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This chapter looks at the rearticulation of race in light of gender differences. The new meanings and practices of race had different consequences for black men and black women. In 1964, very few African American men straightened their hair and virtually all African American women did. When men gave up straightened hairdos, they became more conventionally masculine. Women who ceased straightening their hair did so at the risk of sacrificing their femininity. Though the experience and meaning of wearing straightened hair was quite different for men compared with for women, a gender-neutral discourse of racial pride masked the differences.

Tommy J. Curry considers Wright’s views on gender in terms of the historical reality of black males’ vulnerability to sexual violence at the hands of white men and white women. Curry explores Wright’s impassioned response to the 1951 trial and execution of fellow Mississippi native Willie McGee. McGee had been charged with having raped a white woman, Williametta Hawkins, who had been described as his mistress but who, in fact, had threatened to cry rape if he refused her advances. Curry reports that at that time, black men, often out of economic need, were sometimes coerced into sexual intercourse by threats of false accusations of rape. Otherwise, they would be either literally or metaphorically lynched. In a way unprecedented in Wright scholarship, Curry frames Wright’s “The Man of All Work” as an allegory for the rape of McGee. In the story, a black man cross-dresses in search of employment in domestic work. This leads to a series of misunderstandings and misidentifications by whites that almost kill him. Curry concludes that this story was far more than a clever plot: it effectively expressed a particular set of humiliations and dilemmas faced by black men.

This chapter presents James Baldwin’s short story, “Going To Meet the Man,” as a rescripting of Freud’s Oedipal scene, introducing the black male as a triangulating figure vis-à-vis the (white) male child’s identification with each parent. A desire both to possess and be possessed by the black man, to annihilate and be annihilated by him, functions to consolidate white indivisibility across the division of heterosexual and homosexual identifications that resolves the Oedipal. The chapter extends Baldwin’s reading of this race secret to the torture that occurred at the Abu Ghraib military prison in order to better understand not only the racialized and sexual nature of the violence but also to determine what about it was symptomatically American. This casting of the American race secret onto the globe recruits a gay cosmopolitan archive, especially in its imagination of the exotic, or “brown” (in this case, Arab, Middle-Eastern, Mediterranean, Muslim, “Oriental”).

This chapter contains life histories of ten founding church elders, who are currently in their 80s and 90s. All of the narratives begin with a socio-historical snapshot of the elders' hometowns, followed by interviews covering their life experiences in both the North and the South. These experiences include employment patterns and salaries earned; “separate but equal” education during the Plessy v. Ferguson era; White on Black violence, such as false imprisonment and threats of and actual lynching; politics of sex between White men and Black women in the South; enculturation of White children in perpetrating racial violence and of Black children in surviving it; Black adult strategies for negotiating southern White terrorism and for migrating to and adjusting within urban life; economic survival strategies, such as sharecropping in the South and Black women's performing domestic “day labor” in the North; southern religious roots and new urban religious options; and colorism. The chapter concludes by exploring how these narratives inform Great Migration research.

This chapter examines how black men groomed black boys into industrious and respectable men. While histories of African American life under Jim Crow have revealed in great detail the rhetoric and strategies black women used to enhance the morality and respectability of young black girls, less attention has been paid to the collective and similar efforts of both sexes to bolster the character and gender identity of boys. Indigenous religious, educational, and social movements spearheaded by black men aimed to relieve the “boy problem.” The Baptist State Sunday School Convention, schools such as the Mary Potter School in Oxford, North Carolina, and the Young Men's Institute sought to tend to boys defined as drifting. Such boys were considered passive and malleable. While drifting boys had the potential to be shaped into respectable men, in an unsavory environment, they could also turn bad. To fend off this consequence, black men offered boys wholesome diversions, counseled temperance in thought and behavior, and instructed them in how to lead virtuous and manly lives. Part of this project of masculinization sought to reinforce black boys' fidelity to domestic concerns. Men's work in public institutions addressed private issues as men such as George Shaw, principal of the Mary Potter School, helped his male students overcome broken home environments. Men like George Shaw believed that both men and women shared the responsibility for crafting wholesome domestic spaces.

While some herald Barack Obama’s election as the first black President of the United States as evidence that people were able to overcome stereotypes regarding black men, others suggest that it is Obama’s election that will provide a new image of black men that will, in turn, help to eradicate racial stereotypes and racism more generally. This chapter considers the relevance of prevailing stereotypes of black men in light of Obama’s rise to the Presidency. The chapter first reviews the extant social psychological evidence suggesting that there is a pervasive connection between black men and threat in the minds of most social perceivers. After, evidence regarding the malleability of this “black male = threat” stereotype is presented, followed by a discussion of Obama’s potential to attenuate it. The chapter ends with a discussion of the potential influence of the “black male = threat” stereotype on Obama’s Presidential bid and presidency.

This chapter examines North Carolina Baptist Convention leaders' efforts to make their churches and themselves more manly. Fearing that their churches were becoming feminized, they sought to weaken black church women's home missionary work. At the same time, black men campaigned to assume more of “women's work” by engaging in social service activity. The rhetoric of masculinization within the church influenced the dialogue and activity of North Carolina's black men and women as they fought to assert and redefine the influence of their respective genders within their churches.

This chapter explores the institutional efforts of North Carolina's leading black men to promote racial pride, progress, and a dignified manhood within the black race while fostering interracial dialogue with whites. Though black men dominated the public events as spokespersons, black women played critical roles in these communal enterprises. Interracial gatherings at Emancipation Day and state fair events spoke simultaneously to black and white audiences, often producing multiple and conflicting messages about the meaning of racial progress and equality. Over time, strategies for racial progress within these institutions evolved from a philosophy that emphasized good feelings between the races to one that endorsed more militant and uncompromising approaches. The self-help leadership preferred by men such as Charles Hunter thus fell into disfavor after World War I and the rise of New Negro ideology in the 1920s.

This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to show how North Carolina's black men and women were equally engaged in community-based activism during the Jim Crow era. Central to this investigation is an examination of men's appropriation of communal spaces — generally labeled public and private — to promote gendered agency, cooperation, and, at times, sexual dominance. The factors influencing the development of African-American gender identity are then discussed. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter assesses the construction and contestation of black manhood within private male-dominated spaces. The proceedings of North Carolina's Grand Lodge of Prince Hall Masons reveal the importance of gender to men and how it was retooled over time to allow for uplifting images of black manhood. This task proved challenging for Prince Hall Masons. They struggled to define what constituted respectable manhood amid the perceived threat of rival factions within their ranks, the growing calls for fraternity men to embrace a more militant politics, and, most notably, conflicts with women in their auxiliary (the Order of the Eastern Star) over work autonomy.

This chapter examines the role of carceral power in the rise of Black gangs and particularly in the sociospatial production of Black masculinity. Focusing on the period between 1960 and the early 1980s, it considers how carceral power contributed to the emergence of the Almighty Black P. Stone Rangers street gang. It also explores how policing in Black Chicago and the growing prison industrial complex led to the incarceration of many gang members and Black men in Chicago. In Chicago (as well as other cities throughout the Black diaspora) gangs played a crucial role in the performance of Black masculinity. They did so not simply because of their swagger, clothing, or saturation, but because they were the group who had the strongest relationship with the criminal justice system. This chapter discusses the interrelationships among carceral space, Black gangs, prison masculinity, and the elements of masculinity in carceral institutions.

This book examines the ways women’s bodies are used and misused in African American literature to support the production of black masculine ideality and power. Focusing on black male texts such as the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and Frederick Douglass and the prose of W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Mosley, James Baldwin, and Barack Obama, it analyzes representations of ideal black masculinities and femininities and discusses black men’s struggles for gendered agency in relation to their complicated love-hate relation to (white) normative masculinity. It also assesses the influence of shifting socioeconomic circumstances on the ideological, cultural, and emotional terms upon which black men conceptualize their identities. Drawing on the economies of gendered racism, the book shows how these structures continue to shape contemporary representations of black manhood and womanhood. It also probes how idealized masculinities and femininities are interrogated by black men by considering texts that problematize traditional constructions of black masculinity.

This chapter examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s contributions to the continuing development and modeling of ideal black masculinity by focusing on four of his texts: Souls of Black Folk (1903), Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), Darkwater (1920), and Dark Princess (1928). It considers how Du Bois generates masculine identity, leadership, and power by remythologizing the terms of both black manhood and “colored” womanhood. It argues that Du Bois codifies these inventions and conceptions of strong black masculinity for the new century and uses representations of women to ground his intellectual, artistic, and political notions of black masculine ideality. It also discusses Du Bois’s political figurations of black nationalism, citizenship, leadership, and masculine power in America based on the ability of black men to achieve an ideal manhood that can challenge hegemonic white masculinity to uplift the race.

The chapter discusses the legendary Satchel Paige and his life before and during his baseball heydays. Paige was considered a Babe Ruth of Negro baseball. He did not win every game he was in though he probably had the most wins compared to any other pitcher in history. His appeal was interracial and universal though he never forgot that he was a black man. Tributes were heaped over him by some of the best names in the industry—Dizzy Dean, Joe DiMaggio, Charlie Gehringer, and other major-league stars. The chapter discusses his early years and his numerous conflicts with the law. When he started with the Birmingham Black Barons, he had no other throw but his fastball but it was a fastball like no other. That was the start of his legendary career.

This chapter examines whether black and mixed-race men with higher social standing were exposed to a greater risk of mob violence than were their lower-status neighbors. The results show that southern mobs did not select their victims at random from the general black male population. There were important differentials in the risk of victimization according to both social marginality and social standing. However, what motivated mobs to exercise discretion in their targeting of victims cannot be known. Mobs did consider potential community reaction in their selection of victims. But until there is access to better information about the decision-making calculus of southern mobs the precise explanation for the patterns of differential risk for black men that was documented in this chapter and in Chapter 4 must remain open for debate.

This chapter summarizes the discussions in the preceding chapters and presents some concluding thoughts from the author. This book has situated gender (analysis of black manhood and womanhood) more firmly within the discourse of race activism in the early Jim Crow South by providing insight into the flexible meanings of black manhood and the relationship between black male and female activists in that era. Gender, race, and the use of institutional space contributed to a dialogue within the black middle-class community that was simultaneously uplifting and divisive. As North Carolina's black men sought to reconcile themselves with the outer world of segregation through building institutions, they were equally attentive to the project of fashioning an African American manhood characterized by dignity and authority that would prove uplifting to their manhood and to the black community overall.

This chapter explains the intersections of gender with race in church life. In the larger society, slavery, poverty, and menial status meant that black men risked being labeled feminine and without power. Thus in the black churches men, not women, took primary place, mimicking the white church's example in an exaggerated form. Black women, however, remained numerous in the churches, and supported their leaders through the emergence of auxiliary benevolent societies and in quiet, obedient forms of piety, similar to most white women. Just as white women gained a place in the public sphere through benevolence, so did black men in public processions and benevolent societies. These black men used a universal language of unity, which mirrored colonial-era church language, but like those earlier forms masked the strongly middle-class and masculine identities of the actors.

This chapter shows that southern black gay men's lives are no different from other black southerners' lives. They are full of memories, both good and bad, that speak to the region's fraught history and its relation to the rest of the country. The narrators in this book speak with candor about being children of the South—of the joy of having open fields to run and play in; the comfort of southern food, family gatherings, and church functions; the onerous nature of family chores and the strain of witnessing family dramas; dealing with homophobia and experiencing racism and segregation. The chapter title is from the description of his Southern childhood by Gerome, one of the narrators quoted: “When I stop now and look back at it . . . it's like some bitter and some sweet.”

Slavery in Maryland died during the 1860s, but for all of their promise the changes also brought heartbreak. As Chapter 7 shows, black men’s acquisition of a fuller bundle of property rights and legal protections brought them into conflict with the very criminal justice system built to guard those rights and ensure those protections. White commentators scoffed at black men’s supposed indolence and bristled at their households’ apparent disorder; police officers arrested black Baltimoreans for an expanding list of crimes; and black people, black men in particular, were incarcerated at growing rates. During the years immediately following the Civil War, Baltimore’s policemen and prisons perpetrated a form of racial violence that was different from yet indicative of the violence inflicted by the old order’s vigilantes. Castigated as criminals, freedmen’s legal victories provoked a form of policing reserved for the truly free.