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10 The Slave as Master Black Nationalism, Kawaida, and the Repression of Women CONTEMPORARY SCHOLARSHIP OF twentieth-century black political formations has documented the historical devaluation of issues pertaining to the specific plight of Afro-American women. Besides the male dominance of black ethnic institutions (e.g., churches, black colleges, black insurance firms, professional organizations), the absence of much concern about black women’s issues stemmed from an overarching ethnic belief that the enemy of black progress was white supremacy. In this view, white supremacy did not differentiate according to gender. Thus, to champion issues that presupposed a unique plight for black women was tantamount to undermining race unity. Despite the historical marginalization of such issues, black women have played crucial roles in all social movements toward black emancipation. Black women, for example, were essential participants in the Civil Rights movement. They could be found among the demonstrators and even in its leadership circles. From the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a Montgomery,Alabama, bus to the women who organized the subsequent bus boycott to women like Septima Clark who worked in citizenship schools, black women “carried their weight.” Despite not being supported by the Democratic Party’s leadership, Fannie Lou Hamer, an uneducated Mississippi sharecropper, challenged the Mississippi racial oligarchy at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Ella Baker, a lifelong political activist and organizational genius helped construct the community empowerment model adopted by the organizers of SNCC. In SNCC, women like Gloria Richardson, Diane Nash, Faye Bellamy, Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson, and Joyce Ladner were important participants and leaders. Earlier, Daisy Bates, president of the NAACP chapter in Little Rock,Arkansas, managed the highly contentious desegregation of Central High School.1 Nonetheless, the debate continues over the degree to which women in SNCC were subjected to sexist treatment by male activists. Similarly, there are questions about whether the experiences of black women in the Civil Rights 325 movement generally were different from those of their white female peers. In How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights, Belinda Robnett shows that black women were crucial as leaders and rank-and-file participants in the Civil Rights movement, although they usually were not given formal leadership roles.2 Black women often became leaders on the strength of their individual personalities and or during crises when their competence could not be as easily ignored. Therefore, even though black women were not equally represented in the formal Civil Rights movement leadership, their participation marked the peak of female participation in black political movements of the twentieth century. Then, the decline of the Civil Rights movement and the subsequent rise of the Black Power movement signaled a massive retreat in the already minuscule ability of black women to shape national and local black political agendas. Robnett notes that the rise of the Black Power movement out of the ashes of the Civil Rights movement meant more rigid hierarchies “and fewer free spaces for women’s leadership.” Concerning the gender implications of the emergence of the non-southern-based Black Power movement, Robnett writes: And in the North, the exhibitionism of manhood was not mitigated by the strength of Black institutions whose most vital resource was women. Both black men and radical-chic white men-women, too applauded the machismo of leather-jacketed young men, armed to the teeth, rising out of the urban ghetto. The theme of the late sixties was “Black Power” punctuated by a knotted fist . . . common ethos between northern and southern blacks. Although it may not have been consciously conceived out of the need to affirm manhood, it became a metaphor for the male consciousness of the era. As Floyd McKissick . . . explained: “The year 1966 shall be remembered as the year we left our imposed status as Negroes and became Black men.”3 The Black Power movement’s emphasis on men also coincided with the valorization of violence as the means for attaining freedom. The physical aspects of struggles for freedom were considered a male domain insofar as warriors were deemed to be males.4 In turn, the idea of a violent black struggle was enhanced by the example of the Vietnamese, who at the time were waging a devastating struggle against the United States military. The Vietnam example was an important influence on the Black Power era, for not only were the Vietnamese nonwhite but they also were successfully waging war against the “white...

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