256 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 15 illus., notes, bibl., index

$55.00 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8078-2929-5

Published in 1952, Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man chronicled the life of this unnamed protagonist, exploring the racial blind spot in the mind's eye of white America. In the first half of the twentieth century, racism forced African Americans to hide their true thoughts and identities, and it blinded whites to black humanity. For black men, such social subterfuge was all the more essential, because the ever-present threat of lynching for supposed sexual improprieties meant that their survival could depend on their ability to mask their masculinity. It thus behooved black men to become invisible, lest they become highly visible examples of the racial rules that governed American society. This posed a serious dilemma for black men who, like the protagonist of Ellison's novel, wanted to become activists or leaders in the crusade for racial equality. It also meant that white allies in this struggle worked with blinders that obscured some of the very problems they were trying to solve. These dilemmas had confounded the movement for racial equality from its inception.[1]

In the 1780s, the British Society for the Abolition of Slavery adopted as its official seal a woodcut of a kneeling slave above a banner that read: "Am I not a man and a brother?" By the middle of the 1800s, this illustration had graced the covers of countless abolitionist handbills in America. This image of an African man imploring an unseen master for his freedom came to symbolize the struggle for abolition of the "peculiar institution" in the nineteenth century. As the woodcut reveals, many white Americans, even abolitionists, expected African Americans to adopt a submissive posture of supplication when seeking emancipation. African American abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth did not beg for their freedom, however; they demanded it. And they left a heritage of untiring struggle that would inspire the modern civil rights movement. As eloquent as these African American abolitionists were in their advocacy of equal rights, they were not powerful enough to sway the paternalistic vision of emancipation held by many white abolitionists and lawmakers. These white leaders and their former opponents in the South would define and limit the rights of African American citizens after the Civil War. A century after emancipation, African Americans were still not truly free and equal citizens of the United States. Civil rights activists in the second half of the twentieth century sought to remedy this injustice. No longer willing to wait for an answer to the question, "Am I not a man and a brother?" they demanded freedom with the slogan, "I AM a Man!"[2]

The civil rights movement was first and foremost a struggle for racial equality, but questions of gender lay deeply embedded within this overtly racial conflict. From the outset, the African American quest for emancipation and equality in the United States was a struggle for recognition of black humanity and citizenship. In this sense, demands for recognition of black manhood were calls for an acknowledgment of the human rights of both black men and women. Yet men dominated the social and political arenas in which the struggle for rights took place, and this was reflected in the language used to discuss civil rights. The political philosophy of republican citizenship, which Americans originally borrowed from European Enlightenment thinkers, equated the "rights of man" with the rights of all citizens. Since men were the only voters in most nineteenth century political contests, voting rights and citizenship were directly linked to manhood. This connection between citizenship and manhood shaped the language, strategies and objectives of political and social reform. Like the political leaders of their respective times, abolitionists and civil rights activists also used a gendered language to call for white Americans to live up to the country's egalitarian ideals by recognizing the equal rights of all men regardless of the color of their skin. The gender component of their rhetoric was not simply a matter of semantics, however. In fact, the struggle for black equality since the era of slavery has also had specific implications for gender relations and gender identity in America. The "I AM a Man!" slogan represents a demand for recognition and respect of black manhood as well as black humanity. This demand, and the racial oppression that inspired it, reflect the ways that race and racism have contributed to our understanding of both black and white manhood in America.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, definitions of white manhood—and especially, southern white manhood—rested on mastery over plantations, farms, and households that contained numerous dependents. The legal status of dependence (the subordination of women, children, and slaves) defined white manhood and independence. The Virginians who led the revolt against "enslavement" to a despotic British monarch did so, in part, because they understood only too well what slavery and dependence meant. In 1776 these same men pledged "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" to the cause of independence from England. With few exceptions, citizenship, honor, and manhood in the young American nation would remain the exclusive purview of these white men and their white male progeny.[3]

Along with black women and white abolitionists, African American men struggled for independence on the fields of plantations and the fields of battle in a herculean effort to win emancipation. This struggle was often tied to their identity as men. Since slavery rested on the violent suppression of black bondsmen, black men in the antebellum period often spoke of physical confrontation with whites as a rite of passage into manhood. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass wrote about such a confrontation when describing his first fight for freedom. After winning a bloody, two-hour brawl with a white overseer, Douglass realized his own power and will to be free. "This battle with Mr. Covey," Douglass wrote, "was the turning point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence and inspired me again with a determination to be free." Slave revolts and escapes represented only two of the many forms of rebellion against bondage that imbued black men with a "resistant masculinity." The Civil War offered black men a chance to fight for their own freedom, for the liberation of all slaves, and for their manhood. The struggle for emancipation during the Civil War imparted a new sense of pride in black soldiers. When a white man asked one black Union soldier from South Carolina, "What are you, anyhow?" the soldier responded proudly, "When God made me I wasn't much, but I's a man now."[4]

In the tumultuous years that followed the Civil War, black men won citizenship, the vote, and political office only to see these things stripped from them in the waning years of the nineteenth century. Conferring equal citizenship and the vote, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments provided the legal and political foundations for black equality. Reconstruction established biracial political leadership in the South after the Civil War, but it did not insure that African Americans had the economic wherewithal to maintain independence from white landowners. Sharecropping allowed black families a certain amount of autonomy and distance from former masters and overseers, enabling black men to exercise authority in their households comparable to the limited patriarchy of white yeomen. Yet a cycle of debt to landlords and merchants produced grinding poverty and an equality of oppression for black and white people who worked the land. When the Populists and a small number of other progressive politicians attempted to organize these black and white farmers along class lines in the 1880s and 1890s, elite white southerners trumped this interracial alliance with white male supremacy. Adopting the rhetoric of civilization and manliness that pervaded American culture at the turn of the twentieth century, white southern men banded together across class lines, ostensibly to protect white women from "uncivilized" and "beastly" black men. White night riders, Klansmen, and state legislators hid behind the masks of chivalry and protection of white womanhood as they stole the vote from black men. Lynching, disfranchisement, and segregation solidified a social order in the American South based on white male supremacy. Race men and women such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells would fight against this tide of virulent racism that swept across the South and the nation in the first half of the twentieth century.[5]

Racial separation became the rule in southern society when the Supreme Court upheld segregation in its Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896. Segregation defined the region's labor market, educational system, worship patterns, recreational activities, and sexual mores. Wealthy white men manipulated the sense of racial loyalty inherent in segregation to undercut class solidarity between black and white workers, and all white men could use segregation to protect and control "their" women. Segregation offered no such protection for black women, however, for under the cover of darkness and even in the light of day, white men reserved the "right" to rape black women with impunity. Certainly, not all white men took advantage of this "right," but segregation buttressed the social structure that made such atrocities possible. In short, segregation supported a system that gave elite white men complete control over southern society, guaranteeing the allegiance of white women and working-class white men by offering them a sense of psychological superiority over their black neighbors and coworkers.[6]

Segregation's high walls also confined black men. For them, any transgression in the white world might lead to lynching or castration for supposed sexual improprieties. "You couldn't even smile at a white woman," a black man from rural Mississippi remembered. "If you did, you'd be hung from a limb." This terrifying period when the segregated social order became entrenched is often called the Jim Crow era, named after the character—really, a racist caricature of African American men—in blackface minstrel shows of the nineteenth century. Historians often refer to this time as the "nadir of race relations," because of the ghastly lynching campaign that reinforced white supremacy. From 1889 to 1922, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) calculated that 3,436 Americans were lynched, the majority of them African Americans and all but 83 of them men. Though accusations of rape were made in less than a third of the cases for which the "cause" of the vigilante justice was known, sexual assault by black men remained the popular justification for such lynchings. When around whites, especially white women, black men had to cloak their sexuality and mask their manhood for fear of trespassing on the race and gender prerogatives of white men. Benjamin Mays, a black South Carolina native who would become Martin Luther King Jr.'s mentor at Morehouse College, looked back on his upbringing during the Jim Crow era and concluded, "To exercise manhood, as white men displayed it, was to invite disaster."[7]

When black men and women confronted segregation and disfranchisement in the 1950s and 1960s, they contested white supremacy in the South and questioned long-held assumptions about race and gender in American society. During the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, one of the first major campaigns of the modern movement for racial equality, activists addressed the gender implications of civil rights protest. Rosa Parks, a local black activist who refused to abide by segregation on a Montgomery bus, initiated the boycott, but she and other organizers at first found it difficult to enlist the support of the city's black male ministers. One local leader who had supported the boycott from the beginning was E. D. Nixon. A union man and president of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, Nixon met with Montgomery's black ministers and chastised them for not publicly supporting the boycott begun by courageous women from their community. "We are acting like little boys," Nixon told the ministers, "and if we're afraid, we might as well just fold up right now. We must also be men enough to discuss [this] in the open… . We'd better decide if we're going to be fearless men or scared boys." Martin Luther King Jr. responded to Nixon's call to action, becoming the leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association and one of the most eloquent spokesmen of the civil rights movement. Another of the ministers who heeded Nixon's call that night, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, later noted that the struggle in Montgomery raised questions not only about black manhood but white manhood as well. When white city officials refused to desegregate the city's buses without a court order, Abernathy explained, "They could not appear to be giving in to black pressure. It was a matter of racial pride, their manhood."[8]

As the modern civil rights movement began, both white and black Americans shared basic definitions of manhood. Manhood entailed an economic, social, and political status ideally achievable by all men. A man was the head of his household: he made enough money to support his family as the primary if not the only breadwinner. He also had a political voice in deciding how his community, his state, and his country were run. Racism kept many men, especially working-class black men, from achieving these attributes of manhood. This was partly by design in that white men used racism to reduce competition for jobs, for political offices, and even for women. When overt racial discrimination in the South came under attack in the 1950s, southern white men used masculinist rhetoric to defend the privileges that whiteness and manhood had afforded them in the economic, political, and sexual spheres. It should come as no surprise, then, that some civil rights activists and their allies responded to this defense of white male supremacy by using masculinist strategies of racial uplift with the express goals of gaining economic autonomy, political power, and social status for black men.[9]

In contrast to feminism, which attempts to overturn social inequalities that result from gender discrimination, "masculinism" embraces the notion that men are more powerful than women, that they should have control over their own lives and authority over others. Masculinist rhetoric uses the traditional power wielded by men to woo supporters and attack opponents. It rallies supporters to a cause by urging them to be manly or to support traditional ideas of manhood. It challenges opponents by feminizing them, and therefore linking them to "weakness." When political leaders harness the power of masculinism to forward their agendas, they often simplify complex issues into binary oppositions, placing themselves and their allies in the dominant position. During the civil rights movement, masculinist rhetoric used by both sides served to obscure the questions of racial and economic equality that lay at the heart of the original struggle, complicating and sometimes conflating these issues with the related question of what it meant to be a man.[10]

Early accounts of the movement focused primarily on men without consciously acknowledging the role of women or gender in shaping the course of the struggle. Journalists who chronicled the movement in the 1950s and 1960s highlighted the actions of male leaders in civil rights organizations in part because chauvinism in the wider American culture led them to assume that men were the "natural" leaders of any movement or organization. For many years, civil rights historians replicated this bias, favoring male movement leaders in their narratives, despite the fact that women did much of the tough local organizing. Recently, civil rights scholars have reversed this trend, lauding the admirable achievements of movement women such as Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer. The analysis of gender in these accounts of the movement along with demonstrations by black men in events like the Million Man March raised important questions about the interplay between race and masculinity in struggles for black equality. How did participation in the American military affect black men's conceptions of themselves as men and as citizens? What role did these veterans play in the emerging movement for civil rights? What role did masculinity play in the strategic choices activists made—for instance, the choice between nonviolent protest and armed self-defense? How did notions of manhood shape the responses of southern leaders, federal policymakers, and Americans of all races to the movement? Finally, how did movement activists influence racial and gender identities in American society, and what can we learn from their experiences, both the triumphs and tribulations?[11]