Writing through Jane Crow: Race and Gender Politics in African American Literature

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Ethnic Notions. 2. Baldwin, “Going to Meet the Man,” 232. 3. Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, 8. 4. Murray, “Why Negro Girls Stay Single,” 4. Murray points out the pervasiveness of Jane Crow by noting black women’s glaring absence from an issue of Ebony magazine dedicated to black lawyers. She asks, “What quirk of the editor’s attitude had permitted him or her to ignore the contributions of women”? The editor’s negligence slights Murray the woman and Murray the lawyer. Ironically black entrepreneur John H. Johnson published both Ebony and Negro Digest. 5. Wade-Gayles, No Crystal Stair, 9. 6. Murray, “Liberation of Black Women,” 186. 7. Holloway, Private Bodies, Public Texts, 9. 8. Robert Reid-Pharr challenges the belief in the “inevitability” of racial identity that constructs black subjects, particularly the writer, as products of history and not as agents. He suggests that race is “lived as desire” and the assumption that African Americans have no choice in their subject formation “is, in fact, an affirmation of the racial status quo” (Once You Go Black, 7, 4, 8). 9. Wright, review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, 16, 17. 10. Hurston, review of Uncle Tom’s Children, 3. 11. Hurston and Wright’s art-versus-politics debate is the discursive contest in midtwentieth -century African American literary history. William J. Maxwell argues that the writers’ conflict “underwrites genealogies of audacious black women’s writing burdened by Wright’s male line” while it “dramatizes less intensely gendered oppositions undergirding the black modern within contemporary African-American criticism, oppositions such as race versus class, modernism versus naturalism, Harlem Renaissance versus Chicago Renaissance, black nationalism versus Marxism, and so on” (New Negro, Old Left, 155–56). 222 / NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 12. Johnson, “What My Job Means to Me,” 74. 13. Shockley, “We, Too, Are Americans,” 2. 14. The details of Recy Taylor’s rape case come from Danielle L. McGuire’s study At the Dark End of the Street. The historian argues that from 1940 until 1975 interracial sexual violence and rape was “one crucial battleground upon which African Americans sought to destroy white supremacy and gain personal and political autonomy.” She identifies Betty Jean Owens’s trial in Tallahassee, Florida, as a watershed case that led to convictions in Alabama, North Carolina, and South Carolina, including the sentencing of a white marine to the electric chair (At the Dark End of the Street, xx). 15. Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women,” 41. 16. Robinson, Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, viii. 17. Burks, “Trailblazers,” 71. 18. Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership. 19. Mitchell and Davis, “Dorothy West and Her Circle,” 40. 20. In the interview West also intimates that white literary agent Carl Van Vechten made sexually inappropriate comments toward her (McDowell, “Conversations with Dorothy West,” 291). 21. Similar to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, many black writers, musicians , and painters converged in Chicago during the 1940s and 1950s. For example, Archibald Motley, Louis Armstrong, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Walker, Mahalia Jackson, Willard Motley, and Katherine Dunham utilized the city’s publishing outlets, leftist organizations, philanthropic endowments, and black enclaves to redefine their relationship to African American literature and culture as well as society at large. For more on this creative milieu, see Hine and McCluskey, Black Chicago Renaissance; Bone and Courage, Muse in Bronzeville. 22. Shockley, Renegade Poetics, 2, 8. Shockley notes that the “qualities of ‘blackness ’” outlined in the Black Arts Movement as well as Houston Baker’s and Henry Louis Gates’s canonizing theories of the African American literary tradition “seem to weigh more heavily upon women writers” (8). 23. Hill and Holman, “Preface,” 296. 24. Gloster, “Race and the Negro Writer,” 369. For a discussion of the evolution of Phylon as a journal of literary criticism after World War II, see Johnson and Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics. 25. Glicksberg, “The Alienation of Negro Literature,” 50. 26. Young, Black Writers, White Publishers. 27. Stephanie Brown argues that African American literature had to “bear witness to an experiential blackness positioned as the repository of all that technological advances and material gain have stripped from white American men in the name of progress and the Cold War” (Postwar African American Novel, 25). 28. Locke, “Self-Criticism,” 394. Gender themes are not included on Locke’s list of censured black subjects. Candice M. Jenkins explains that the oversight is not on the grounds of “straightforward sexism...