Cherisse Jones-Branch. Crossing the Line

Cherisse Jones-Branch's Crossing the Line: Women's Interracial Activism in South Carolina during and after World War II joins a growing body of literature examining women's grassroots organizing to offer new perspectives on the history of African American social justice coalitions. Focusing on two civil rights issues in the state of South Carolina—voting rights and education—the author finds successes and limitations in the interracial alliance-building of women working in local branches of the United Council of Church Women (UCCW) and the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in the post–World War II South. Not surprisingly, she also finds that tensions between national and local leadership in significant ways shaped the contours of women's work to integrate southern institutions. This study fills important historiographical gaps; its focus on women's organizing distinguishes it from earlier voting rights studies at the same time that a South Carolina context adds nuance to previous work on women's interracial activism. Bringing a sustained gender analysis to the voting rights research of historians such as Steven Lawson and Peter Lau allows Jones-Branch to dig deeply into relationships between national and local organizers, evaluating their influence on southern social and political life. Building on Nancy Marie Robertson's organizational study of interracial activism in the national YWCA and Joyce Blackwell's treatment of the same topic in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Crossing the Line also provides insight into how integration policies created by board members residing largely in northern U.S. cities fared in the urban South. Liberal use of biographical profiles of activists Modjeska Simkins, Septima Clark, Jessie Daniel Ames, and Elizabeth Avery Waring, among others, helps to demonstrate the challenges women faced working in a state that following Reconstruction relied on race-baiting as a strategy to maintain social “order.” The author's far-reaching class analysis illustrates how race and class intersected to provide ideal footing for the de facto and de jure segregation that formed the underpinnings of Jim Crow.

Alliance · Context (archaeology) · Grassroots · Historiography · League · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · Voting · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies