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Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South (Palgrave Studies in Oral History) PDF

228 Pages·2010·1.89 MB·English
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PA L G R AV E Series Editors: Linda Shopes and Bruce M. Stave The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, by Alessandro Portelli (2003) Sticking to the Union: An Oral History of the Life and Times of Julia Ruuttila, by Sandy Polishuk (2003) To Wear the Dust of War: From Bialystok to Shanghai to the Promised Land, an Oral History, by Samuel Iwry, edited by L. J. H. Kelley (2004) Education as My Agenda: Gertrude Williams, Race, and the Baltimore Public Schools , by Jo Ann Robinson (2005) Remembering: Oral History Performance, edited by Della Pollock (2005) Postmemories of Terror: A New Generation Copes with the Legacy of the “Dirty War,” by Susana Kaiser (2005) Growing Up in The People’s Republic: Conversations between Two Daughters of China’s Revolution, by Ye Weili and Ma Xiaodong (2005) Life and Death in the Delta: African American Narratives of Violence, Resilience, and Social Change, by Kim Lacy Rogers (2006) Creating Choice: A Community Responds to the Need for Abortion and Birth Control, 1961–1973, by David P. Cline (2006) Voices from This Long Brown Land: Oral Recollections of Owens Valley Lives and Manzanar Pasts, by Jane Wehrey (2006) Radicals, Rhetoric, and the War: The University of Nevada in the Wake of Kent State, by Brad E. Lucas (2006) The Unquiet Nisei: An Oral History of the Life of Sue Kunitomi Embrey, by Diana Meyers Bahr (2007) Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City, by Jane LaTour (2008) Iraq’s Last Jews: Stories of Daily Life, Upheaval, and Escape from Modern Babylon, edited by Tamar Morad, Dennis Shasha, and Robert Shasha (2008) Soldiers and Citizens: An Oral History of Operation Iraqi Freedom from the Battlefield to the Pentagon, by Carl Mirra (2008) Overcoming Katrina: African American Voices from the Crescent City and Beyond, by D’Ann R. Penner and Keith C. Ferdinand (2009) Bringing Desegregation Home: Memories of the Struggle toward School Integration in Rural North Carolina, by Kate Willink (2009) 9780230621527_01_prexiv.indd i 5/26/2010 12:22:59 PM I Saw it Coming: Worker Narratives of Plant Closings and Job Loss, by Tracy K’Meyer and Joy L. Hart (2010) Speaking History: Oral Histories of the American Past, 1865–Present, by Sue Armitage and Laurie Mercier (2010) Surviving Bhopal: Dancing Bodies, Written Texts, and Oral Testimonials of Women in the Wake of an Industrial Disaster, by Suroopa Mukherjee (2010) Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South, by Anne Valk and Leslie Brown (2010) Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Detention and Exile, by Jehanne M. Gheith and Katherine R. Jolluck (2010) Being Muslim in America, by Irum Shiekh (2010) 9780230621527_01_prexiv.indd ii 5/26/2010 12:23:01 PM Living with Jim Crow African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South Anne Valk and Leslie Brown 9780230621527_01_prexiv.indd iii 5/26/2010 12:23:01 PM LIVING WITH JIM CROW Copyright © Anne Valk and Leslie Brown, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61962–3 (hard cover) ISBN: 978–0–230–62152–7 (paper back) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Living with Jim Crow : African American women and memories of the segregated South / Anne Valk and Leslie Brown. p. cm.—(Palgrave studies in oral history) ISBN 978–0–230–61962–3 (hardback)— ISBN 978–0–230–62152–7 (pbk.) 1. African American women—Southern States—Interviews. 2. African Americans—Segregation—Southern States—History—20th century— Anecdotes. 3. African Americans—Southern States—Social conditions— 20th century—Anecdotes. 4. Racism—Southern States—History—20th century—Anecdotes. 5. Sexism—Southern States—History—20th century—Anecdotes. 6. Southern States—Race relations—Anecdotes. 7. Southern States—Biography—Anecdotes. 8. Southern States—Social conditions—20th century—Anecdotes. 9. Interviews—Southern States. 10. Oral history. I. Valk, Anne M., 1964– II. Brown, Leslie, 1954– E185.61.L597 2010 305.896⬘073075—dc22 2009050940 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. 9780230621527_01_prexiv.indd iv 5/26/2010 12:23:01 PM Contents List of Figures vii Series Editors’ Foreword ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction W e Did Well With What We Had: Remembering Black Life Behind the Veil 1 CHAPTER 1 The Foundation Was There: Growing up a Girl in the Jim Crow South 17 CHAPTER 2 What Is Expected Of You: Gender and Sexuality 53 CHAPTER 3 You Are All Under Bondage, Which Is True: Working Lives 79 CHAPTER 4 A Society Totally Our Own: Institutional and Cultural Life 113 CHAPTER 5 I Like To Get Something Done: Fighting for Social and Political Change 139 Afterword 173 Appendix A List of Interviews 177 Appendix B Sample Edited Transcript, from Interview with Ila J. Blue 181 Notes 185 Index 203 9780230621527_01_prexiv.indd v 5/26/2010 12:23:02 PM This page intentionally left blank List of Figures Map 1 Location of Interviews. Map illustration by Amy L. Kendall, 2009 15 Photos Following Page 112 • C hildren and teachers at the West End School, Durham, North Carolina, 1906. Courtesy of the Durham Historic Photographic Archives, North Carolina Collection, Durham County Library. • V ermelle Diamond Ely, crowned queen of the Queen City Classic, 1948, Charlotte, North Carolina. Ely is pictured with the principals of West Charlotte and Second Ward High Schools, the rival teams that played an annual football game in Charlotte. Courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room, Charlotte and Mecklenburg County Library. • Midwives Association, New Iberia, Louisiana, 1920s. Members include (left to right) Mary Pratt, Mary Guant, Mrs. Prezeal Simon, Virginia Compton, Mrs. Laninia, Mary Traham, Mary Anthony (unidentified), and Patsy Moss. Courtesy of the Iberia Parish Library and the Behind the Veil Collection, Duke University Special Collections Library. • P enn School students selling vegetables at the Farmer’s Fair, 1939, St. Helena Island, South Carolina. Courtesy of Lula Holmes, Ernestine Atkins, and Louise Nesbit, and the Behind the Veil Collection, Duke University Special Collections Library. • Margaret Rogers interviewed by Kara Miles, Wilmington, North Carolina, 1993. Courtesy of the Behind the Veil Collection, Duke University Special Collections Library. • Susan Kelker Russell playing checkers with Florida A&M College presi- dent, John Robert Edward Lee, Tallahassee, Florida, circa 1930. Courtesy of Sue K. Russell and the Behind the Veil Collection, Duke University Special Collections Library. 9780230621527_01_prexiv.indd vii 5/26/2010 12:23:02 PM This page intentionally left blank Series Editors’ Foreword African American history and women’s history have flourished in recent decades; indeed they are a defining feature of the current generation of scholarship. And oral history has been essential to both enterprises. Of course, both African Americans and women—and African American women—appear in the written record if we look carefully, a record that is occasionally quite extensive for the more literate, leisured, or prominent among them. But more often when they appear, it is on the whole as a result of their participation in public life or as a result of less than felicitous encounters with the state. Frequently, lived experi- ence is subsumed within a larger context. Oral history, however, restores to the record the individual voice, especially the agency of the less privileged, those who have been disinclined or unable to chronicle their own lives, and who have lived largely outside of public view. Oral history affords insight into not only the texture of everyday life but also moments of change and transformation—as well as the meanings people give to their lives. Such is the case with Anne Valk’s and Leslie Brown’s masterful Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South, a collection of carefully edited interviews with forty-seven African American women who were born into the Jim Crow South and lived through the enormous changes in race relations characterizing the last half of the twentieth century. These interviews are part of Duke University’s Behind the Veil Project, which interviewed hundreds of southern blacks about their lives during the period of segregation. Valk and Brown served as research coordinators for Behind the Veil, and theirs is the first book developing out of the project to focus exclusively on women’s experiences. The women narrators included here speak of their upbringing, their fami- lies and homes, their lifetime of labor, their churches, organizations, and neigh- borhoods. They speak of the humiliations and injustices of Jim Crow, but also of their determination to build meaningful lives, their embrace of all that life offers, and their acts of resistance—both small and large. As women, they speak of the gendered dimension of their lives, even as they also reflect differences in age, class, and region. The narrators included here are all survivors—literally, in that they have lived to a relatively old age despite well-known racial disparities in health, health care, 9780230621527_01_prexiv.indd ix 5/26/2010 12:23:02 PM

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