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This chapter describes landmark legal arguments Murray made about equal protection in the 1960s. Using the category of “Jane Crow,” she demanded that the law be responsive to the synthetic nature of identity. In so doing, Murray placed African American women's experiences at the center of democratic consideration. Despite her attempts to build coalitions, she found herself increasingly at odds with leaders of the feminist and Black Freedom movements.

James and Esther Cooper Jackson’s marriage, commitment to communism, and devotion to the black freedom movement evolved over the course of the twentieth century. Their experiences were shaped by major events like the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the civil rights movement. The couple’s relationship, gender dynamics, and leftist activism offer unique insight into the influence major political and social changes had on the long black freedom movement. It also provides a new look at the relationship between Communists, communism, and the civil rights movement. The couple’s love informed their activism, and their activism shaped their love.

This introductory chapter investigates how the pioneers of the Women's Liberation Movement gained the courage and consciousness to make a movement against male supremacy in the United States in the 1960s. The Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) against male supremacy in the United States has been thought from time to time to be a result of frustrations at male chauvinism faced by women in past movements such as the Black Freedom Movement. In fact, the WLM was rather the consequence of experiences, ideas resources, and skills acquired by women activists during the movements prior to the existence of the WLM. The introductory chapter explains this fact quite thoroughly. The chapter also brings forth the sources instrumental to activists in such women's liberation movements. Feminist ideas and aspects responsible for the success of these movements are also an important part of this chapter.

This chapter examines the relationships between the freedom movement, the Watts insurrection, and the formation of the carceral-security apparatus during the Cold War. The counterinsurgency against the Black freedom movement created the conditions of possibility for the Watts rebellion of 1965. A turning point in the history and future of freedom struggles, the Watts insurrection represented an organic crisis of Jim Crow racial regimes—one that presented the opportunity to form a broad alliance against racism, militarism, and poverty. In turn, these developments, alongside the rise of Ronald Reagan in California, created the political foundation upon which the neoliberal carceral state would flourish.

This chapter compares two 1915 issues of The Crisis and The Masses that focused on women’s suffrage as a way of identifying similarities, differences, and cross-periodical dialogues between black and white justice-seeking communities, both of which deemed advocating women’s suffrage important to their projects and audiences. The Crisis and The Masses spoke to gender-integrated audiences, included women as editors and contributors, and created public spaces for protest, outrage, and affirmation that countered dominant culture beliefs. Focusing on their words, images, argumentation, and advertisements, this study situates these two special issues in the contexts of debates about women’s suffrage, women’s rights, and feminism, as well as within the fraught conflicts between the nineteenth-century abolitionist and Black freedom movements and the women’s rights movement. Comparing the contents of both issues makes clear that considering race in gendered radicalism and gender in race radicalism are essential when examining suffrage media rhetoric.

Chapter Three explores how Black Power activists rebuilt the pre-rebellion coalition under the banner of a reconstructed and relevant Christianity that drew upon both formal Black Theology and grassroots religious traditions. This chapter chronicles the formation of the Cairo United Front, an organization that brought together Black Cairoites from across organizational, class, generational, and ideological lines in support of a broad-based and inclusive movement for racial change and social justice.

This chapter analyzes the racial politics of Mayor Harold Washington’s election, his education summit, and the supporters and critics of the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act. Harold Washington’s election as the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983 was heralded by many as the ultimate attainment of Black Power and the success of the local Black Freedom Movement. His electoral victory was grounded in years of grassroots struggle by Black organizers fighting for integration, community control, and Black empowerment. While historians have largely considered the 1980s as a product of the political triumph of conservatism and the “Reagan revolution,” in Chicago a Black-led, urban, antimachine, progressive coalitional politics led to Washington’s electoral victory. The disparate programmatic and ideological camps detailed in previous chapters (desegregation activists, community control organizers, founders of independent Black institutions, Black educators) staked claims in Mayor Washington and his political organization. The politics of Washington’s education reform summits, however, exposed the fractures within this political coalition. The interracial and intraracial struggles over school reform in Chicago during the 1980s reveal the tensions between a politics of racial representation and a politics of progressive transformation and prefigure the increased privatization of public education in the decades that followed.

This chapter examines Raymond Pace Alexander’s judicial activism in Philadelphia as well as his views on the Black Freedom Movement in the city and in the South. It looks at Alexander’s creation of the Community Legal Services, an organization intended to provide free legal assistance for the poor, along with his campaign for the desegregation of Girard College in Philadelphia. The chapter also discusses his appointment as judge of the Court of Common Pleas, his role in the Democratic Reform Movement, his continued involvement in the civil rights movement in the South and in Philadelphia, his efforts to address juvenile delinquency and poverty in the city, and his dispute with Cecil B. Moore, a black lawyer and president of the NAACP’s Philadelphia branch.

This introduction lays out the main arguments of the book. It begins with a case study, a voting rights campaign in Orangeburg, South Carolina, during the early 1960s with support from the Voter Education Project (VEP). It then zooms out and explains the scope and importance of the VEP during the civil rights era. The book argues that the VEP was the main engine that drove the civil rights movement forward by providing money and support to hundreds of African American grassroots campaigns throughout eleven southern states, money deriving from philanthropic foundations, up until conservatives cut off the money supply through the Tax Reform Act of 1969.

The intellectual history of black Marxism in the United States has focused overwhelmingly on how black Marxists approached the race question. This focus has tended to exceptionalize these thinkers, occluding both their embeddedness in other streams of thought and their broader visions of social theory. This chapter demonstrates the yields of a broader lens on black Marxism through a discussion of the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Oliver Cromwell Cox. Specifically, it focuses on the theories of democracy developed in their respective major works, Black Reconstruction in America and Caste, Class & Race.

This chapter focuses on two local leaders who are emblematic of postwar grassroots black freedom movements: Aaron Henry and Vera Pigee. Virtually unknown on the national stage, both organized and sustained the local movement in Clarksdale and spent the greater part of their adult lives devoted to the struggle for racial justice in Mississippi.

This chapter examines the case of Joan Little, a North Carolinian inmate who defended herself against sexual assault by her white jailer and was subsequently put on trial for murder in 1975. Little found avid support from the black freedom, women’s liberation, and prisoner’s rights movements, all of which employed varying frameworks to theorize Little’s plight. The confluence of multiple political agendas around this single case reveals the many ways that activists defined the injustices of rape. The dominant racial justice discourse focused on Little’s vulnerability as a black woman, attacked by both a white man and then a white supremacist legal system. From the prisoner’s rights perspective, the defining issue was Little’s status as an incarcerated woman. Her case revealed the violence and oppression of the legal system as a whole. Finally for feminists, Little epitomized the situation faced by all women, first victimized by men and then a male-dominated legal system that refused to grant her her right to self-defense. Although not in conflict with one another, these varying interpretations reveal what motivated activists to respond to rape and when and why activists deemed rape a political issue.

This chapter examines the conflicts and constraints posed by varying antirape discourses and approaches to antirape activism in the 1970s. At this time, activists in the women’s liberation and black freedom movements confronted one another’s politics on rape, sometimes unable to find common ground. The competing beliefs and approaches that activists brought to their antirape work heightened the potential for discord between movements. This was particularly exacerbated by the increasing role of the state in antirape work. By the mid-1970s, state actors and agencies played a dominating role in antirape work, leaving many feminists deeply concerned about the direction of the movement. State co-optation of key feminist interventions, such as rape crisis centers, resulted in a movement that was largely reformist. Feminists saw their once radical vision of social revolution overshadowed by increasing state efforts for reform-based solutions to the problem of sexual violence.