front cover of Gender and the Civil Rights Movement
Gender and the Civil Rights Movement
Ling, Peter J
Rutgers University Press, 2004
This collection of nine essays analyzes the people, the protests, and the incidents of the civil rights movement through the lens of gender. More than just a study of women, the book examines the ways in which assigned sexual roles and values shaped the strategy, tactics, and ideology of the movement. The essays deal with topics ranging from the Montgomery bus boycott and Rhythm and Blues to gangsta rap and contemporary fiction, from the 1950s to the 1990s. Referring to groups such as the National Council of African American Men and events such as the Million Man March, the authors address male gender identity as much as female, arguing that slave/master relations from before the Civil War continued to affect Black masculinity in the postwar battle for civil rights. Whereas feminism traditionally deals with issues of patriarchy and prescribed gender roles, this volume shows how race relations continue to complicate sex-based definitions within the civil rights movement.
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The Georgia of the North
Black Women and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey
Hettie V. Williams
Rutgers University Press, 2024
The Georgia of the North is a historical narrative about Black women and the long civil rights movement in New Jersey from the Great Migration to 1954. Specifically, the critical role played by Black women in forging interracial, cross-class, and cross-gender alliances at the local and national level and their role in securing the passage of progressive civil rights legislation in the Garden State is at the core of this book. This narrative is largely defined by a central question:  How and why did New Jersey’s Black leaders, community members, and women in particular, affect major civil rights legislation, legal equality, and integration a decade before the Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas decision? In this analysis, the history of the early Black freedom struggle in New Jersey is predicated on the argument that the Civil Rights Movement began in New Jersey, and that Black women were central actors in this struggle. 
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