Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle (review)

In Battling the Plantation Mentality, Laurie Green takes a fresh look at the Memphis freedom struggle through the prism of race, class, and gender. Her primary interest is working-class blacks and how they defined freedom as they battled what she calls the plantation mentality, a pervasive Southern ethos promoting white domination and demanding black subservience. Situating her work in the vast literature of the civil rights movement, Green maintains that historians have paid scant attention to this aspect of the freedom struggle. And although the locus of attention has shifted from national leaders to local activists, she believes that there is still too little exploration of the everyday lives and attitudes of the masses of blacks that participated in movements. On both counts her work goes a long way toward filling the void.

Key to constructing her thesis concerning black working-class consciousness and identity is a reliance on over sixty oral history interviews [most conducted by Green between 1995 and 1997 as part of the massive Behind the Veil project sponsored by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University]. She also makes use of interviews from the Memphis Black Gospel Singers Oral History Collection and the Memphis Sanitation Strike Collection [Special Collections, Ned R. McWherter Library, University of Memphis, Tennessee] among others. The result is a well-documented study that encompasses an extensive literature review, court cases, and archival research that explores the Memphis movement from World War II to the 1968 Sanitation Strike, an event that will ever be associated with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Green begins her story by examining the prewar Memphis struggles that set the stage for the movement that accelerated after World War II. During this period, blacks streaming into Memphis from rural areas in Tennessee and neighboring Mississippi resisted attempts to relegate them to the same low-wage farm work and poorly paid domestic labor that they sought to escape. With the onset of World War II, as they vied for more lucrative jobs in the defense industry, they also contested demeaning practices and attitudes aimed at robbing them of their dignity—attitudes and practices that were "reminiscent of slavery and sharecropping" (1).

In the postwar era, battles broadened, overlapped, and coalesced. Workplace struggles, protests against police brutality and misconduct, demands for political access, and demonstrations against segregation in public facilities intersected as black Memphians began to increasingly challenge the tight rein of white domination. But dismantling Jim Crow was only part of the fight as blacks fought to control their images by challenging pejorative stereotypes and protesting racist censorship policies that sought to ban or edit films with black characters or content. Mass culture, Green argues, "became a locus of racial struggle" (143). Key to this cultural struggle was black radio, a novelty when it appeared on the scene in 1949. Besides disseminating information, cultivating race pride, and fostering a greater sense of community, black radio developed into a new public sphere that provided a forum for racial discourse. Black on-air personalities became important participants in the ongoing fight, joining workers, high school and college students, and local activists.

Looming large during the period was the outsized persona of Ed Crump, the white supremacist political boss who ruled Memphis with an iron fist from 1910 until his death in 1954. His death, along with the Brown decision that same year and the abolition of the poll tax three years earlier, intensified the movement as black Memphians remobilized: the NAACP dramatically increased its local Memphis membership with a younger and not necessary more militant leadership, and civic clubs founded in the 1940s and 50s with the goal of neighborhood improvement began moving in the direction of voter registration and political activism. By 1960, the student sit-in movement was in full flower and about this same time the sanitation workers began to organize over abysmally low pay and wretched working conditions. Their...