Crossroads at Clarksdale

Françoise N. Hamlin's study of the civil rights movement in Clarksdale, Mississippi, is a beautifully written book, strong in its ability to capture the different organizing strategies pursued in one community. In Clarksdale, readers see how personality, class, sexism, and gender shaped local organizing. Hamlin uses the lives of two leaders: Aaron Henry, the well-known president of the state's first chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), and Vera Mae Pigee, the less familiar secretary of the naacp and a local beautician. Both Henry and Pigee were “architects” of the movement's foundation, says Hamlin, and without them, a mass movement would not have been possible (p. 10). However, they reflected different strategies that often led to conflicts within the community. Henry represented the middle-class, educated, hierarchical, male leadership that allowed him to rise to national prominence within the civil rights movement. Although he was president of the local naacp chapter, he also worked with all of the other civil rights organizations. Pigee symbolized a different form of leadership—“activist mothering”—rooted in the poor and working-class community (p. 61). Pigee organized naacp youth councils that were the backbone of the local freedom struggle as it emerged in the 1960s. Unlike Henry, she moved in community circles and shunned other organizations. As Hamlin notes, Pigee's “invisibility enabled her to work locally and utilize female-centered spaces like her own beauty salon to organize, but that same invisibility denied her any credit when her colleague took center stage” (p. 88). Hamlin argues that “Henry was not able to do what Pigee did—he was not plugged into the same networks in the community that facilitated organizing at the grassroots level” (ibid.). But “she could not access his networks, which enabled him to receive the mantle of formal leadership in the national spotlight” (ibid.). Both leaders did important work and both had egos that clashed frequently

Beauty · Civil rights · Invisibility · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society