Title: Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom
Author: Elsa Barkley Brown
Year of Publication: 1994
Thesis:
Brown argues that the focus on Black masculinity as the center of African American freedom has its roots in nineteenth-century political dynamics within the Black community. Drawing on extensive literature and research, she opens her article by offering an example of women advocating a role in voting in and out deacons at the First African Church in Richmond, VA. Rather than the loss of male power taken up by women (see: Glenda Gilmore's dissertation "Gender and Jim Crow," 1992), Brown sees an internal shift within the Black community as more significant.
Time: Late 19th century
Geography: Richmond, VA
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Historiography:
"Much of the literature on Reconstruction portrays freed African Americans as rapidly and readily adopting a gendered private-public dichotomy. Much of the literature on the nineteenth-century public sphere constructs a masculine liberal bourgeois public with a female counterpublic." (109) References Jones - Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow & other more mainstream works (Foner's Reconstruction, for example)
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"Women in First African and in other arenas were seeking in the late-nineteenth century not a new authority but rather a lost authority, one they now often sought to justify on a distinctively female basis." (108)
"This exploration suggests how the ideas, process, meanings and practice of freedom changed within late-nineteenth-century southern African American communities and what the implications of those changes may be for our visions of freedom and for the possibilities of African American community in the late-twentieth century." (108)
"...many African Americans have come to link a history of repression and racial violence exclusively to challenges to black masculinity and thus to establish a notion of fredom and black liberation which bifurcates public discussion privileges men's history and experiences." (145)
"The idea of sexual danger had been a part of the Reconstruction era discourse, as evidenced in the mass indignation meetings and testimonies. Then, however, it was constructed as a matter of general interest, part of the general discussion of the repression of African Americans. Now a more clearly gendered discourse developed where violence against men was linked to state repression and the struggle against it to fredom and violence against women became a matter of specific interst, increasingly eliminated from the general discussions." (140, footnote 59)
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