Engendering Movement Memories:
Remembering Race & Gender in the Mississippi Movement
(Without Notes)
Steve Estes

When Stokely Carmichael joked in 1964 that the only position for women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was “prone,” the women and men gathered around him simply laughed. Or did they? Mary King, Casey Hayden and other women in SNCC clearly weren’t laughing a month or so before when they anonymously penned a position paper, arguing that women were treated as second-class citizens in the movement just as African Americans were in society at large. Nor were these women laughing about sexism when they spoke with historian Sara Evans a decade later about how the “personal politics” of the civil rights struggle inspired them to support the emerging feminist movement. In subsequent interviews and writings, however, King, Hayden and other activists downplayed the importance of gender tensions in the movement and the seriousness of Carmichael’s quip about women in SNCC. To understand why, we must explore the ways that historians and activists have revised movement narratives over the last forty years to provide a usable past that can guide struggles for racial and gender equality.

The first half of this essay explores the gender dynamics of the movement through sources created during the movement itself, and the second half examines oral history interviews, memoirs, and scholarly sources to show how the narratives of activists and historians have evolved over time. I argue that movement participation raised both the gender and racial consciousness of participants in the 1960s, though most movement-era sources understandably focus on racial consciousness and an understanding of the ways that poverty reinforced the racial hierarchy in America. Remembering the movement in the 1970s, some activists highlighted the gender dynamics of the struggle as part of a narrative of emerging feminist consciousness and solidarity. By the 1980s and 1990s, activists began to reemphasize racial consciousness in their movement memories and narratives as the struggle for racial equality seemed to falter in an increasingly conservative political era. As the needs of the activists’ communities evolved, so did their stories, and this evolution has been reflected in subsequent generations of scholarship.

Many scholars of the civil rights movement are activists as well as academics. Perhaps because of this, we are more comfortable with the symbiotic relationship between the past and the present. There is an implicit assumption in many of our accounts, as in the memoirs of many civil rights veterans, that a deeper understanding of the movement past will advance race relations and social equality in the present. And yet as much as we have explored the ways that the past can shape the present, civil rights historians have not been as critical in assessing the ways that the present has shaped our understanding of the past. Such an assessment must begin with an examination of movement memories and oral history.

Critics of oral history might argue that interviews magnify the influence of the present on historians’ understanding of the past. I believe that we need not see this as a methodological shortcoming, but rather as an opportunity to explore the relationship between past and present that is nowhere more immediate than in the dialogue between historians and historical actors. If oral historians were scientists, we might set up an experiment designed to separate the influence of the present on interviewees’ understandings of the past—a fission of memory from historical “reality”. Such an experiment would require that historical actors chronicle events as they take place, writing a first draft of history that reflects their immediate reactions to these events and offers a chronology untainted by the passage of time. Then, the oral historian and the historical actors would conduct interviews in five or ten year intervals to determine the influence of subsequent events on the interviewees’ memories of the past.

Though far from scientific, such an “experiment” has taken place in the oral histories and scholarship on the civil rights movement. Successive generations of historians have interviewed veteran activists, many of whom were fairly young when they participated in the civil rights struggle. The first generation of interviews was conducted by journalists covering the movement and college students working with Stanford University’s Project South during the summer of 1965. Subsequent oral history projects on the movement have included individual scholarly investigations by Sara Evans and Clay Carson in the 1970s, Charles Payne and Doug McAdam in the 1980s, and many others since the 1990s. There have also been multi-interviewer projects run by Howard University, the Southern Oral History Program, the University of Southern Mississippi, and Duke University. Each generation of historians has asked different questions of these activists, but most of the interviews have touched on the roles of race, gender and sexuality in the movement. By examining the shifting questions and answers of interviews on these topics, we can explore how events since the 1960s have “engendered” the memories of movement participants and the narratives that they have co-authored with historians.

One place where these questions are especially pertinent is in scholarship on the movement in Mississippi. Segregation, racial prejudice, and state-sponsored violence were so oppressive in the Magnolia State that movement activists who worked there asked the rhetorical question: “Is this America?” The civil rights campaigns in Mississippi were first and foremost struggles for racial equality in a state and region where race had been the primary marker of oppression since the era of slavery. Yet hierarchies of gender and sexuality clearly buttressed the social structure of white supremacy in the Deep South. The architects of racial segregation, for instance, had argued that black and white southerners must be separated to protect the purity of white womanhood. In this way, white men used segregation to curtail the freedom of both African Americans and white women, giving themselves the power to govern and traverse both black and white social spaces.

Segregation’s high walls proved especially confining for black men. For them, any transgression in the white world might lead to lynching for supposed sexual improprieties. When around whites, especially white women, black men had to cloak their sexuality and mask their manhood for fear of trespassing on the race and gender prerogatives of white men. The African American writer Ralph Ellison captured this dilemma in his novel The Invisible Man. In the face of racism, the novel’s black male protagonist disappears from view altogether, hiding underground until a day that he can reemerge and confront discrimination. Though black men, like Ellison’s protagonist, often performed traditional “manly” roles within the home and the black community, the system of segregation forced them to hide their manhood from the public, white world rendering them, in a powerful sense, invisible.

When the courageous, unassuming field secretaries for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) arrived in Mississippi, they joined experienced local activists in a movement to tear down the walls of segregation and the architecture of white male supremacy. During the early 1960s, SNCC was an integrated, black-led organization. The field secretaries who fanned out through regions like the Mississippi Delta were primarily young black men and women, idealistic in the belief that nonviolent organizing could move the people against white supremacy. As they worked in the movement, these organizers came face to face not only with violent white supremacy, but also with the gender implications of the struggle for racial equality.

The best place to begin digging for firsthand accounts of the movement is, of course, the archives. The SNCC papers are a virtual treasure trove of documents that chronicle everything from the number of cars and telephones used by the organization to the personal observations of field secretaries. One such personal observation, recorded by Charles McLaurin, reveals some of the gender dynamics that emerged early in the struggle. A native black Mississippian, McLaurin was inspired by SNCC staffer Bob Moses to join the organization’s voter registration drive in the Delta during the summer of 1962. McLaurin began his campaign in Ruleville, Mississippi, a small Delta town where less than two percent of eligible African American adults could vote. After some hard work canvassing local neighborhoods, McLaurin convinced several older African American women to join him on the harrowing trip down to the Sunflower County courthouse to try to register. Tall white columns stood like daunting sentinels in front of the courthouse, guarding the franchise from black Mississippians as they had since the end of Reconstruction. As he waited outside for what would surely be a rejection of the women’s petition to register to vote, McLaurin had a heartening thought. “The people are the true leaders,” he realized. “We need only to move them; to show them. Then watch and learn.” In the weeks that followed, McLaurin brought dozens of Ruleville residents—most of them women—down to the courthouse. Among them, was a sharecropper named Fannie Lou Hamer, who became one of the most powerful advocates for the rights of women, minorities, and the poor during the 1960s. In McLaurin’s later speeches, that first trip still shined brightly on the horizon of his memory. “I will always remember August 22,” he said, “as the day I became a man.”

Charles McLaurin’s reminiscences might seem strange at first. He himself did very little. He did not register to vote. He did not face the white registrar. The women did. Yet McLaurin found his strength that day by helping the women find theirs. He claimed his manhood by helping the women reclaim a bit of their dignity. Coming of age in Mississippi, where respect for black men was all too rare, it is not surprising that McLaurin and other SNCC men looked back on their activism as a rite of passage into manhood. The question is when did the movement become such a ritual for black men? When did women begin to view their movement experience as a similar rite of passage? What can this tell us about how movement memories have changed over time in response to cultural shifts in the intervening years?

The movement in Mississippi and especially the summer project of 1964 raised broad questions about the gender, racial, and sexual mores of the segregated South and the larger American society. During the summer project, hundreds of young white men and women lived and worked alongside black activists in an attempt to replace segregation with the “beloved community,” a society based on equality, democracy, and a love that knew no racial boundaries. As they struggled to obtain an equal education and the right to vote for black Mississippians, these civil rights activists found that segregationists and liberal observers alike fixated on the sexual repercussions of the integrated campaign. For segregationists, it surely must have seemed that the “race mixing” apocalypse had arrived in 1964. The records of white Mississippi authorities that monitored and attempted to undermine the activities of movement activists remain largely untapped by civil rights scholars. Excavating such archival sources exposes the deeper social context in which the movement operated and, as we will see later, reveals some surprising new evidence concerning gender relations in the movement.

From the very beginning of the summer project, Mississippi authorities sent informants to spy on the young civil rights activists. The governor had set up an investigative bureau known as the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission in the late-1950s to “defend” the state from outside agitators and native activists. The election of staunch segregationist Ross Barnett to the governor’s mansion of the Magnolia State ensured that the Sovereignty Commission would be well funded. By the summer of 1964, the agency had several paid informants in civil rights groups. Though civil rights activists suspected that they were being watched, they had little idea who among their ranks was an informant. With activists from SNCC, the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as well as countless volunteers, the organization that ran the summer project—the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO)—could not be expected to do a background check on everyone who offered to help. As a result, informants observed and participated in many of the movement activities starting with the first orientation meetings for the summer project, held in Oxford, Ohio.

On a mission to gather damning information about the summer project, one such spy wrote secret memos back to the governor of Mississippi, warning of “communist infiltration” and interracial relationships in the ranks of the civil rights activists. “The white girls have been going around with Negro boys, and Negro girls are going with white boys. I have seen these integrated couples going into the dorms together for extended periods of time,” one racy exposé revealed. Allegations of such taboo activities reveal more about the obsessions of Mississippi authorities than the reality of everyday life in Oxford. Yet the taboos against interracial relationships did haunt the summer project.

When civil rights volunteer JoAnn Ooiman arrived by train from Oxford, Ohio in Canton, Mississippi where her part of the summer project began, the power of such racial and sexual taboos quickly became apparent. A white college student originally from Denver, Colorado, Ooiman had never been to Mississippi, and her introduction began with a barbeque at a local black minister’s house. Just as Ooiman and the other volunteers began to dig into the heaping plates of food, police sirens brought the welcome party to a screeching halt. The sheriff hauled the volunteers down to the station, took their mug shots, and then played a taped speech from the district attorney, warning that “the women would be raped by blacks in town and the men would be beaten up.” It was a welcome befitting the “closed society.”

The frenzied fear of interracial sex, whipped up by the segregationists, contributed to the sexually charged atmosphere of the summer. From the beginning, SNCC organizers warned volunteers to avoid such interracial liaisons. Stokely Carmichael, a black SNCC staffer and the project director in the small Mississippi town of Greenwood, admonished white volunteers to be conscious of the history of white men taking sexual advantage of local black women. “As far as white girls with Negro boys,” Carmichael said, “of course, none of that on the other side of town.” Carmichael opposed all staff dating, feeling that it would only complicate matters during the summer, but he did not prohibit dating altogether. Given the close quarters of communal living arrangements, the stress and strain of daily organizing, and the young age of most movement volunteers and veterans, it is understandable that civil rights workers formed intimate relationships that summer.

Liberated sexuality also represented a logical extension of SNCC’s ideals (a truly free society or “beloved community”). Due to the highly politicized nature of interracial sex, however, such relationships could both bring activists together and tear them apart. The taboos against interracial sex made it that much more enticing. “For black men,” historian Sara Evans writes, “sexual access to white women challenged the culture’s ultimate symbol of their denied manhood.” Writing in the 1970s, Evans based her work both on archival sources and oral history interviews. The interviews and analysis bear the clear imprint of the modern feminist movement. White women staffers and volunteers, who “had experienced a denial of their womanhood in failing to achieve … cheerleader standards,” told Evans that sexual interest from black men was in many ways empowering. White men and black women also experienced the liberating power of love that summer. But activists found that the personal politics of interracial sex could damage the movement. Black women, at times, grew angry when black men flocked to white women, reinforcing American society’s racist standards of beauty. On the other hand, white women may have felt trapped in a Catch-22 of being labeled as racist if they declined black men’s advances and opportunistic if they accepted. Despite all of the complications that arose from interracial sex during the movement, it is important to remember that these intimate relationships were born out of a faith in love (both platonic and passionate) and a hope that movement ideals were harbingers of a more egalitarian and open society. As one volunteer wrote in his journal at the time, the people in SNCC “already have the ‘beloved community’ and they rightly see the aim of the movement to be the inclusion of the whole of America into this community. . . . Our aim is indeed miscegenation, more profoundly so than they think.”

Though interracial relationships have gained much scholarly attention in the decades since the summer project, they were, in fact, relatively minor distractions from the real work of civil rights activism and organizing that took place during the summer of 1964. Most of the volunteers and veteran activists worked either canvassing door-to-door for voter registration or teaching in the freedom schools. The voter registration drive was an attempt to show the federal government (and the national Democratic Party) that black Mississippians wanted to vote, but were unable to register because of discriminatory laws and racist white registrars. Similarly, the freedom schools were set up to show that black children wanted equal access to educational opportunities that were denied them by poorly funded, segregated schools.

According to Doug McAdam, a sociologist who interviewed and surveyed a large number of former volunteers in the early 1980s, gender was an important factor in determining job assignments during the summer. Though SNCC valued Freedom School teaching and voter registration work equally, volunteers had preconceived notions of the work they wanted to do, and some questioned the gender breakdown of work assignments. Speaking to McAdam nearly twenty years after the Mississippi summer project, a female volunteer recalled that she felt “shoved to the side” as a teacher, while male volunteers were “being macho men,” facing violence out in the field. One male canvasser admitted to the sociologist that although teaching was important, “it wasn’t the same kind of, if you want, macho adventurism that I was into.” Based on these volunteer interviews and archived staff rosters, McAdam estimated that women were nearly twice as likely as men to be assigned to teaching, whereas men dominated the ranks of voter registration workers. In response to such assertions, one veteran activist told me in the 1990s that any such restrictions on female canvassing set up at the beginning of the summer had probably gone by the wayside by the end of the project when volunteers simply did whatever jobs needed to be done regardless of race or gender. “Our own ideas are [based on] equality,” he said, “and what are we doing if we set up these kinds of rules?” Regardless of their assignments or their gender, all of the volunteers and staff members “put their bodies on the line.” JoAnn Ooiman’s assignment in Canton, Mississippi was teaching at a freedom school where a bomb had exploded the week before the summer project started. Whether her willingness to take on the teaching assignment was “macho” or not, it was clearly brave.

If volunteers, national civil rights leaders, and other “outside agitators” displayed bravery in journeying to Mississippi to challenge discrimination, what about the men and women from the Deep South who risked their jobs and homes, lives and loved ones to join these idealistic crusaders? “The depth of the involvement [for local folks] … nobody understands,” Delta native and activist Tommie Jean Lunsford told me. “It’s different when you’re trying to hide from the police. You can’t come to your house. You can’t go to your parents’ home. You can’t visit them. You can’t visit your friends, because you’re being followed and your name is in the paper.” In the late 1980s and early 1990s, scholars finally began to chronicle the courageous involvement of “local people” like Lunsford. Historians Charles Payne and John Dittmer found a very different story of gender relations when they talked with local black men and women. Far from male dominated, the local movement in Mississippi was, according to Payne, a “woman’s war.” As the black SNCC activist Charlie Cobb explained to an interviewer in the mid-1990s, “I’ve always thought that women have been the backbone of … Mississippi’s movement.” Corroborating this assessment, Payne’s research led him to conclude that local African American women were more politically active, attended mass meetings in larger numbers, and attempted to register to vote more often than Mississippi men during the movement. Though most observers believe that women participated in disproportionately high numbers, few agree on why this was so. Payne offers a variety of explanations, including black women’s faith and enthusiasm for the churches that often supported the movement and the possibility that black women may have seemed less threatening to white authorities than black men.

Both of these factors may have facilitated women’s participation in the movement, but it may also be instructive to examine the obstacles to men’s involvement. Struggling to explain why it seemed so difficult to get local black men to join the movement, members of the mostly white volunteer staff for the summer project were struck by what they perceived as the inability of these men to stand up and fight racism. Segregation has “so smashed and whiplashed” the black community, one volunteer wrote in a letter home, “it makes boys . . . out of men. The men are often so pitifully weak—unable to decide anything.” Another wrote of the “absolute castration of the Negro male,” who “is trained to be nothing more than a child with his . . . sheepish expression and ‘Yessir, yessir’ to everything the white man says.” Without a deep understanding of the long history of lynching and repression faced by these men or the skillful subterfuge required to survive in the Delta, the volunteers callously criticized the crushing fear that crippled some men’s participation in the movement.

Local black women had their own opinions on this issue. Annie Devine, an organizer from Canton, Mississippi who later ran for Congress, said that she became active in the movement and politics because most men just would not run for office. “Negro men have been pushed around and hounded,” she told an interviewer in 1965, so the black man “needs to be reassured that he is a man, and that when he does speak, you know, he’ll be looked upon as a man, ‘cause right now he’s not, and he hasn’t been. He’s had no control over his woman; he’s had no job to take care of her.” Fannie Lou Hamer, who became the most eloquent spokesperson for the Mississippi movement after a brutal beating at the hands of local police officers, explained, “If they beat me almost to death in jail, what do you think would happen to my husband? You have to live in Mississippi as a Negro to understand why it’s not more men involved than there is.”

Despite the obstacles to their participation, many local men rose to the challenge and joined the fight against white supremacy in Mississippi. Highlighting women’s activism, civil rights scholars have rightly recognized the integral role that women played as the unsung heroes of the movement. But we must also acknowledge the immense courage of local men who, like local women activists, were often overlooked in contemporary accounts that focused on articulate national leaders and highly educated volunteers. Ridiculed as “outside agitators” by local white supremacists, national civil rights leaders and activists who came into Mississippi during the early 1960s could fly home once campaigns ended. Local men joined the struggle, knowing that they would have to deal with the white backlash long after others left.

One such local black hero was C. O. Chinn. Volunteers would have received no welcome at all when they arrived in Canton if not for men like Chinn, who sacrificed everything for the movement. “He was a powerful man,” wrote one movement veteran, “known as ‘badass C. O. Chinn’ to the Negroes and whites alike. All of the Negroes respected him for standing up and being a man. Most of the whites feared him.” Within a week of joining the movement in 1963, Chinn lost his business, but he continued to campaign for the right to vote, and his personal loss only made him a more passionate advocate of the civil rights movement. He spoke at mass meetings and organized a local boycott against stores owned by segregationists. Canton police arrested Chinn for trying to organize other local blacks—he was “threatening” them, according to white authorities—making sure that they supported the boycott. But Chinn’s real crime was simply movement activism. He was helping SNCC staff prepare for Freedom Summer. At the start of the summer, Chinn was working on the chain gang as a prisoner of the Canton jail. Bone tired at the end of a scorching summer day on the work gang, Chinn would probably have agreed with another local black activist, who observed that in Mississippi, the white man “is our friend, as long as we are ‘boys.’ But when we act as if we are ‘mens,’ then we’re not his friends.”

Working alongside these black activists, white women in the movement found their own voice, and they began to see parallels between racism and sexism. Not long after the summer, two stalwart white movement veterans named Casey Hayden and Mary King co-authored a paper for a SNCC staff meeting late in 1964 on the position of women in the organization and the broader society. “The average white person finds it difficult to understand why the Negro resents being called ‘boy’,” the women wrote anonymously, “because the average white person doesn’t realize that he assumes he is superior. . . . So too the average SNCC worker finds it difficult to discuss the woman problem because of the assumption of male superiority.” Such sentiment had evidently been brewing since the summer project. In July of 1964 a spy for Mississippi authorities sent a secret memo to the governor, noting, “The ‘strong’ females on the permanent office staff have told me earlier of a revolution among females, ‘the women’s fight for equality with men.’ . . . I have watched it gain momentum over the past months. There are many male supporters of this new thing.” Though Hayden and King’s paper on sexism inspired Carmichael’s infamous quip that “the position of women in SNCC is prone,” there were clearly men in the organization that encouraged such nascent feminism. Hayden and King’s position paper is now seen as an influential document in the history of women’s liberation, because it reveals the origins of the modern feminist movement in the struggle for civil rights.

The historians who originally articulated this thesis, Sara Evans chief among them, have come under fire from women and men in the movement as well as other scholars. At a conference on the movement in the late 1980s, Joyce Ladner was one of several black SNCC veterans who were critical of the early feminist scholarship on gender relations in the movement. Ladner believed that Evans’s work, in particular, was “total rubbish” and “revisionist to the core.” To many of the SNCC veterans, it seemed that Evans had focused too much on gender tension in SNCC and not enough on SNCC’s supportive environment that enabled women on staff to voice an emerging feminist consciousness. Ladner felt that this flawed analysis was due, in part, to the fact that Evans “didn’t even interview the right people.” In the mid-1990s, historian Belinda Robnett picked up this same point, arguing that a focus on interviews with white women and volunteers in SNCC had distorted earlier accounts of gender in the movement. Robnett found that the black women she interviewed had greater opportunities for leadership roles and fewer problems with sexism than white women on the SNCC staff. My own interviews with black women veterans of SNCC in the late 1990s and early 2000s bore this out as well. Thinking back on her time with SNCC in Mississippi, Martha Prescod Norman told me, “I never felt [there was] any position or role or job or task that I was kept from doing on the basis of my sex.” In fact, she remembered positive “pressure from the men in SNCC to be brave, to be smart, to be intellectual, to be all of the things that are not stereotypically not female.” Tommie Jean Lunsford was just a teenager from rural Mississippi when she was swept up into the movement. And she too remembers the empowering and supportive environment that she encountered working alongside women and men of SNCC.

What are we to make of this conflicting testimony? On the one hand, we have a position paper on women in the movement written in the 1960s and interviews with women, most of them white, in the 1970s suggesting that sexism did plague civil rights organizations. On the other hand, we have later interviews with SNCC women, most of them black, who argue that they faced very little sexism. Perhaps, as Belinda Robnett suggests, these contradictions can simply be explained by the race of the interviewees—the different backgrounds and experiences of black and white women. In a black-led organization like SNCC that was struggling for racial equality, it is not surprising that African American women found more opportunities for leadership than white women. Even after the feminist movement raised black women’s consciousness of sexism in both civil rights organizations and the larger society, such prejudices may have paled in comparison to the racism that they faced. White women, on the other hand, may have been more likely to remember their feminist epiphanies as having been equally important as their new awareness of racism, especially when being interviewed by Sara Evans, Doug McAdam, or other white scholars who were trying to understand the relationship between the civil rights and feminist movements.

While race is certainly crucial to understanding these conflicting movement memories, I think that there is something else going on here as well. There has been an evolution of the stories and memories of activists in SNCC, including those who authored the position paper in 1964 and those who initially spoke with Evans in the 1970s, about chauvinism and a growing feminist consciousness in the movement. Several of these women now emphasize different facets of their movement experiences. Speaking to Robnett in 1990, Hayden reevaluated her earlier position paper on the movement, saying, “I had a really privileged status. I didn’t have any real argument about my place in SNCC.” Along with other women who were active in SNCC, she now emphasizes, “the great lifting of sex role expectations and the freedom that ensued” from her movement activism.
Hayden’s revisions of her position paper and early interviews speak to the evolutionary nature of memory and historical narrative. Like many movement veterans, Hayden has been interviewed countless times over the years, and these interviews represent a dialogue with the written history and the historical trends of her times. These conversations between the historians and historical actors do not take place in a vacuum; they are shaped by the events of intervening years. Thus, Hayden’s early memories and Evans’s account of the movement in the wake of women’s liberation reflected an emerging feminist consciousness that highlighted and analyzed the role of gender in the movement in ways that might have seemed totally foreign to activists in the 1950s or early 1960s. In subsequent years, Hayden and others revised their stories, perhaps because they were fearful that feminist critiques of civil rights groups from the 1960s and 1970s would contribute to a negative revisionism in historical accounts of the movement.

Recent accounts of the movement have similarly been influenced by new intellectual currents and current events. Scholarly works and interviews of the 1980s and 90s bear the clear imprint of womanist analysis articulated by feminists of color over the last two decades. As movement biographer Cynthia Griggs Fleming emphatically pointed out in her book on the life of SNCC activist Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, “Being an oppressed black woman has always been quite different from being an oppressed woman in American society.” While womanist scholars discussed the unique confluence of racism and sexism facing women of color, they also theorized about the different support networks and strategies that these women harnessed to overcome oppression. Belinda Robnett’s brilliant insights about the importance of black women organizers as “bridge leaders” connecting community activists to the predominantly male national civil rights leadership clearly emerged from this intellectual inquiry. The womanist critique of second wave feminism’s racial blind spot has not simply influenced scholars, however, it has also led white SNCC veterans like Casey Hayden to reevaluate their own experiences in the movement, emphasizing the nurturing and familial relationships in SNCC as well as the strong leadership role of black women whose experience with sexism was different from their own.

At the same time that a womanist critique of early feminist scholarship influenced accounts of black and white women in the movement, the rise of the men’s movement and the Million Man March may have also reshaped understandings of movement masculinity. In the 1990s the Promise Keepers and Nation of Islam called for white and black men to accept the responsibility of leadership in their homes and communities, harkening back to very traditional notions of patriarchy and manhood. In particular, black men were called on to protect and provide for women and their families in ways that they had been unable to under the oppressive conditions of slavery or segregation. Though the traditional gender ideologies of these men’s movements seemed diametrically opposed to the ideas espoused by womanist scholars, the perceived crisis of masculinity in the 1990s that inspired events like the Million Man March may have also led veteran activists and scholars to reevaluate the role of men in the movement. For instance, Casey Hayden told one interviewer in the early 1990s that the civil rights movement “was really a coming to the fore of Black men—young black men . . . [because] Black women had always been strong in the local community.”

In fact, visions of manhood and men’s roles in the movement have evolved in much the same way that women’s accounts have, reflecting contemporary gender issues. A quick glance at the story of one oral historian of the movement and a few of his interviews illustrates this point. Robert Wright first traveled to Mississippi with SNCC in the summer of 1963. After graduating from Harvard in 1965, he continued his involvement in the movement and eventually was interviewed and also signed on as an interviewer for the Civil Rights Documentation Project. In his own 1968 oral history interview, Wright tried to explain the complex relationship between nonviolent activism and manhood at a time when many believed that Black Power necessitated taking a violent stance. “What do you feel this does to your manhood,” an interviewer asked Wright, “when you sit there and you watch black women beaten and you do nothing?” Recalling a time when violent resistance was not an imperative for manhood, Wright patiently explained that given the repression in Mississippi in 1963 and 1964, nonviolent protest was “a really militant thing to do, to be able to just be a man and not bow down and scratch your head.” Tumultuous change in the movement and the wider society had wrought such a transformation in gender identity and racial consciousness by 1968 that it was difficult for many who had not participated in the southern movement to look back on nonviolent activism as a “manly” struggle against racism. The writings of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and others had coded such nonviolent resistance as “feminine,” contrasting it with the more “masculine” strategy of protecting black women and black communities by any means necessary. By the late 1960s then, militant manhood had come to mean almost exclusively a willingness to support armed self-defense.
Wright’s own interviews with movement activists in the late 1960s and early 1970s reveal similar shifts in gender identity and consciousness. In 1970 Wright interviewed Charles Scattergood, a white summer volunteer who worked with Charles McLaurin in Sunflower County and stayed in the Delta until 1965. In hindsight, Scattergood told Wright that tension on the local project was due, in part, to “male chauvinism.” When Wright observed that Scattergood seemed “hung up” on chauvinism and women’s liberation, the former volunteer explained:

I saw racism spreading all over Mississippi. But I also saw male chauvinism spreading out pretty bad too. . . . I think that women have a definite place in the movement, you know—not just as secretaries either—as leaders. . . . If women stand up, then maybe men won’t have to be in this protective bag so much. And that’s almost fifty percent of what’s happening in Mississippi.

From the vantage point of 1970, Scattergood and Wright could wrestle with connections between chauvinism and racism. They understood that white Mississippians had rationalized violence against the movement as a chivalrous duty to “protect” white women from integration and that similar impulses in SNCC ironically may have restricted the role of women at the same time that the organization sought to achieve egalitarian ideals. But this understanding evolved over time, becoming clear long after the summer project ended.

Just as memories of movement gender dynamics have evolved, so too have understandings of the relationship between race and sexuality. The summer volunteer who proudly proclaimed that miscegenation was the ultimate goal of the movement in 1964 was voicing a radical position for both the black and white communities given the taboo against interracial relationships at the time. SNCC veteran, Chuck McDew, understood this only too well when he married a white woman that same year. Though McDew had endured beatings and extensive jail time for his commitment to racial uplift, his interracial relationship was still suspect in some movement circles. When Malcolm X criticized McDew’s marriage, the SNCC field secretary told the Muslim leader, “I’ve paid some heavy dues …[and] nobody else will tell me who I will love.” McDew ultimately won Malcolm’s blessing, but as Black Nationalism eclipsed integrationism, interracial relationships in the movement lost their revolutionary character and became vilified as vestiges of an outdated, assimilationist ideology. This was, in part, a response to increasing mainstream acceptance of interracial relationships that grew gradually from the 1970s through the 1990s. By the 1990s movement veterans viewed such mainstream acceptance of interracial relationships with only cautious optimism, understanding earlier than most Americans what historian Renee Romano has argued: “The notion that ‘love is the answer’ serves to mask existing inequalities, not to undo remaining racial hierarchies.” Sex and love were clearly important parts of SNCC’s beloved community, but they were not the primary objectives of the organization or the movement.

The tensions between the egalitarian ideal in SNCC and the reality of gender relations in 1964 eventually led women (and some men) in the movement to challenge sexism. Feminism, according to historian Belinda Robnett, “did not evolve from the sexist treatment within SNCC,” but from the organization’s liberating philosophy and open structure that fostered challenges to authority. The structure of the organization, which was founded on principles of participatory democracy, gave both men and women a voice in decisions. In this, SNCC was far more progressive than other movement organizations and most other parts of American society in 1964. Yet SNCC also reflected the larger society’s gender bias in work assignments and formal leadership. As Sara Evans originally argued, the women in SNCC experienced both liberation and discrimination. To acknowledge this paradox is not to single out the organization or its male leaders for special criticism; it merely captures the historical reality of 1964. Despite the pervasiveness and intractability of race and gender norms in America during the mid-1960s, the men and women of SNCC attempted to fashion an organization and a movement in which all people could gain personal and political power.

Memories and histories of SNCC activism in Mississippi have evolved in a parallel circuit with one another, reflecting shifts in American society and culture that have taken place in the years since the movement. The SNCC papers and other archival sources reveal some of the gender dynamics that influenced the course of the movement in Mississippi, but for the most part, they focus on the roles of race and poverty in limiting the progress of black Mississippians and civil rights activism. Interviews with activists and histories of the Mississippi movement from the 1970s and early 1980s reflect the influence of the struggles for women’s rights and Black Power that emerged from the civil rights movement. It is not surprising then, that gender analysis moved to center stage in these accounts, and this was an important innovation in civil rights scholarship, since much of the “master narrative” of the movement had previously downplayed the importance of women’s roles. In the early 1990s, a new wave of scholarship focused on local people, who played roles just as important as national leaders. This too, revised our understanding of gender in the movement, highlighting the power of local women. Finally, the Million Man March and other consciousness raising efforts by men in the mid-1990s have led scholars to investigate the role of masculinity in the struggle for civil right and the influence of the movement on American conceptions of manhood. Movement history, like movement memory, is a dynamic understanding of the past. This is not a progression toward some higher Truth; it is a dialogue between historians and historical actors, between scholarship and activism, between the past and present that keeps us engaged in the struggles for civil rights and social justice today.