֍ elle ֍’s Reviews > Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 > Status Update

Man, the later chapters of this book are a mess. A complete and total mess. I don’t think Gilmore does even nearly enough to delineate who is who and what is what. There’s 400 different boards, commissions, associations, clubs, and leagues to keep track of, all of which are just different configurations of the same core group of women. I’ve just totally given up on following any of this.

"Artificially excluded from the electoral realm, African Americans found that the rest of life took on a more political cast. Disfranchisement seemed to spur whites to vilify the African American family, putting the 'private' sphere in the middle of public life."

Brilliant observation. I'm so glad I'm going back and reading this book more carefully now.

"Higher education prepared black women for the world's work, not simply by showing them better ways to work but by showing them a better world."

"In the summer of 1893, black North Carolina college student William Fonvielle tossed a few clothes and a volume of Shakespeare into his valise and departed on a train through the lower South to experience these curiosities firsthand…Fonvielle’s journey is like a snapshot from the eye of a hurricane: a calm view of segregation-in-process."

"A black woman’s radicalizing experience almost always occurred at the moment she realized that racial exclusion precluded possibility. By the time black female children first encountered sexism, they were armed with an ideological paradigm: racism is wrong; therefore sexism is wrong."

"Oppression, whether on account of race or on account of sex, was all of a piece to Sarah Dudley Pettey since it sprang from the same sin: a hierarchical mind-set that violated Christian teachings. She linked race and sex discrimination closely… Her feminism was not just a response to patriarchy but a response to racial oppression as well."

"When an African American writer proposed 'affirming we are Americans, pure and simple,' Dudley Pettey retorted that if 'we [were] Americans pure and simple,' there 'would be no class legislation against us; there would be no need of separate schools and churches.' To Dudley Pettey, race prejudice worked like class prejudice: it created false divisions among worthy human beings."

"Finally, in 1872, at age twenty-three, he put on a pair of shoes he had made, dressed himself in a suit sewn from fabric he had spun, pocketed $95 in savings, and walked ninety miles to Charlotte to enroll in college."

"His daughter, Sarah, born in 1869, learned her political lessons at her father's knee. Members of Sarah's generation of African Americans were raised to expect full civil rights, a generational experience repeated only by those who came of age after the Voting Rights Act of 1965."

Oof, what a hard sentence to read.