Deconstructing the Narrative of Black Motherhood: From the Civil Rights Movement to Community Control

• In Event: 390 - Section on Race, Gender and Class Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 07. Race, Gender, Class and the Sociology of Family

Abstract

During the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s, the nature of de facto segregation and demographic changes in Northern cities influenced many Northern black mothers to support the push for community control of school districts- a movement that was particularly strong in New York City and resulted in the creation of experimental school boards in Ocean Hill-Brownsville. Unfortunately, the literature on this issue overwhelmingly focuses on the breakdown of the Jewish-African-American alliance in the city. Little attention is devoted to the ways in which black mothers’ activism in Ocean Hill-Brownsville complicated the dominant narrative of black motherhood.

To many mainstream black leaders, the first step to achieving victory in the fight for civil rights was to change the public’s perception of blacks and use public support to push for reform. Ocean Hill- Brownsville mothers did not fit the “respectable” narrative however; the mothers who were elected as parent representatives of the school board, for instance, were welfare recipients and some did not have a standard education. Newspaper accounts and images drew a clear boundary between the typical civil rights woman and the Ocean Hill- Brownsville activists. Using newspaper accounts of the events, visual images, and relevant literature, I analyze the re-construction of black motherhood in the context of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville crisis. Excavating this forgotten piece in the history of community control will allow us to grasp the complexities of black female identity construction during the civil rights era and further demonstrate the agency women had in this process.

Author

• Vanessa Joi Paul, City University of New York-Graduate Center