling and began the lifelong relationship that encouraged and sustained her writing career. From 1936 to 1946, Smith and Snelling coedited a magazine, first called Pseudopodia, then North Georgia Review, and finally South Today, which quickly achieved acclaim as a forum for liberal opinion in the region.

A record-breaking best seller, Strange Fruit was translated into 15 languages, banned for obscenity in Boston, and produced as a Broadway play. But Killers of the Dream, an even more insightful exploration of the interrelationship of race, class, and gender in southern society, brought strong criticism from more moderate southerners. Though widely reviewed, none of her subsequent works achieved the popularity or financial success of her first novel.

Her more philosophical works, The Journey (1954) and One Hour (1959), demonstrate the extent to which Smith’s concerns extended beyond race relations to encompass all aspects of human relationships in the modern world.

In The Journey she wrote, “I went in search of an image of the human being I could be proud of.” One Hour, Smith’s response to the McCarthy era, is a complex psychological novel about the inevitable destruction unleashed in a community when the reality and power of the irrational are unacknowledged in human life.

Two collections of her work have been published posthumously: From the Mountain (1972), a selection of pieces from the magazine, edited by Helen White and Redding Sugg; and The Winner Names the Age (1978), a selection of speeches and essays, edited by Michelle Cliff with an introduction by Paula Snelling.

MARGARET ROSE GLADNEY

University of Alabama

Louise Blackwell and Frances Clay, Lillian Smith (1971); Will Brantley, Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir: Smith, Glasgow, Welty, Hellman, Porter, and Hurston (1993); Margaret Rose Gladney, Southern Studies (Fall 1983); Fred Hobson, Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (1983); Darlene O’Dell, Sites of Southern Memory: The Autobiographies of Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray (2001).

 

Terrell, Mary Church

(1863–1954) EDUCATOR AND SOCIAL ACTIVIST.

Mary Eliza Church was born in Memphis, Tenn., on 23 September 1863. She was the oldest child of Robert Reed (“Bob”) Church and Louisa Ayers Church, who were slaves of Charles Church and T. S. Ayers, respectively, at the time of Mary’s birth. Louisa and Robert had “assumed the relationship of man and wife” in 1862, and their relationship was legitimized under Tennessee law in 1866. Mary’s family, which also included her younger brother, Thomas, continued to live in Memphis after the Civil War. Bob Church owned several businesses, and Louisa Church, with the financial backing of her former owner, opened a hairdressing salon. Mary (“Mollie” to her family and friends) enjoyed a life of relative economic security, despite the ever-present specter of racial animosity. Her parents and her maternal grandmother, Lisa, told her about their own and other family members’ experiences as slaves and her father’s injury during the 1866 Memphis Race Riot. Mollie remembered a train conductor’s attempt to force her out of a first-class coach when she was only five years old. Only her father’s drawn pistol prevented the conductor from carrying out his threat.

Mary’s parents separated when she was six years old. After their divorce, Louisa Church sold her salon and moved to New York, where she opened a similar business. She sent Mary to Antioch School, in Yellow Springs, Ohio, rather than enroll her in the segregated New York City schools. Mary continued her early education in Ohio, graduating from Oberlin Academy in 1879 and entering Oberlin College in 1880. Her father’s business interests expanded, and he was soon recognized as one of the wealthiest black men in the South. His connections with other “aristocrats of color” provided young Mary admission into a widening circle of influential black political and economic leaders. She met Frederick Douglass when she attended the 1880 presidential inauguration with Josephine Bruce, wife of Bob Church’s friend (and the newly elected Mississippi senator) Blanche K. Bruce.

Mary Church graduated from Oberlin College in 1884 and briefly returned to Memphis before assuming a teaching position at Wilberforce College. Although her father opposed her decision, Mary felt that her education had prepared her to do useful work for her race. After two years at Wilberforce, she moved to Washington, D.C., to teach at the M Street School, the most prestigious public school for blacks in the city. In 1888 she began a two-year sojourn in Europe, traveling in France, Italy, and Germany. She returned to her teaching position in Washington, D.C., and married fellow educator Robert Heberton Terrell in 1891. Robert Terrell served as principal of the M Street High School and was appointed judge of the Municipal Court in Washington, D.C., in 1902. Although her husband was a supporter of Booker T. Washington’s educational philosophy and owed his judgeship to the black leader, Mary Church Terrell advocated liberal arts education and interracial cooperation.

Mary Church Terrell was a leading advocate for the civil rights of African Americans, particularly African American women, throughout the first half of the 20th century. She fought against lynching (after the 1892 murder in Memphis of her childhood friend Thomas Moss and two other black businessmen), disfranchisement, and segregation. Terrell believed that the key to the advancement of the race was recognition of the respectability of black women. In 1896 she became founder and first president of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), and under her two-year tenure as president this organization of clubwomen adopted an agenda that supported black women’s activities in progressive reform. She helped organize and was a charter member of the NAACP. She campaigned for woman suffrage, while calling attention to the racist agenda of some suffrage leaders.

Terrell supported efforts to pass federal antilynching legislation, campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, endorsed A. Phillip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement, which led to President Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order creating a Fair Employment Practices Committee, attacked court rulings in the Scottsboro Case, and fought for the integration of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the American Association of University Women. In 1950, at the age of 77, Mary Church Terrell began a three-year struggle to integrate restaurants in Washington, D.C. Terrell was a party in the case of District of Columbia v. John Thompson, which successfully forced Washington, D.C., restaurants to enforce 19th-century laws requiring that they serve “any respectable, well-behaved person regardless of race.” Terrell died on 24 July 1954, two months after the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

BEVERLY GREENE BOND

University of Memphis

Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (1993); Beverly W. Jones, Quest for Equality: The Life and Writings of Mary Church Terrell, 1863–1954 (1990); Jacqueline M. Moore, Leading the Race: The Transformation of the Black Elite in the Nation’s Capital, 1880–1920 (1999); Mary Church Terrell, A Colored Woman in a White World (1996).

 

Uncle Tom

In current usage, the term “Uncle Tom” is an epithet used for African Americans who are traitors to their race. However, when the abolitionist and novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe created the character for her 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly, she viewed him as the hero of her story. Stowe’s book, a response to the Fugitive Slave Act, combined the genres of sentimental domestic novel and abolitionist polemic to convince public opinion that slavery was evil. By early 1853 more than a million copies of Uncle Tom had been sold in the United States and England. The book was translated into numerous languages and read throughout the world. The novel’s immense popularity in the North was matched by virulent criticism in the South. Southern women writers penned novels about slavery from the southern perspective, though none approached the cultural impact of Uncle Tom. Other characters from the novel, Little Eva, Eliza, Topsy, August St. Clair, and Simon Legree, immediately became part of American culture. The book’s melodramatic scenes lent themselves well to the stage, and hundreds of performances entertained thousands of audiences. Indeed, it was the most performed play in America until the 1920s. The story was filmed as early as 1903, and there were various remakes and spin-off films that created an Uncle Tom genre.

Criticism began from the moment of publication and ranged from Stowe’s inaccurate portrayal of slavery and her lack of firsthand knowledge of the South to the book’s poor literary merit. Subsequent generations have critiqued the novel, with much of the criticism reflecting the particular concerns of each period. Stowe, a deeply religious woman, was the daughter, wife, and sister of six ministers. She imbued Uncle Tom with Christ-like characteristics and made him virtuous, kind, selfless, loving, and peaceful. After Tom loses his family he becomes devoted to a young white girl named Little Eva. Later in the novel, Uncle Tom refuses to betray two runaway slaves and to renounce his Christian beliefs, knowing that Simon Legree will kill him. To Stowe, Uncle Tom was a Christian martyr for all to emulate.

Later generations did not see Tom’s passive characteristics as noble. In 1949, writer James Baldwin scathingly criticized Uncle Tom in “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” During the civil rights movement, African Americans desired a different type of hero. The noble character in Stowe’s novel was not suited for the times, which called for a more masculine, less compliant hero. Today the term “Uncle Tom” is a pejorative and has come to symbolize black impotence and a weak, obsequious, unmanly man who is too eager to please whites. Literary criticism and historical and cultural analysis of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is vibrant and lively, indicating that the novel still inspires debate.

MINOA D. UFFELMAN

Austin Peay State University

Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins, The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (2007); Thomas F. Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (1985); Eric J. Sunquist, New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1986).

 

United Daughters of the Confederacy

Southern fiction frequently portrays indomitable southern women in the Civil War. Given the late 19th century’s predilection for organizations, it was perhaps inevitable that real-life diehard women who saw themselves as guardians of the Lost Cause would create the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), as they did in Nashville in September 1894. The roots of the UDC may be traced back to the wartime Ladies’ Aid Societies that sprang up spontaneously throughout the South in 1861 to assist Confederate soldiers. Perhaps the earliest organized voluntarism among Victorian southern women, these societies began as sewing groups, many of them in the churches, to make socks, mufflers, gloves, balaclava helmets, uniforms, and blankets for Confederate soldiers. As war took its human toll, some societies changed into Women’s Hospital Associations, which set up hospitals and convalescent homes for Confederate sick and wounded soldiers.

A monument to Gen. John H. Morgan and members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy who commissioned it, c. 1911, Lexington, Ky. (R. L. McClure, photographer, Library of Congress [LC-LC-USZ62-95819], Washington, D.C.)

During the spring of 1866 many of these organizations reorganized as Ladies’ Memorial Associations to ensure proper interments for hastily buried Confederate dead, to honor their graves on 26 April (Confederate Memorial Day), and then to raise funds for monuments and statues commemorating the Lost Cause, in settings ranging from courthouse squares to battlefields.

Many members of the Ladies’ Memorial Associations joined the UDC when it was organized, with its founders’ declared goal of obtaining an accurate history of the Confederacy. The UDC was and is a social, literary, historical, monumental, and benevolent association made up of widows, wives, mothers, sisters, and other lineal descendants of men who rendered military, civil, or other personal service to the Confederate cause.

Organized on 10 September 1894, the UDC was incorporated in the District of Columbia on 18 July 1919. It has erected numerous memorials, it presents Crosses of Military Service to lineal Confederate descendants who themselves have served in later American wars, and it presents awards to outstanding service academy cadets and midshipmen. At its height, in the early 20th century, the UDC totaled some 100,000 members and was a political force to be reckoned with. As the years took their toll and memories faded, its membership dwindled to about 20,000 in the 1950s. But after the Civil War Centennial in the 1960s, interest revived. Today there are chapters in southern, northern, and western states, as well as in Paris and Mexico City. Associated organizations include the Sons of Confederate Veterans, founded in 1896; the Children of the Confederacy, organized in 1899; and the Military Order of the Stars and Bars, begun in 1938 and made up of male descendants of Confederate officers.

CAMERON FREEMAN NAPIER

Montgomery, Alabama

Jerome Francis Beattie, ed., The Hereditary Register of the United States of America (1972); Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (2003); Wallace Evan Davies, Patriotism on Parade: The Story of Veterans’ and Hereditary Organizations in America, 1783–1900 (1955); Mary B. Poppenheim et al., The History of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (1956).

 

Walker, Alice

(b. 1944) WRITER.

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is saturated with the atmosphere of the South, the rural Georgia farmland of her childhood. Walker, who has written more than 29 books of poetry, fiction, biography, and essays, finds strength and inspiration in the land and the people: “You look at old photographs of Southern blacks and you see it—a fearlessness, a real determination and proof of a moral center that is absolutely bedrock to the land. I think there’s hope in the South, not in the North,” she says.

Alice Walker was born in 1944 in Eatonton, Ga., the youngest of eight children. Her parents were poor sharecroppers. As a child, she read what books she could get, kept notebooks, and listened to the stories her relatives told. She attended Spelman College in Atlanta and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., where her writing was discovered by her teacher Muriel Rukeyser, who admired the manuscript that Alice had slipped under her door. Rukeyser sent the poems to her own editor at Harcourt Brace, and this first collection of Walker’s poetry, Once, was published in 1965. From 1966 through 1974 Walker lived in Georgia and Mississippi and devoted herself to voter registration, Project Head Start, and writing. She married Mel Leventhal, a Brooklyn attorney who shared her dedication to civil rights in his work on school desegregation cases. Their daughter, Rebecca, was born in 1969. After they left the South, Walker and Leventhal lived for a while in a Brooklyn brownstone and then separated. Alice Walker now lives in rural northern California, which she chose primarily for the silence that would allow her to “hear” her fictional characters.

Alice Walker is the literary heir of Zora Neale Hurston and Flannery O’Connor. Walker has visited O’Connor’s home in Milledgeville, Ga., and Hurston’s grave in Eatonville, Fla., to pay homage. Walker’s novels The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1977), Meridian (1976), and The Color Purple (1982) and short stories In Love and Trouble (1973) and You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1980) capture and explore her experiences of the South. She draws on her memories and her family’s tales of Georgia ancestors in creating the portraits of rural black women in The Color Purple. Their speech is pure dialect—colloquial, poetic, and moving. Walker’s poems too are filled with the rich landscape and atmosphere of the South.

Consciousness of the South has always been central to Alice Walker. The flowers and fruits in her California garden recall her mother’s garden back in Georgia, a place so important to Walker that it became the inspiration for her collection of essays entitled In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983). Her mother’s creativity was a compelling example to Alice Walker, as well as a constant source of beauty amid the poverty of rural Georgia. Her mother died in 1993 at the age of 80. The headstone reads “Loving Soul, Great Spirit.”

Among her many accomplishments and honors, Alice Walker has been Fannie Hurst Professor of Literature at Brandeis University and a contributing editor to Ms. magazine. In her writing and teaching she continually stresses the importance of black women writers. She edited a Zora Neale Hurston reader and wrote a biography of Langston Hughes for children. In 1984 Walker launched Wild Trees Press in Navarro, Calif., and published the work of unknown writers until 1988. The film version of The Color Purple was released in 1985 to much acclaim. In 2004 the musical version of The Color Purple premiered in Chicago, and it opened on Broadway in 2005. Alice Walker continues to highlight vital issues, such as female genital mutilation, which is central in her 1992 novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy. Alice Walker’s literary awards include the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Lillian Smith Award for her second book of poems, Revolutionary Petunias (1972), and the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Color Purple (1983).

ELIZABETH GAFFNEY

Westchester Community College, suny

David Bradley, New York Times Magazine (January 1984); Robert Towers, New York Review of Books (12 August 1982); Alice Walker, Atlanta Constitution, 19 April 1983; Evelyn C. White, Alice Walker: A Life (2004).

 

Walker, Maggie Lena

(1867–1934) BANKER.

Maggie Lena Walker, born in Richmond, Va., founded the Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond in 1903, becoming the first woman bank president in the United States. Before her death she helped to reorganize it as the present-day Consolidated Bank and Trust Company, the oldest continuously existing black bank in the country. The bank, like most of Walker’s activities, was the outgrowth of the Independent Order of Saint Luke, for which she served as Right Worthy Grand Secretary for 35 years. Under her leadership, this female-founded but previously male-run mutual benefit association established a juvenile department, an educational loan fund for young people, a department store, and a weekly newspaper. Growing to include 80,000 members in 2,010 Councils and Circles in 28 states, the order demonstrated a special commitment to expanding the economic opportunities within the community in the face of racism and sexism. It sought to develop interdependence among black women as a positive response to their problems and a step toward collective well-being.

Walker believed that black women had a “special duty and incentive to organize.” And her work as a founder or leading supporter of the Richmond Council of Colored Women, the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women, the National Association of Wage Earners, the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, the National Training School for Girls, and the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls resulted from that belief. Additionally, Walker and others of the Saint Luke women were instrumental in political activities of the black community, including the struggle for woman suffrage, voter registration campaigns after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, and the formation of the Virginia Lily-Black Republican Party, which nominated Walker for state superintendent of public instruction in 1921. Throughout the 1920s Walker handled the finances of the National League of Republican Colored Women.

As a contributor to the ideological perspectives and political strategies of the black community, Walker symbolizes the growing belief in the early 20th century in economic development and self-help. All of her activities were motivated by a profound belief in the necessity to create an independent, self-sustaining community. Walker also helped direct the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the Negro Organization Society of Virginia.

Throughout her life and career, this daughter of a washerwoman developed a distinct understanding of what it meant to be wife, mother, business-woman, and female activist. It was this perspective that shaped her struggle to expand notions within the black community of the proper role of women and within the larger society of the proper place of blacks.

ELSA BARKLEY BROWN

University of Maryland

Wendell P. Dabney, Maggie Walker and the I. O. of Saint Luke: The Woman and Her Work (1927); Sadie Iola Daniel, in Women Builders, ed. S. Daniel (1931); Maggie Lena Walker Papers, Maggie Walker National Historic Site, Richmond, Va.

 

Wells-Barnett, Ida B.

(1862–1931) JOURNALIST AND SOCIAL ACTIVIST.

For Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “southern culture” was an embattled site of identification. She was a native of Holly Springs, Miss., born a slave in 1862. There she attended Rust College, which was run by the American Missionary Association, and was strongly influenced by its “Yankee” teachers. Wells-Barnett was baptized in the Methodist Episcopal church. After her parents’ death in the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, she moved to Memphis, Tenn., around 1880 and lived there until 1892. In that year she published her most important writing, a pamphlet entitled “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” This essay placed southern codes of honor in the horror of the lynching-for-rape scenario, part of a violent, morally hypocritical, crassly economic system of white supremacy. White men justified the murder of “bestial” black men by claiming the role of protectors of “weak” white women. But Wells-Barnett proved that, statistically, the rape charge was rarely in play during actual, documented lynchings. Instead, the cry of rape was often a cover to punish black men who in any way challenged the social, political, or economic status quo of the South. She also pointed out that white women sometimes participated in both mob activity and consensual sex with black men. When a death threat appeared in print in 1893 because of Wells-Barnett’s newspaper criticism of lynching and southern honor, she had to leave for the North. She returned only once, in disguise, in 1917, to investigate the plight of 16 Arkansas farmers imprisoned for labor-organizing activity and sentenced to die in Helena.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett became famous—to opponents, infamous—for her critique of the South, but she accomplished the work largely outside of it. In 1895 she settled in Chicago, married lawyer Ferdinand L. Barnett, and raised four children. She died there in 1931. She perhaps achieved greatest prominence outside the United States, during 1893 and 1894, when she traveled to England and Scotland to mobilize opposition to lynching in the United States. At strategic points, however, she referred to herself as a “southern girl, born and bred,” or by the pen-name “Exiled.” Such identifications established her credibility as a native witness to history, especially since a black woman’s moral authority was by definition suspect in American society. After a difficult period of political retrenchment in Chicago and the brutal race riot of July 1919, Wells-Barnett again reached out to the progressive elements of the white South in renewed efforts toward interracial understanding in the region (probably through the Commission on Interracial Cooperation), but this offer likely did not reach ears that had long since tuned her out.

Ironically, some of the best evidence of Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s sparsely documented personal life dates from the 1880s, when she lived in Memphis and participated in a wide array of activities that mark her as a product of the post-Reconstruction New South. She left a diary dating from December 1885 to September 1887, and it provides vivid details of her life during this dynamic period. Entries describe a context not, perhaps, stereotypically “southern” or dominated by folkways. She studied Shakespeare and elocution, attended lectures by national figures like Dwight Moody, and was present at gender-and racially inclusive meetings of the Knights of Labor. The diary further documents her anger at injustice and violence directed at African Americans, some of which touched Wells-Barnett directly, as in her forced removal from a railroad “ladies” car. She was also the godmother of a child whose father, along with two business associates, was murdered, during a conflict in the spring of 1892. This triple lynching in Memphis was a life-changing event that directed her attention to full-time protest against mob violence protest.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett organized against southern violence outside of the region, resulting in scores of local anti-lynching committees and the founding of the National Association of Colored Women (1896) and the NAACP (1909). Her efforts successfully positioned antilynching as a legitimate focus of national reform, although based in the urban North. In that context, individuals and groups more securely positioned than she—by academic credentials, social status, or political connections in publishing, philanthropy, and government—assumed leadership of the issue in the World War I era. Although Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s southernness enabled her powerful voice to emerge in the 1890s, she came to be eclipsed by the competitive, money-driven, and consolidating trends that came to characterize social reform in the United States over her lifetime.

PATRICIA A. SCHECHTER

Portland State University

Miriam DeCosta-Willis, ed., The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells: An Intimate Portrait of the Activist as a Young Woman (1995); Trudier Harris, ed., Selected Words of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1991); Patricia A. Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 (2001); Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. and introduced by Alfreda M. Duster (1970).

 

Winfrey, Oprah

(b. 1954) TALK SHOW HOST AND ACTRESS.

Oprah Winfrey was born on 29 January 1954 in Kosciusko, Miss., to Vernita Lee and Vernon Winfrey, who never married. When Oprah was a baby her mother moved to Milwaukee, Wis., in search of better economic opportunities. Winfrey spent her formative years in Kosciusko with her maternal grandmother, who taught her to read at an early age and enrolled her in kindergarten. Oprah attended church with the deeply religious woman and began her public speaking at a young age in her grandmother’s church. When she was six, Winfrey moved to Milwaukee to be with her mother. These were difficult years for Oprah because her mother worked long hours as a domestic and came home exhausted to their tiny apartment. Additionally, when she was nine years old, Oprah was raped by a teenage cousin, and another family member and a family friend continued the sexual abuse. In response, Oprah became so rebellious that her mother could not control her, and she sent Oprah to Nashville to live with her father and his wife. Her father proved to be a strict disciplinarian, and Oprah responded favorably. She focused her talents in a number of extracurricular activities at East High School, including theater, debate, and student council. A local radio station sponsored Oprah in a Miss Fire Prevention contest, which she won, and when management heard her speak, they hired her to read the news on the radio after school. Winfrey earned a scholarship to Tennessee State University in Nashville, and during her college years she entered and won the Miss Black Nashville and Miss Black Tennessee contests and competed in the Miss Black America Pageant. When she was 19, the local CBS affiliate named her coanchor, making her the first woman to hold that position.

In 1976, during her senior year, Oprah relocated to Baltimore to the ABC affiliate to become the anchor for the evening news. Soon thereafter she began providing updates for ABC’s Good Morning America, and later she hosted a morning talk show called Baltimore Is Talking. After eight years in Baltimore, Oprah moved to Chicago to host A.M. Chicago, the lowest-rated talk show, opposite the popular Phil Donahue. Within a month, her show’s ratings equaled Donahue’s. After several months, the show was extended to an hour and renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show. In 1985, while on a business trip to Chicago, movie producer Quincy Jones saw Winfrey’s show, was impressed by her talent, and offered Oprah the role of Sophia in The Color Purple. Oprah eventually performed in several movies, including Native Son and The Women of Brewster Place. In 1986 Oprah started HARPO, Inc., to produce videos, films, and television shows. That same year, King World Productions syndicated the talk show, making it the highest-rated show in its time slot in virtually every city in the country. Oprah’s popularity crosses racial and class lines, and she even has immense international appeal. Her show is seen in 107 countries.

As Oprah has grown and matured, so has the show. Earlier themes were sometimes sensational in nature; later shows stress how to improve lives in a variety of ways. With her willingness to explore the emotional aspects of life, critics have sometimes decried the “Oprahization” of American society. In 1996 Oprah launched the Oprah Book Club, and any writer whom Oprah featured became an instant best seller. To promote philanthropy, she created Oprah’s Angel Network, which has raised over $50 million for charities. To further her commitment to improving education for impoverished African girls, she built the Oprah Winfrey Leadership School in South Africa. Winfrey entered the publishing world with a popular magazine called O, The Oprah Magazine. The international version is published bimonthly. Winfrey invested in the cable network Oxygen.

Throughout her career, the Oprah Winfrey Show has won dozens of Emmys, and she was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in The Color Purple. She has received numerous humanitarian awards and honorary degrees and is consistently chosen by magazines as one of the most influential people in America. She has the distinction of becoming the first black billionaire in the United States.

MINOA D. UFFELMAN

Austin Peay University

Helen S. Garson, Oprah Winfrey: A Biography (2004); Henry Louis Gates Jr., Finding Oprah’s Roots: Finding Your Own (2007); Kathryn Lofton, Journal of Popular Culture 39, no. 4 (2006).