Women's History as Diaspora History
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As the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has famously reminded us, "well behaved women rarely make history." In Boycotts, Buses, and Passes, Pamela E. Brooks takes Ulrich's observation one step further. Brooks argues that even when misbehaving women do make history, they rarely make it into history books. To help remedy this elision, her study of mid-twentieth century U.S. and South African women's movements draws upon a rich collection of oral interviews to successfully claim a place for women within the history of the African diaspora. Impressively grounding her arguments in a long record of black activism, Brooks demonstrates the importance to global freedom movements of women organizing. Valuable background on nineteenth-century antecedents to movements of the following century helps to contextualize the history she details, contributing significantly to the strength of her study.
Brooks focuses her analysis on well-documented examples of activism in Montgomery, Alabama and Alexandria, South Africa. Chronicling the events of bus boycotts taking place in these cities in 1955 and 1957 respectively, she writes that "Black women in both countries had initiated a round of mass actions that aimed to eliminate white supremacy" (p. 2). In setting the activism of women separated by the Atlantic Ocean within a diasporic framework, she suggests that what may at first appear to be individual, sporadic, and isolated acts of resistance are better understood as "patterns of resistance and change" within a global movement (p. 5). Hers seems a reasonable argument; in overlooking these patterns, historians—intentionally or not—have written women out of diaspora and pan-African history.
Revisionist scholarship on the Montgomery bus boycott lays a foundation for Brooks' thesis by challenging earlier Martin Luther "King-centered" narratives that credit the charismatic minister with the success of this early victory in the modern civil rights movement. She draws on participant Jo Ann Gibson Robinson's The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It (1987), as well as historian Paula Giddings' When and Where I Enter (1985), to [End Page 362] balance praise for the King-led Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and give credit to the city's Women's Political Council (WPC) for its significant contribution in organizing the boycott. Less known to U.S. readers will be the story of black women's resistance to bus-fare increases in Alexandria, which led to a three-month boycott of the city's bus system by an overwhelmingly female ridership. Although Montgomery riders were protesting segregated seating and Alexandria women steep fare increases, Brooks characterizes these movements, which took place within months of each other, as "two sites of reverberating protest within Africa and her diaspora in the 1950s" (p. 3). Her contribution to women's and diaspora history lies in offering new understanding of the global significance of events previously studied in isolation.
Brooks is not the first to draw parallels between U.S. and South African history and politics. Her work is influenced by such scholarship as George Frederickson's White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (1981) and George Shepperson's essay "African Diaspora: Concepts and Context" (1993), in which the author reaches back to the late nineteenth century to trace comparisons between the "reassertion of white racism" at the conclusion of Reconstruction and the victory of colonialism following the "scramble for Africa." Only recently have scholars turned their attention to comparisons of women's resistance to colonialism on these continents. While Brooks' work fits well with such scholarship as Race Woman (2000)—historian Gerald Horne's biography of Shirley Graham Du Bois—her study is distinguished from other comparative histories by her attention to finding historical linkages between earlier-and mid-twentieth-century movements, placing them within diaspora history, and considering the important role that gender played in activism to end white supremacy.
Compelling interviews of U.S. and South African women give testament to the importance of community in...
