Civil Rights and Women’s Roles Reading Analysis Why were issues of race and gender both so intertwined and conflicting in the post-war world? How did the A

Civil Rights and Women’s Roles Reading Analysis Why were issues of race and gender both so intertwined and conflicting in the post-war world? How did the African-American Civil Rights movement affect women differently than men? Be sure to use the additional reading, and to consider ethical issues.Essay should be one page response using evidence from the attached readings. How It Feels to Be Colored Me
by Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960)
I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am
the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian
chief.
I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little
Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I
knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty
horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town
knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners
were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid.
The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much
pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.
The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for
me. My favorite place was atop the gatepost. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter. Not only
did I enjoy the show, but I didn’t mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them
in passing. I’d wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this:
“Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin’?” Usually automobile or the horse paused at this,
and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably “go a piece of the way” with them,
as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see
me, of course negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first
“welcome-to-our-state” Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take
notice.
During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town
and never lived there. They liked to hear me “speak pieces” and sing and wanted to see me dance
the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which
seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop, only they
didn’t know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me,
but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county-everybody’s Zora.
But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I
left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, a Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at
Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of
Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my
heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown–warranted not to rub nor run.
But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking
behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who
hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but
about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the
strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world–I am too
busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to
register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and
the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a
potential slave said “On the line!” The Reconstruction said “Get set!” and the generation before
said “Go!” I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep.
Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure
and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater
chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think–to know that
for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting
to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to
weep.
The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair
beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of
keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.
I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before
the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.
For instance at Barnard. “Beside the waters of the Hudson” I feel my race. Among the thousand
white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself.
When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.
Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is
just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World
Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we
have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have,
this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to
business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This
orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive
fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen-follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai
above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle
way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like
a war drum. I want to slaughter something–give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the
piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to
the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in
his seat, smoking calmly.
“Good music they have here,” he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.
Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what
I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen
between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.
At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down
Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street
Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule
Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic
manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the
eternal feminine with its string of beads.
I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment
of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.
Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me.
How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.
But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in
company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a
jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of
broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old
shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things
too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag.
On the ground before you is the jumble it held–so much like the jumble in the bags, could they
be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the
content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how
the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place–who knows?
Introductory Lecture __________________________________________________
The Civil Rights Movement drew more activism from younger people than had any other cause since the
end of the war. Racism was not something confined just to the South, but the rigid legal codification of it
through Jim Crow laws made it more apparent in that region. As the movement gained more members
and popular support, through public protests such as the Montgomery bus boycott (kicked off by the
impressive Rosa Parks, who had recently returned from a non-violent protest training) and the sit-ins at
segregated lunch counters, more non-southerners paid attention, especially the younger generation,
those in high school and in college. White college women began joining up with the Civil Rights
Movement.
They joined the movement for the same reasons
that men had: a belief in equality. They wanted to
be involved in protests, organization, and voter
registration. However, women found that they
were not viewed as equal within the movement.
The male leaders (white and black) gave the white
women “feminine” jobs, such as housekeeping
tasks (keeping the office clean, making coffee, etc.),
and secretarial work. Stokely Carmichael, one of
the national leaders of the movement, when asked
what the position of women should be in the
movement, responded, “Prone.” The sexual
implication of his comment was not unnoticed by
women.
Many women in the movement began to identify
with the “disadvantaged” for whom they worked,
and began drawing a correlation between the way
they were treated and the way racial minorities
were treated. This brought up ethical questions for
women. How could they fight for others’ rights for
equality when they themselves were not
considered equal? Should issues of gender be fixed
first, in order to help with race issues? This harkens back to the same divides suffragists had seen in the
19th century. White women in the movement also saw the way black women gained power in their
communities. Black women were leaders within community-action projects and, largely because they
were the primary bread-winners in most households due to more racism being directed at black men
than women, held more power and/or prestige within families. Keep in mind this didn’t apply to all
women or families, but it did to enough of them where white women paid attention.
In 1965, two white women in the Civil Rights Movement (who were married to two activists) wrote a
paper that they called “A Kind of Memo,” detailing the issues about the roles of women in social
movements. In doing so, they brought to the surface things many women in the movement had been
feeling, but had been reluctant to admit, especially since the Movement was supposed to be filled with
liberal, progressive men.
As the younger women were coming together due to the Civil Rights movement and this memo, the “old
guard” women (like Betty Friedan) were also questioning why the federal government wasn’t
responding to women’s issues. The two groups came together in 1966 when the National Organization
for Women was formed. Many attribute the formation of NOW as the birth of the new national
feminism.
Critics charge that these feminist movements reflected just white women, and to a degree this was
correct. Kristin Anderson-Bricker in her article, “’Triple Jeopardy’ Black Women and the Growth of
Feminist Consciousness in SNCC, 1964-1975” argues that for the most part, black women in the
movement had more authority and responsibility than white women, and thus King and Hayden’s
comments didn’t reflect their situation. In 1968, Frances Beal organized the Black Women’s Liberation
Committee (BWLC) to overcome black women’s triple jeopardy: as blacks, women, and workers. Black
men were using the civil rights movement as a way to recast their masculinity, at the expense of women.
The focus of BWLC was still, overall, black equality.
Increasingly, it became apparent that not just black women were facing these issues and the Third World
Women’s Alliance developed out of BWLC and Black Women’s Alliance (BWA) in 1970 to allow other
women of color in. This group was very critical of capitalism, since it led to women’s economic
dependence. TWWA later published its journal, Triple Jeopardy, to discuss the three threats to women:
racism, imperialism, and sexism. The idea that “Sisterhood is Powerful” hoped to bind women together,
but minority women charged that it was just a myth that the women’s movement/sisterhood is based
predominantly on the notion that women share a common set of experiences based on gender. They
were experiencing different challenges that few white women, it seemed, were willing to look at.
How did gender roles in the Civil Rights movement increase feminist thought? What were the different
experiences for African-American women in the Civil Rights movement as compared to white women?
What do these experiences demonstrate about the intersections of race and sex, and what are the
ethical conclusions we can draw from this? Why did white women in the movement find it ethically
challenging that they were not accepted nor treated as equals in the movement?
Women in the movement have been getting more attention in recent years. In 2013, a new
documentary, Reflections Unheard, examined women’s roles. You can watch clips of it on YouTube.
Here is a link to a clip from the documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gSfCnVE3gU. If you
have time, this link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKJu2N4Upj4) is about 75 minutes long and it
features a few different scholars discussing women in the movement.

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