We, Too, Are American: African American Women in Detroit and Richmond, 1940-54 (review)

Labor Day in Detroit. Union floats, marching bands, and thousands of union members take over the city's main street to celebrate organized labor's official holiday. It is 1989, an election year. Politicians insert their supporters between groupings of teachers, carpenters and construction workers. A contingent supporting Detroit mayor Coleman A. Young places itself behind a marching band. The mayor's troops—middle-aged, female, and solidly African American—are a hundred strong. They are a lively, boisterous group in t-shirts and caps, and as they move past the main grandstand filled with union officials and politicians, they catch the attention of the mayor who stands to wave at the women.

The group responds, first by waving a hundred "Re-Elect Young" placards, and then with a jingle that makes the grandstand explode in cheers and laughter:

"Who dat? Who dat? Who dat talkin' bout beatin my mayor?

Who dat? Who dat? Who dat talkin' bout beatin my mayor?"

Across the street stands a Black woman in her late thirties, a politician dressed in a gray business suit and heels. She frowns at the group, sucks her teeth and whispers, "Embarrassing...they are so embarrassing," then turns away from the parade, putting some space between herself and the marchers. This woman is one of so many of us who would benefit from reading We, Too, Are American.

In Professor Shockley's study of African American women in Detroit and Richmond, Virginia, during the war years, 1940 to 1954, she takes on the complicated topics of social activism, leadership, and class divisions, and how African American women defined themselves during this period as they challenged state, union, and civil rights organizations.

For historical framework, Shockley notes that from 1880 to 1920, middle class women had the expectation that by "espousing the ideals of Victorianism—thrift, Christianity, strict standards of sexual propriety, and hard work—African Americans could win the respect of white America and claim rights in that way." For the Black elite, it was felt that leadership would come only from women with "superior minds." Waitresses, factory workers, and domestics were the "great unwashed," exhibiting pathological behaviors determined by "poor education and social dislocation."

"Our highest colored citizens," proclaimed Lillian Payne of the Order of St. Luke, "are daily bearing the burden thrust upon them by ignorance or conduct of our lowest." To correct this, middle-class women used the YWCA and Urban League to train working women in hygiene, good mothering, charm school etiquette, and "non-confrontational model(s) of protest" to corral "loose and boisterous" conduct. When jobs became scarce and working-class Black women were pressed to take low-wage domestic work in white homes, some middle-class organizations accommodated this reversal with training programs focused on cooking and standardized servant work.

These efforts failed.

Shockley then brings her focus to the years during and after World War II—a contradictory period of racial repression and limited advancement, as Black working class women challenged a wave of hate strikes, lynching, race riots, racist unions, and groups like the Dixie Voters. She points out how working and middle class Black women ultimately found their greatest allies in each other. In Detroit, the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority would join working class Black women in fair housing demonstrations against city hall. They sponsored UAW-CIO forums on equal wages and led a boycott of the American Tobacco Company in support of striking Black female farm workers. Working and middle class activists persuaded churches, recreation centers and the Detroit Board of Education to open daycare centers for the children of working mothers. The Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority organized job clinics, assisted union vocational programs, and even testified before the House Committee Investigating National Defense Migration to complain about the lack of opportunities for Black working class women.

We, Too, Are American is a wonderful study of the...