I am a man!
Subtitle: race, manhood, and the civil rights movement
By: Steve Estes.
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Chapel Hill
Language: eng
Number of pages: 239
Subjects: African Americans -- Civil rights -- History -- 20th century; Civil rights movements -- United States -- History -- 20th century; African American civil rights workers -- Attitudes -- History -- 20th century; African American men -- Attitudes -- History -- 20th century; Rhetoric -- Political aspects -- United States -- History -- 20th century; Masculinity -- Political aspects -- United States -- History -- 20th century; Sex role -- Political aspects -- United States -- History -- 20th century; Sexism -- United States -- History -- 20th century; Racism -- United States -- History -- 20th century; United States -- Race relations
Description: The civil rights movement was first and foremost a struggle for racial equality, but questions of gender lay deeply embedded within this struggle. Steve Estes explores key groups, leaders, and events in the movement to understand how activists used race and manhood to articulate their visions of what American society should be. Estes demonstrates that, at crucial turning points in the movement, both segregationists and civil rights activists harnessed masculinist rhetoric, tapping into implicit assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality. Estes begins with an analysis of the role of black men in World War II and then examines the segregationists, who demonized black male sexuality and galvanized white men behind the ideal of southern honor. Later, he explores the militant new models of manhood espoused by civil rights activists and groups such as Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Black Panther Party. Reliance on masculinist organizing strategies had both positive and negative consequences, Estes concludes. Tracing these strategies from the integration of the U.S. military in the 1940s through the Million Man March in the 1990s, he shows that masculinism rallied men to action but left unchallenged many of the patriarchal assumptions that underlay American society. --Publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [217]-233) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : am I not a man and a brother?; title: Man the guns; title: A question of honor; title: Freedom summer and the Mississippi movement; title: God's angry men; title: The Moynihan report; title: I am a man! : the Memphis sanitation strike; title: "The baddest motherfuckers ever to set foot inside of history"; title: Conclusion : "the heartz of men."