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Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina
Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina
Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina
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Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina

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In an in-depth community study of women in the civil rights movement, Christina Greene examines how several generations of black and white women, low-income as well as more affluent, shaped the struggle for black freedom in Durham, North Carolina. In the city long known as "the capital of the black middle class," Greene finds that, in fact, low-income African American women were the sustaining force for change.

Greene demonstrates that women activists frequently were more organized, more militant, and more numerous than their male counterparts. They brought new approaches and strategies to protest, leadership, and racial politics. Arguing that race was not automatically a unifying force, Greene sheds new light on the class and gender fault lines within Durham's black community. While middle-class black leaders cautiously negotiated with whites in the boardroom, low-income black women were coordinating direct action in hair salons and neighborhood meetings.

Greene's analysis challenges scholars and activists to rethink the contours of grassroots activism in the struggle for racial and economic justice in postwar America. She provides fresh insight into the changing nature of southern white liberalism and interracial alliances, the desegregation of schools and public accommodations, and the battle to end employment discrimination and urban poverty.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 13, 2006
ISBN9780807876374
Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina
Author

Christina Greene

Christina Greene is professor of African American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina.

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    Our Separate Ways - Christina Greene

    Table of Contents

    Title Page

    Copyright Page

    List of Illustrations

    Dedication

    Acknowledgments

    Abbreviations

    Introduction

    Chapter 1 - If You Want Anything Done, Get the Women and the Children: Fighting Jim Crow in the 1940s and 1950s

    Chapter 2 - A Few Still, Small Voices: Black Freedom and White Allies in the Doldrums

    Chapter 3 - The Sisters behind the Brothers: The Durham Movement, 1957–1963

    Chapter 4 - The Uninhibited Voice of the Poor: African American Women and Neighborhood Organizing

    Chapter 5 - Someday, . . . the Colored and White Will Stand Together: Organizing Poor Whites

    Chapter 6 - I Can’t Catch Everybody, but I Can Try: Black Power Politics, the Boycott, and the Decline of Neighborhood Organizing

    Chapter 7 - Visiting Ladies: Interracial Sisterhood and the Politics of Respectability

    Conclusion

    Epilogue

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Illustrations

    North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company building

    1950s classroom scene at DeShazor Beauty School

    White hecklers storming the Durham armory

    Mary Price and Louis Austin

    Rev. Douglas Moore serving Communion to youths who sat in at the Royal Ice Cream Parlor in 1957

    Demonstrations at Howard Johnson’s in May 1963

    Durham NAACP youth rally

    Black women housekeepers and cafeteria workers picketing at Duke University in April 1967

    Dilapidated houses typical throughout Durham’s low-income neighborhoods

    1966 demonstration in front of Abe Greenberg’s office

    Rubye Gattis

    Low-income black and white women at Durham’s Edgemont Community Center

    Ann Atwater and C. P. Ellis

    Howard Fuller at a protest march in downtown Durham the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated

    Malcolm X Liberation University

    Women-in-Action

    OUR SEPARATE WAYS

    111411535

    Women and the Black Freedom Movement

    in Durham, North Carolina CHRISTINA GREENE

    The University of North Carolina Press | Chapel Hill and London

    © 2005 The University of North Carolina Press

    All rights reserved

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    Designed by Barbara E. Williams

    Set in Quadraat and Scala type by BW&A Books, Inc.

    The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

    Parts of this book have been reprinted with permission in revised form from the following works: Christina Greene, ‘In the Best Interest of the Total Community’?: Women-in-Action and the Politics of Race and Class in a Southern Community, 1968–1972, Frontiers 16, no. 2/3 (1996): 190–217, University of Nebraska Press, and "‘. . . The New Negro Ain’t Scared No More!’: Black Women’s Activism in North Carolina and the Meaning of Brown," in From the Grass-Roots to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education and American Democracy, edited by Peter Lau (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Greene, Christina, 1951–

          Our separate ways : women and the Black freedom movement in Durham, North Carolina / Christina Greene.

          p. cm.

       Includes bibliographical references.

       ISBN 0-8078-2938-2 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-8078-5600-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

       eISBN : 9780807876374

       1. Durham (N.C.)—Race relations. 2. African Americans—Civil rights—North Carolina—Durham—History—20th century. 3. Civil rights movements—North Carolina—Durham—History—20th century. 4. African American women—North Carolina—Durham—Political activity—History—20th century. 5. Women, White—North Carolina—Durham—Political activity—History—20th century. I. Title

       F264.D9G74 2005

       323.1196'0730756563—dc22  2004024382

    cloth   09 08 07 06 05   5 4 3 2 1

    paper   09 08 07 06 05   5 4 3 2 1

    For Joan

    and

    For my father

    Acknowledgments

    I now understand why authors claim that books are never solitary, individual endeavors. This book is no exception. I have spent more than a decade researching and writing, revising and editing this manuscript in nearly a dozen cities and states. Along the way, I have been helped by countless individuals and institutions.

    My first debt is to the women and men who grace these pages. I am especially thankful to all those who generously shared their lives and stories with me. I hope I have captured even a small bit of their courage, dignity, perseverance, and commitment. Many of the individuals who participated in Durham’s black freedom struggle do not appear here—an unfortunate but unavoidable feature of a study of grassroots activism that, by its very nature, involved scores of people too numerous to name. Though they are anonymous, their contributions are no less valuable.

    My parents, Patricia Greene and the late James Greene, gave me early lessons in social justice. As a young girl, I had little interest in their fair-housing battles in New Jersey; and only shortly before he died did I learn that my father had joined freedom rides in the 1960s, helping to desegregate restaurants in Maryland. But the seeds they planted bore fruit in the evolution of my own political and intellectual commitments, and I am forever grateful to them both. My father, the first in his family to attend college, went on to receive a Ph.D.; he helped provide a home where ideas were important and professors were people with foibles and flaws just like everyone else. My mother also was the first in her family to earn a college degree, taking advantage of the free-tuition policy at Hunter College. She too dreamed of pursuing graduate work, but family and financial constraints as well as social conventions that frowned on married women and mothers pursuing doctoral degrees in the 1950s kept those dreams from becoming a reality. When I received my doctorate, she was so proud that she asked if she could frame a copy of my diploma. It still hangs on her bedroom wall. I shall always cherish my late maternal grandmother, Veronica Gibbons, a daughter of immigrants, whose stories of survival and resistance during the Depression and World War II inspired my own efforts to document the history of women’s efforts on behalf of their families and communities. My siblings, Jimmy, Claudia, Cathy, Susan, and Stephen, each in his and her own way, always believed in my abilities. My nieces and nephews have enriched my life immeasurably: Damien and Jenny, my sweethearts always, kept their promise and allowed me to finish the final editing process when they came for a summer visit; Brian and Steven don’t know how remarkable they are, but I do; Victoria and Tara inherited their mother Evangeline’s beauty, grace, and intelligence, and they light up my life. Allie Figueroa Greene, who became the daughter I never had, announced at age seven that her heroines were Rosa Parks and Wonder Woman, giving me hope that perhaps I too had planted some seeds.

    Over the years, I have had the good fortune to amass an amazing group of friends and colleagues who supported me and pushed me to think more carefully about the interplay of race, gender, and class dynamics. I was privileged to attend City College of New York, where I received a tuition-free college education and was introduced to women’s studies and the notion of class struggle, all within the context of New York City’s fractious multiracial politics. There I met the late Joan Kelly, whom I loved and admired and who set me on a life-changing quest to uncover the history of women. At Sarah Lawrence College Women’s History Graduate Program, which Joan Kelly and Gerda Lerner founded, I discovered under Gerda’s brilliant and demanding tutelage the centrality of race in American history. While I was working toward my master’s degree in women’s history, Jane Gould saw promise in me despite my lousy office skills and hired me at Barnard College Women’s Center, where I fought to unionize clerical workers and learned about bringing feminist scholarship to wider audiences. At the women’s center at Jersey City State College I discovered how working-class and low-income women of all races could merge campus and community concerns; the late Pat Kernodle’s heroic and unbending determination to secure an education against enormous odds, including a debilitating and ultimately fatal illness, touched my life profoundly, and I will never forget her. At Sarah Lawrence, I also met one of my most cherished friends—Bonnie Johnson. Bonnie brings extraordinary gifts to her life-long battle against all oppression, and our late-night talks helped me think more clearly about black women’s history and activism. Lisa Watson, my oldest and dearest friend, has stood by me through thick and thin, and she is more precious to me than she perhaps knows. Whether at carasa meetings or Berkshire Conferences, study group dinners or birthday bashes up the lake, Bonnie and Lisa remind me always of the power of women’s friendships.

    At Duke University I was blessed with the most wonderful group of faculty and fellow students anyone could imagine. I first came to Duke in the mid-1980s, not as a student, but as the project director for the Duke-UNC Center for Research on Women, thanks to Elizabeth Minnich, who convinced me to make another life-altering decision. At the Center I worked closely with Bill Chafe, an extraordinary human being. Before meeting and working with Bill, I couldn’t quite believe that this white guy had started the center, served as its academic director, and retained the friendship and respect of feminist scholars of all races, not only at Duke and the University of North Carolina, but across the country. While still at the Center, I returned to graduate school and Bill agreed to be my adviser, reading more chapter drafts than I’m sure he cares to remember, first for the dissertation and then for this book. Bill and Lorna Chafe, along with their now adult children, Jenny and Chris, opened their home and hearts to me and my family, and they are all dear friends. After leaving North Carolina, Chez Chafe in Chapel Hill became our home away from home, enabling me to complete the additional research for this book. Bill’s ability to maneuver these multiple roles and relationships is a testament to his enormous generosity of spirit, intellectual rigor, and capacity to live egalitarian social relationships in the midst of fighting for a world where these are the norm rather than the exception. Over lunch one day and several years before she came to Duke, Nancy Hewitt, along with Steve Lawson, helped me find the dissertation topic that became this book. Nancy has been a good friend over the years, always ready with sage advice and support. My dissertation committee—Bill Chafe, Nancy Hewitt, Ray Gavins, Barry Gas-par, and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (who gave me one of the best compliments I’ve ever received when she bestowed on me the title of honorary southerner)—helped steer me on the course that turned a dissertation into a book. Larry Goodwyn, Claudia Koonz, Syd Nathans, Kristen Neuschel, Bill Reddy, Anne Firor Scott, and Peter Wood taught me to think more broadly about history and historical problems. Faculty members Cynthia Herrup (at Duke) and Judith Bennett (at UNC) opened their home to the Duke and UNC Feminist Women’s History Group, which became a kind of contemporary salon where intellectual bonds between women students and faculty could be forged and nurtured; it is also the forum where I first presented my research for this book. I can’t conceive of a better group of graduate students: Herman Bennett, Nick Biddle, Leslie Brown, Mary Ellen Curtin, Kirsten Fischer, Jennifer Morgan, and Tim Tyson were a model of interracial solidarity, political commitment, and intellectual excitement. They made graduate school one of the richest and most rewarding experiences of my life, and they remain my closest friends still. Martha Jane Brazy, Rod Clare, Jackie Bindman Campbell, Ann Farnsworth-Olvear, Lisa Hazirjian, Janet Irons, Marjoleine Kars, Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Chuck McKinney, Kara Miles-Turner, Celia Naylor-Ojurongbe, and Annie Valk also became buddies and allies.

    My twelve years in Durham remain among the best of my life—the crew on Pennsylvania Avenue is unsurpassed. I will always be grateful to David Cecelski for inviting me to join him at the Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, where I worked with Eric Bates, Laura Benedict, Cynthia Brown, Christina Davis-McCoy, Meredith Emmett, Bob Hall, Mary Lee Kerr, Jim Lee, Isaiah Madison, Temma Okun, Len Stanley, Dimi Stephen, and Sharon Ugochukwu and learned first-hand about the on-going southern movement for racial and economic justice.

    At the University of South Florida, where I began to turn my dissertation into a book, I had the good fortune of landing among another group of wonderful colleagues who soon became friends: Giovanna Benadusi and Fraser Ottanelli (with whom I shared parenting tips and who are still my comrades in arms), Carolyn DePalma, Laura Edwards, Carolyn Eichner, Kennan Ferguson, Susan Fernandez, Kirsten Fischer, Alejandro de la Fuente, John McKeirnan Gonzalez, Gurleen Grewal, Bob and Joelle Ingalls, Rebecca Johns, Steve Johnson, Shreeram Krishnaswami, Phil Levy, Bill and Suzanne Murray, Ella Schmidt, Ward Stavig, and Kelly Tipps, all made Florida far more than just a tropical paradise. Participants in the Department of History’s Faculty and Graduate Seminar provided insightful comments about portions of chapter 3. Ray Arsenault and Gary Mormino also took an interest in my work and helped along the way. My graduate students Michele Alishahi, Caitlin Crow-ell, Gordon Mantler, Lee Irby, Pam Iorio (who became mayor of Tampa), Carl Parke, and Jason Vickers made me remember why I wanted to be a historian and teacher. I am also grateful for having found Rev. Warren Clark, Julian Cunningham, and the wonderfully eclectic congregation at First United Church of Tampa, a rare interracial, open and affirming faith community committed to the ongoing struggle for peace and justice.

    I have presented earlier versions of many of the chapters from this book at professional conferences and received thoughtful comments and suggestions from a host of people including Eileen Boris, Albert Broussard, Connie Curry, Davison Douglas, Adam Fairclough, Gerald Gill, Michael Honey, Michael Klarman, Bob Korstad, Peter Lau, Chana Kai Lee, Annelise Orleck, Charles Payne, Jacqueline Rouse, Stephanie Shaw, and Pat Sullivan. I am especially grateful to Charles Payne, who has commented on several papers and provided insightful critiques and encouragement. Although they may not know it, Darlene Clark Hine and Millicent Brown asked probing questions that spurred me to think more critically about my material. Rhonda Williams took time away from her own book to offer extensive comments on chapter 4. Conversations over the years with Leslie Brown, Laurie Green, Kathy Nasstrom, and Rhonda Williams sharpened my thinking about black women’s activism. Ned Kennington, my former next-door neighbor and slayer of dragons both real and imagined, helped bring me up to date on Durham politics as I was rewriting the epilogue. Any errors or misinterpretations, of course, are mine alone.

    As I completed the final manuscript, my colleagues in the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin—Sandy Adell, Jim Danky, Frieda High, Stanlie James, Robert Livingston, Nellie McKay, Richard Ralston, Michael Thornton, Tim Tyson, Bill Van Deburg, and Craig Werner—provided the kind of collegial atmosphere that every scholar envisions. Robin Brooks was a diligent research assistant, and I am grateful for all she did. The graduate students at UW—John Adams, Maria Bibbs, Mat Blanton, Robin Brooks, Tessa Desmond, Jerome Dotson, Tanisha Ford, Dave Gilbert, Michelle Gordon, Kori Graves, Brenna Greer, Helen Hoguet, Charles Hughes, Sherry Johnson, David La Croix, Rhea Lathan, Holly McGee, Story Matkin-Rawn, Lydia Melvin, Crystal Moten, Eric Pritchard, Kate Slattery, Tyina Step-toe, Zoe Van Orsdol, and Shannen Williams—remind me continuously about the importance of the work we all do. Two colleagues in particular, Tim Tyson and Craig Werner, gave invaluable assistance. Not only are they the founding members of Madison’s infamous Harmony Bar Writers Collective, which I was invited to join, but both read multiple chapter drafts and offered their expert literary skills as well as their broad knowledge of African American history and culture. Craig Werner is without question the most generous and skilled editorial critic I have ever come across; he read the entire manuscript twice, and words cannot express my gratitude. And Tim Tyson is always ready to prop up a beleaguered writer with his legendary chicken and ribs and a splash of bourbon (or a mean gin and tonic) . . . what more can I say!

    Jean Boydston, Jeannie Comstock, Suzanne Desan, Nan Enstad, Anne Enke, Barbara Forrest, Steve Kantrowitz, Gerda Lerner, Trina Messer, and especially Perri Morgan provided a warm welcome to the freezing Midwest and made the transition from Florida to Wisconsin and the completion of this book a whole lot easier and more fun.

    Every researcher depends on the professionalism and generosity of archivists, and I have run across some of the best. At each of the archives listed in the bibliography, the staff offered invaluable help. I am most grateful to those who granted me access to unprocessed materials: Bill Erwin, Linda McCurdy, and Janie Morris at the Special Collections Library at Duke University; John White at the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and especially Doris Terry Williams at the Hayti Heritage Center at North Carolina Central University, who allowed me unrestricted access to the original tape recordings of the Black Solidarity Committee meetings and to the unprocessed Floyd McKissick Papers. Bill Boyarsky, Lynn Richardson at the Durham County Library, Janie Morris and Eleanor Mills at Duke, Keith Longiotti at the North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, and Steve Massengill at the North Carolina State Archives were especially helpful in securing photographs.

    I was fortunate to receive an AAUW fellowship when I was writing my dissertation. A two-year internship at the Special Collections Library at Duke provided much-needed financial support at a crucial point during the dissertation. Steve Lawson and Bill Link offered me a full-time instructor position at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, enabling me to finish the dissertation. Summer research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of South Florida, and the University of Wisconsin allowed me to conduct additional archival research and oral histories and to complete the final editing process for the book. A small travel grant from the Institute of Black Life at the University of South Florida provided additional support.

    The University of North Carolina Press boasts a superb cast of characters. Kate Torrey, David Perry, and especially my editor, Chuck Grench, gave steady support and encouragement. Several anonymous readers offered helpful suggestions. At crucial points, David Perry and Chuck Grench in particular refused to stop believing in this book, and I will always be grateful to them both. Ruth Homrighaus provided excellent copyediting assistance, while Paula Wald and Amanda McMillan steered the book through production.

    First, last, and forever are my boys—Jim Conway and our son, Dylan. Both have lived with this project for more years than is reasonable to ask of any family. Dylan has spent his entire life wondering how one person could possibly spend so much time writing one book and is sure it must be well over a thousand pages by now. Their love and support—including Jim’s cheerful willingness to take on more than half of the household and childcare tasks—have kept me grounded and ever mindful of what is most important.

    Abbreviations

    AAUW American Association of University Women

    AFL American Federation of Labor

    AME African Methodist Episcopal

    BSC Black Solidarity Committee for Community Improvement

    CAN Congregations, Associations, and Neighborhoods

    CIO Congress of Industrial Organizations

    CNC Committee for North Carolina (state chapter of the SCHW)

    CORE Congress of Racial Equality

    CWJ Concerned Women for Justice

    DCNA Durham Committee on Negro Affairs

    DIC Durham Interim Committee

    EPO Experiment in Parallel Organization

    ERAP Economic Research and Action Project

    FCD Foundation for Community Development

    HUAC House Un-American Activities Committee

    KKK Ku Klux Klan

    LDEF Legal Defense and Education Fund (of the NAACP)

    LWV League of Women Voters

    NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

    NCC North Carolina College for Negroes (North Carolina College at Durham from 1947 to 1969; currently North Carolina Central University)

    NCF North Carolina Fund

    OBT Operation Breakthrough

    OEO Office of Economic Opportunity

    PTA Parent-Teacher Association

    SCHW Southern Conference for Human Welfare

    SCLC Southern Christian Leadership Conference

    SDS-ERAP Students for a Democratic Society–Economic Research and Action Project

    SNCC Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee

    SSOC Southern Student Organizing Committee

    TWIU Tobacco Workers International Union

    TWUA Textile Workers Union of America

    UDI United Durham Incorporated

    UNC-CH University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

    UOCI United Organizations for Community Improvement

    WIA Women-in-Action for the Prevention of Violence and Its Causes

    WILPF Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

    YWCA or Y Young Women’s Christian Association

    Introduction

    In 1931, Julia Lucas left her birthplace in Warren County, a rural, predominantly black area of North Carolina, and made her way fifty miles south to Durham. In less than a century, the Bull City had grown from a railroad depot established in 1854 to become the tobacco center of the world. The sharp, sweet smell of flue-cured tobacco wafted from the gigantic red brick warehouses downtown; people liked to joke that it smelled like money. The manufacturing success of the Piedmont’s brightleaf tobacco industry soon brought textiles to the city, and between 1890 and 1930 scores of black and white women, often outnumbering men, flooded to Durham’s factories and mills. Tobacco money fueled the establishment of a white professional class as well, and in 1925 the prominent Duke tobacco family transformed Trinity College, affiliated with the Methodist Church, into Duke University. In a sense, Julia Lucas had moved from an old South to a new one.¹

    But Durham was not just a New South industrial city with a university. When Julia Lucas arrived, she discovered a small black business elite centered around the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the largest black-owned financial institution in the country. The Mutual’s success had drawn praise from both Booker T. Washington and W. E. B Du Bois, legendary (though opposed) black leaders. In the 1920s, a leading sociologist named Durham the capital of the black middle class.²

    When she arrived, Julia Lucas quickly embraced some of the leading institutions of the black capital. She enrolled at North Carolina College for Negroes (NCC), the first publicly funded black liberal arts college in the South.³ She also joined White Rock Baptist Church, the largest and most prestigious black church in town, which once again was looking for a new minister. Bypassing Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the flamboyant young minister from Harlem—the elder churchwomen thought his cream-colored trousers and flashy jacket were a bit too sporty—White Rock selected the lettered son of another prestigious minister, Rev. Miles Mark Fisher, who remained for over thirty years. The young minister had been influenced by Ida B. Wells’s settlement movement in Chicago, and he knew that Durham’s small black business elite and professional class had done little to diminish the poverty that most blacks endured. In a style both erudite and soothing, Fisher exhorted his flock to embrace a social gospel ministry somewhat at odds with their comfortable social position. Before long, tobacco workers were praising the Lord alongside wealthy executives, and the church was sponsoring a wide range of community programs and services.⁴

    Julia Lucas no doubt felt at home with Fisher’s mix of old-time religion, social gospel, and advanced degrees, for she also straddled two worlds. Durham’s black tobacco workers, day laborers, and maids frequented the barbershop and pool hall she opened with her husband just before World War II. Every dime I made, I made it off of those people, she said of Durham’s African American working class. Lucas also joined the ranks of organized black women, participating in a wide range of civic and voluntary associations from the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Volkamenia Literary Society. The literary club, which boasted a female majority, functioned as a kind of salon where members gathered to discuss current issues. The group also sponsored a newspaper reading circle that taught literacy skills with an eye toward increasing black voter registration.⁵ During the 1940s, Lucas occasionally ventured across the racial divide for annual prayer services with white women’s groups. Nearly fifty years later, Julia Lucas still remembered the white women who had worshipped beside her but found it impossible to greet her on the street. We had our little . . . World Day of Prayer. And we always had black and white women, she recalled. But then we would go our separate ways.

    In Edgemont, where poor whites fared little better than the masses of Durham blacks, World War II pushed nineteen-year-old Bascie Hicks into one of the city’s several textile mills. There, Bascie met her future husband and joined the Textile Workers Union of America (TWUA), a Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) union. One day, a black man, out of work, out of luck, and with a family to feed, stopped by the mill. The boss man told the man he could not hire him because he was black, Hicks recalled. Reared in the Jim Crow South and well-versed in the ways of the racial caste system, she kept quiet, but the injustice gnawed at her. I wonder now why I didn’t say anything, she mused years later.⁷ Both Bascie Hicks and Julia Lucas would have another chance to reach across the chasm that divided white and black as they and their descendants acted on the possibility of creating a different kind of Durham.

    In 1965, Julia Lucas’s daughter, Charsie Hedgepath, and a brilliant young community organizer, Howard Fuller, knocked on Ann Atwater’s door. Atwater was a single mother of two, behind on the rent in a house that was leanin’ toward the street . . . with broken boards . . . [and leaks in] the bathroom. When the water ran, it would shoot up. . . . My kids called it Niagara Falls, Atwater remarked. Something about Hedgepath and Fuller’s suggestion that collective action could help solve her problems struck a chord. Within a few years, Atwater became one of the most respected community organizers in black Durham and a veritable expert on public housing regulations. Charsie Hedgepath continued to organize neighborhood councils through Durham’s antipoverty agency, Operation Breakthrough (OBT), and low-income black women soon formed their own neighborhood federation, United Organizations for Community Improvement (UOCI), which mounted a protracted campaign against the city’s white power brokers. During a demonstration outside a slumlord’s home, one picket had the audacity to direct a message to the man’s wife: My Children Sleep With Rats, Mrs. Greenberg, the picket sign announced to the neighbors.

    By the late 1960s, Charsie Hedgepath found herself the secretary of the Black Solidarity Committee (BSC), a cross-class Black Power community alliance that launched a seven-month boycott of white downtown merchants. During the boycott, Hedgepath’s mother, Julia Lucas, and Blue Greenberg, wife of the notorious white slumlord, worked together in a new biracial women’s organization, Women-in-Action for the Prevention of Violence and Its Causes (WIA). WIA had been established in 1968 by Elna Spaulding, wife of the retired president of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. Lucas tried to move the largely middle-class, biracial WIA membership beyond its class-based politics of respectability, while a white woman urged the members to form dialogue groups with the Mrs. Atwaters or else risk becoming just another group of visiting ladies.

    Bascie Hicks also played her part in the racial politics of the mid- to late 1960s. Drawing on several earlier efforts to organize poor whites, Bascie, her husband, Doug, and their daughter, Theresa, helped form a new organization called act, which organizers hoped might lay the foundation for a biracial movement of the poor. Someday, I don’t know when, the colored and white will stand together, Hicks insisted. Her prediction soon bore fruit, if only in small ways. In 1968, when a local black woman appealed to Hicks to join the Edgemont health clinic, a community-controlled endeavor, Hicks agreed to serve on its board. Her symbolic action reassured local whites, and the clinic became one of the most successful cooperative efforts among low-income blacks and whites in Durham.¹⁰

    As might be expected, these moves toward freedom were not made without conflict. Ann Atwater may have been one of the most respected community organizers in town, but her patience had limits. After C. P. Ellis, a local Klansman and Edgemont resident, spewed forth racial epithets at a 1968 city council meeting, Atwater lunged at him with her knife in hand, hoping to silence him forever. Fortunately for both Atwater and her target, Atwater’s friends physically restrained her. A few years later, however, Ann Atwater and C. P. Ellis formed an unlikely alliance. The knife-wielding black mother and the iconoclastic Klansman agreed to head up a local committee designed to ease school desegregation. Before long, Ellis left the Klan, and the ex-Klansman and the black community organizer became good friends. I begin to see, here we are, two people from the far ends of the fence, havin’ identical problems, except her being black and me bein’ white, C. P. said. Weeping as he spoke, Ellis explained his transformation: From that moment on, I tell ya, that gal and I worked together good. . . . I begin to love the girl, really, he admitted.¹¹

    Such are the vagaries and mysteries of race in America. As these stories suggest, southerners well understood that the color line that defined their worlds was less a rigid demarcation than a fluid, permeable marker. Following World War II, some believed the color line might finally be eradicated. The war heightened black expectations for redress of age-old grievances and fueled the expansion of black women’s organizations as well as women’s membership in the local NAACP. From formal groups like the Housewives League to informal networks forged in churches, beauty parlors, and drink houses, black women used their new organizational base to press for freedom.

    The interracial women’s fellowship that beckoned Julia Lucas underlined the limitations as well as the possibilities of the postwar years. The world into which you and I were born is no more, writer Lillian Smith warned an interracial audience in Durham five years after the war ended. The white Georgian visionary called for a presidential proclamation immediately ending segregation, though she knew it would be akin to the dropping of the atom bomb.¹² Most white southerners clung to segregation, and the timorous few who dissented did so hesitantly. But black women grew increasingly frustrated with their cautious white sisters. By the 1950s, they began to insist on full inclusion in groups like the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA, or Y), the American Association of University Women (AAUW), the League of Women Voters (LWV), and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). During the repressive years of the Cold War, when an incipient progressive, interracial movement collapsed and white supremacist violence surged forward, mainstream women’s organizations in the region were sorely tested. Within such groups, black and white women, often timidly and haltingly, tried to keep alive a vision of racial equality. But in the face of only limited progress, black women more often worked in concert with black men than with white women, and Louis Austin, Floyd McKissick, and Howard Fuller, among others, were indispensable to Durham’s African American freedom struggle.

    When direct action erupted in the 1960s, black women’s organizational bases helped to sustain the movement. Drawing on community organizing efforts initiated during the local NAACP school desegregation lawsuits of the late 1950s, women organizers mobilized their networks to demand an end to segregated public facilities and to push for expanded job opportunities. After the mid-1960s, as the freedom movement focused more intently on poverty, low-income black women utilized their numbers and their organizing skills to shape the direction of black protest. At times, black and white women reached across the racial divide to forge fragile interracial alliances, even during the height of the Black Power movement. Indeed, some African American women embraced black nationalism and racial integration simultaneously, sometimes within the same organization.

    The story of Durham’s black freedom movement is not unlike that of countless towns and cities, especially in the Upper South. Many of the broader themes in this story resonate with the history of the struggles that swept the region in the years after World War II. Too often, however, the women who participated in those struggles have remained invisible, elusive, or unappreciated despite the oft-quoted observation of a civil rights activist nearly twenty-five years ago: It’s no secret that young people and women led organizationally.¹³ As one scholar confirmed in a recent history of the black freedom movement, Women took civil rights workers into their homes of course, but women also canvassed more than men, showed up more frequently at mass meetings and demonstrations and more frequently attempted to register to vote.¹⁴ Yet a curious anomaly has prevailed. Despite the lip service given to women’s importance, their participation has received little scholarly attention until very recently. It is not simply that women’s contributions have been inadequately examined.¹⁵ More importantly, analysis of women’s activism suggests new ways of understanding protest, leadership, and racial politics. The inclusion of women, especially African American women, in this history demands an entire rethinking of a movement that changed forever a region and a nation. Our Separate Ways is one attempt to provide that perspective, to tell that story.

    1

    If You Want Anything Done,

    Get the Women and the Children

    Fighting Jim Crow in the 1940s and 1950s

    Ersalene Williams must have jumped at the chance to earn a few dollars that summer day in July of 1952. Simply living in Durham, the capital of the black middle class, did not put money in the pockets of an unemployed African American woman. Little of the post–World War II prosperity that swept the nation had found its way to the inhabitants of the unpaved streets and dilapidated houses that made up most of black Durham. So when Thomas Wilbert Clark, a white resident, asked Mrs. Williams if she could help his wife with some household chores, she readily agreed.¹

    When Mrs. Williams arrived at the Clark home, however, Clark’s wife was nowhere in sight. Without warning, Thomas Clark pounced on the unsuspecting Williams. When she rebuffed his pawing, he offered her money for what the press called immoral purposes. The horrified Williams kicked and screamed as Clark dragged her into the bedroom, tossed her on the bed, and got on top of her. During a frantic struggle, Mrs. Williams managed to free herself and escape. Thomas Clark soon appeared at her door to apologize. He had been drinking, he explained. Couldn’t they just forget the whole thing? When Williams refused, Clark returned with two white detectives, perhaps hoping to intimidate her; but the ploy backfired, and Ersalene Williams swore out a warrant for Clark’s arrest.² White male privilege was not so easily curtailed, however. Later on in the day, two other white men came to my home and offered me money to compromise, Williams reported. They stated that I would gain nothing because [Clark] would probably [not get more] than 30 days.³

    The assault on Ersalene Williams typified the sexualized racial violence that had plagued African American women for centuries. Slavery had maintained its grip by abrogating black women’s control of their own bodies while simultaneously denying black men both the ability to protect black women and any other claims to conventional notions of masculinity. The end of slavery had not eradicated these arrangements, and black women too often were forced to rely upon their own efforts for protection and redress of grievances.⁴ Tellingly, Durham’s traditional black male leadership—perhaps out of class snobbery, but undoubtedly wary of the volatile mixture of race, sex, and violence in the case—remained silent in the wake of the attack on Ersalene Williams. The Carolina Times, Durham’s black weekly, denounced black men’s lethargy and excuses while praising a small local group of African American women, the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, for rallying behind the unemployed Ersalene Williams.⁵ Headed by a Duke Hospital worker and the wife of a local tobacco worker, the left-leaning Sojourners for Truth pointed to a renewed organizational impulse among black women that had emerged during World War II and its aftermath.⁶

    It was not the first time that the Carolina Times’s fiery editor, Louis Austin, had castigated Durham’s black male elite for its timidity. Nor was it the first time that black men recognized women’s collective abilities. If you want anything done, get the women and the children, a local NAACP official had declared two years earlier.⁷ Sojourners for Truth itself may have yielded little sway among Bull City power brokers, yet its public support for Ersalene Williams symbolized both the legacy of African American women’s community work and the growing importance of black women’s organizations in Durham’s burgeoning African American freedom movement. Usually invisible to the white public and too often unappreciated within the black community, African American women’s wartime activity laid the foundation for the freedom struggle of the 1960s, in which female activists frequently outnumbered men.⁸

    World War II and Black Women’s Organized Activity

    Indeed, during World War II, Durham witnessed an upsurge in black women’s organized activity, a response to both the hardships and the opportunities created by the war. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, African American women increasingly added both their voices and their numbers to the growing demand for black freedom. The experiences of the war, both at home and abroad—and especially the racially motivated murder of a black soldier on a Durham bus in 1944—exacerbated class and ideological divisions among Durham’s black leaders. Much of the conflict centered in the local NAACP. The question became which brand of leadership would ascend in the postwar years, the old accommodationist brand exemplified by the traditional black business elite or the new militancy spurred by the exigencies of war. Although the battle between the old guard and the militants usually did not involve African American women directly, it provided space for women’s organizations to join the new black insurgency.

    Class and political divisions among Durham’s black residents were hardly a new phenomenon, despite the fact that class lines among African Americans were always somewhat permeable.¹⁰ Durham’s reputation as a center for the black bourgeoisie reflected the remarkable success of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the largest black financial institution in the world, and the host of African American businesses that grew up around the Mutual. Within the constraints of Jim Crow, Durham’s black business elite frequently negotiated behind the scenes with white power brokers on behalf of the larger black community.¹¹ Embedded in this arrangement was an element of social control; white largesse was offered in exchange for racial peace and quiescence among the black masses.¹²

    While significant numbers of African Americans had never been comfortable with this arrangement of quasi-paternalism, World War II both aggravated differences of opinion about race strategy and enhanced black women’s organizational base. The war strengthened existing women’s groups and spurred the creation of new organizations, though this expansion drew on a historic tradition of black women’s community work.¹³ Organized activity included not only formal organizations but more informal settings—family and community gatherings and even leisure activities—in which women established social and political networks. Black women’s group activity throughout the 1940s and 1950s, whether benevolent, social, or overtly political, strengthened personal bonds and provided critical space for the development of a collective identity.¹⁴ As the freedom movement swelled, women’s networks furnished a crucial organizational base for mobilizing mass protests.¹⁵

    Black women’s organized activity was also class based. Although class lines were somewhat fluid in Durham’s black community, the middle class had a more formal style of organizing, especially through voluntary associations. Middle-class women formed the Harriet Tubman branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association, a local chapter of the National Council of Negro Women, the links Incorporated, and a branch of the National Housewives League, along with church groups, sororities, literary societies, social clubs, and mothers’ clubs.¹⁶

    Notwithstanding these middle-class organizational bastions, an exclusively female organizational base may have been even more pronounced in working-class neighborhoods, where both men and women frequently perceived community work as women’s work. For example, black women tobacco workers in Durham often lived in the same neighborhoods and attended the same churches, where they formed a majority of their congregations and led usher boards, missionary circles, and Sunday schools. These networks established a basis for female solidarity and a form of black sisterhood within Durham’s African American communities.¹⁷ Although women tobacco workers were active in union locals in Durham—even holding leadership positions in the early years—they remained ambivalent about the Tobacco Workers International Union (TWIU), an American Federation of Labor (AFL) union.¹⁸ Unlike nearby Winston-Salem’s less hierarchical CIO tobacco union, where black women were a dominant force, the Durham TWIU remained male dominated and male centered. White male union officials in the national TWIU office were especially patronizing toward black women.¹⁹ But the most decisive factor in black women’s ambivalence toward the union was the men’s failure to address their concerns. Black women refused to back a 1939 tobacco workers’ strike after black male tobacco workers chose to form an alliance with white male workers and then failed to include black women’s grievances in the strike demands. The women’s complaints were echoed repeatedly by the Carolina Times, which accused African American labor leaders of complacency and ineptitude in behalf of their members. Black working-class women were equally dismissive of the pious attitudes of middle-class black women at the Tubman Y who tried unsuccessfully to develop programs for women tobacco workers in the 1940s.²⁰ Despite these difficulties, working-class women organized in neighborhood and church groups and strengthened community bonds at social gathering places including beauty parlors, corner grocery stores, and even drink houses and piccolo joints.²¹ Such networks in turn formed an important foundation for black community and church support of civil rights protest.

    The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, established in 1899, was the largest black-owned financial institution in the nation, and it helped give Durham its reputation as the capital of the black middle class. This was the home office building from 1921 to 1966. (Courtesy North Carolina State Archives)

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    By the 1950s, a wide array of women’s organizations in Durham had begun to take organizational memberships in the NAACP. When direct action protest broke out in 1960, the local NAACP had a majority female membership and large numbers of working-class members. In Durham, the NAACP, notably its youth and college chapters, galvanized the new direct action movement.²² Two decades of women’s community activism had laid the foundation. The origins of the 1960s direct action movement, therefore, can be found not simply in the more visible public demonstrations of black discontent or in the activities of black men in labor unions, churches, and the military but also among African American women in neighborhoods, community organizations, and NAACP branches throughout the South during the 1940s and 1950s.²³

    Camp Butner and the Double-V Campaign

    The federal government’s decision to construct Camp Butner, a 40,000-acre military training facility twelve miles north of Durham, had a dramatic impact on the Bull City.²⁴ When Butner opened in August 1942 with a population of 35,000—including about 7,500 African Americans—it was like a city within a city. Thousands of young soldiers and their families streamed into the area, intensifying the housing crunch but also providing a boost to the local economy. Bus routes were set up to transport

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