Description
Decades before the "Freedom Schools" of the Civil Rights Movement, African-American women in the South organized sophisticated voter mobilization drives and citizenship schools. Where they voted in sufficient numbers, they even worked to leverage their ballots in exchange for improved services and institutions for their communities. Despite the legal and extra-legal means employed by political elites to keep African-Americans from participating in southern politics, some black women were able to make their voices heard. This study analyzes the symbolic and substantive effects of these efforts on southern politics. It also asks why these women believed their political participation would matter, given the anti-democratic nature of southern politics at the time. Although the scholarly work on African-American women continues to grow, no historian had yet undertaken a study of the role of black women in electoral politics during the 1920s and 1930s. Scholars have widely assumed that disfranchisement and segregation effectively stifled black women's voices, but this research is an attempt to recover the surprising and important ways in which these women were able to participate in southern politics. This project also questions historiographical assumptions about the stability of race relations in the 1920s and 1930s and the origins of the Civil Rights Movement. It suggest that even during this "classical" period of segregation, southern politics was far more contested than most historians have acknowledged. Finally, by studying the political activism of southern black women and the obstacles that they faced, this project provides fresh insights into the means by which Americans gain access to political power and how our democratic system can be responsive to new ideas.
