I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10029270 |
|---|---|
| Authors | H Graham (Princeton University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 92 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1506-1507 |
| Publication date | 2006-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/4486019 |
| OpenAlex | W2316889905 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
Steve Estes's I Am a Man!, the first monograph to explore the impact of the civil rights movement on notions of manhood, is a well-conceptualized and engagingly written narrative study of the subject. Each of the book's main chapters, which can be read together or individually, explores a discrete topic pertaining to a period in the civil rights struggle, from World War II to the rise of the Black Panther party. Much of the material covered in the book will be familiar to civil rights specialists, especially the chapters on World War II, Freedom Summer, and Malcolm X. Estes's primary interest is gendered language. The book examines how both black and white men deployed “masculinist” rhetoric to assert male power, to court potential allies, and to stigmatize adversaries as an inferior class of men. A strength of the book is that Estes does not limit his analysis of “race” and the movement to African American men. Analyzing articles from the Citizens' Council's eponymous newspaper, the author shows that segregationists, worried about implementation of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, articulated their fears of a changing social order in gendered language. They warned fellow white men that moderation would usher in a day in which interracial sex between black men and white women was commonplace. Segregationist academics also entered the fray, inventing pseudoscientific theories about black men being sexual predators, while outspoken politicians red-baited civil rights advocates, denigrating them as subversives and effeminate men
Art · Black Power · Civil rights · Literature · Narrative · Newspaper · Political science · Power (physics · Racism · Rhetoric · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Theology · White (mutation · White supremacy · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society
| Citations per year | 0.39 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2008 - 2023 (16) |
| Highly cited | No |