all2445, Author at Not Even Past

Serious students of the death penalty must begin here. Law Professor Stuart Banner provides an engaging, richly detailed and superbly objective history, examining both the law and the popular culture surrounding capital punishment, and showing why Americans, almost alone in the developed world, still endorse the practice.

Austin Sarat, When The State Kills: Capital Punishment And The American Condition. (2001)

Political scientist Austin Sarat is an unabashed opponent of the death penalty, and one of the most articulate voices for its abolition. Capital punishment, he believes, is an extra-ordinarily divisive issue, triggered by our worst human instincts, such as racism and vengeance. Both supporters and opponents of the death penalty will find much to chew on.

Hugo Bedau and Paul Cassell, Debating The Death Penalty (2004)

This superb collection of essays covers both sides of the debate. Hugh Bedau, a longtime opponent of the death penalty, offers his perspective, as do other abolitionists; but what makes this collection unique is the articulate defense of capital punishment delivered by the likes of Paul Cassell, Louis Pojman, and Judge Alex Kozinski. Rarely have so many ideas regarding the death penalty been covered with such skill and sophistication.

Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song (1979)

Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his magisterial account of the life and execution of Gary Gilmore, a convicted murderer who demanded to die. The book is far more than fiction, of course, blending dozens of interviews and true details into an epic account of one’s man descent into barbarism— and the cultural realities of American life that Mailer believes led Gilmore down that path.

Great Books on African American Beauty Culture

by Tiffany Gill

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of books examining African American beauty culture from various angles.

A’Lelia Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker (2001)

Madam C.J. Walker is the best known of the pioneering generation of beauty culture educators and manufacturers, and A’Lelia Bundles’ well researched book is the first biography of this industry mogul. Bundles, who is Walker’s great-great granddaughter, takes the reader on a journey from Walker’s humble beginnings as the child of a Louisiana sharecropper to the end of her life when she died as one of the wealthiest black women of the early twentieth century. In addition, the book provides an in depth examination of the entrepreneurial challenges and triumphs of the early black beauty industry.

Maxine Leeds Craig, Aint I a Beauty Queen: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race (2002)

Examining black beauty contests, personal photographs, political posters, and conducting an impressive array of oral interviews, sociologist Maxine Leeds Craig examines the role that ideas about beauty played in racialized constructions of beauty. Her emphasis on representations of black women since World War II sheds light onto the ways that the modern Civil Rights and Black Power movements were concerned with articulations of political equality, which, for women, included discussions of beauty as political meaningful.

Julliette Harris and Pamela Johnson, eds. Tenderheaded: A Comb-bending Collection of Hair Stories (2001)

This collection of first-person narratives, photos, essays, letters, cartoons, poems, and short stories gives great insight into the complex meanings surrounding hair and beauty culture in the contemporary lives of African American women.

Susannah Walker, Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975 (2007)

Relying heavily upon print advertisements, periodical literature, and first hand accounts from black beauty culture’s practitioners, Susannah Walker examines the role beauty culture played in forming black women’s racial and gendered identities. Moving beyond a simplistic analysis of the “good hair/ bad hair” debate, that often represents the quest for beauty among African Americans as a mere mimicry of white beauty standards, Walker elucidates the complexities surrounding the business of black female appearance.

Tiffany Gill on Beauty Shop Politics

By Tiffany Gill

Bernice Robinson, a forty-one year old Charleston beautician, was surprised when she was asked to become the first teacher for the Highlander Folk School’s Citizen Education program in the South Carolina Sea Islands, for she had neither experience as a teacher nor a college education. This did not present a problem for Myles Horton, founder of the Highlander School. His main concern was that the sea islanders would have a teacher they could trust and who would respect them. In fact, for Horton, Robinson’s profession was an asset. In his autobiography, he explained the strategic importance of using beauticians as leaders in civil rights initiatives by declaring, “we needed to build around black people who could stand up against white opposition, so black beauticians were very important.”

This example illuminates some of the ways that beauty shops offered economic independence for the African American women who owned and operated them and provided a site for social and political activity. The black beauty industry has often been vilified for subjugating women and denounced for peddling products that denied an authentic “blackness,” but it should be seen instead as providing one of the most important opportunities for black women to agitate for social change both within their communities and in the larger political arena.

Myles Horton’s insight concerning the strategic importance of beauticians to African American political struggles was not simply a peculiarity of the Highlander Folk School’s Citizen Education Program. Other leaders of the modern Civil Rights movement also acknowledged the importance of beauticians. From Martin Luther King to Ella Baker, civil rights leaders openly acknowledged the centrality of beauticians in political struggles. However, it was not only in during the modern Civil Rights Movement that black beauticians were seen as key political activists. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, beauticians were the driving force behind war bond efforts during World War II and they were at the forefront of the push for black internationalism in the 1950s. Even earlier, some of the most active women in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and other black nationalist groups in the 1930s, were, ironically, beauticians. Finally, many of those most identified as reformers during the progressive era were black beauticians. In other words, beauticians are all over the historical record. Not only were they involved in these and other national and grassroots campaigns, but they were usually represented in large numbers, serving as leaders, mobilizers, and major financial contributors.

While the presence of beauticians in these major political movements may be surprising on the surface, their extensive activism makes sense when viewed in light of their status within the African American community. As entrepreneurs with a high level of economic autonomy, they had the freedom to engage in some of the most volatile political movements of the twentieth century. During the entire twentieth century, the black beauty industry was one of the only industries where all aspects were primarily in the control of black women. They served as the manufacturers, producers, and promoters of beauty products. These women built an economic base independent and beyond the reproach of those antagonistic to racial uplift and civil rights work.

Furthermore, black beauticians had access to a physical space—the beauty salon. As Robin Kelley has argued, Jim Crow ordinances forced places like “churches, bars, social clubs, barber shops, beauty salons, even alleys, [to] remain ‘black’ space.” These spaces, Kelley continues, “gave African Americans a place to hide, a place to plan.” Of all of the sites he mentions, the beauty shop is the only space that was not solely a “black space” but was simultaneously a “woman’s space” owned by black women and a place where they gathered almost exclusively. Whether a large salon in a four-story brownstone or a small establishment in a woman’s kitchen or patio, the beauty salon was one of the most important—albeit unique—institutions within the black community. Examining beauty shops and the women who owned and operated them gives unique insights into black women’s resistance strategies and political styles throughout the era of segregation.

Great Books on African American Beauty Culture

Great Books on Atlantic Empires

by Jorge Esguerra-Cañizares

Several new works expand our understanding of the early modern New World with studies of religion, visual imagery, demonology, and the transmission of ideas across the Atlantic Ocean.

David Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (2001). Brading offers a learned study of the origins of the cult of the Virgin of Our Lady of Guadalupe in colonial Mexico. Brading’s great contribution is that it lays bare the depth of thought and creativity informing sermons and treatises that promoted the cult. Demonology was at the core of the Marian theologies of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (1999). Clark describes in painstaking detail how demons were thought to work: through inversion and mockery of established institutions and through the manipulation of the “preternatural,” that is, those laws of nature that humans have yet to understand and therefore still remain occult. Clark also explains how the Renaissance and Reformation paradoxically enhanced the power of Satan in the European imagination. But the most fascinating aspect of the book is Clark’s superb analysis of the central role of demonology in the Scientific Revolution.

Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (2008). This is a beautiful study of how classical antiquity was creatively deployed in colonial Peru by both Europeans and Native Americans. MacCormack demonstrates the wealth and depth of thought in learned communities of the colonial Andes.

Great Books on Egypt in the Modern World

by Yoav di-Capua

Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (2007)
Not only was modern history writing new to the Egyptian life of the mind, but also new were anthropology, sociology, demography and a host of other disciplines in the social sciences. In this book, intellectual historian Omnia EL Shakry offers an institutional and cultural history of the Egyptian social sciences. By examining a wide array of historical and ethnographic material, this book illustrates the complex imperatives of race, class, and gender in their specific Egyptian colonial context. In doing so, it uncovers how the social sciences influenced local modes of governance, expertise, social knowledge and a racist imagination that shaped Egyptian national identity in the first half of the twentieth century.

Hanan Kholoussy, For Better, For Worse: The Marriage Crisis That Made Modern Egypt (2010)
In this original and concise contribution, social historian Hanan Kholoussy takes a close look at the institution of marriage in early twentieth-century Egypt, a time when a new, modern middle class emerged, the extended family declined, and the nation as a whole was striving to free itself from British rule. Situated in the intersection of various political, economic and social forces, marriage became both a metaphor and a battle ground for what young educated Egyptians hoped to achieve. By looking at the historical origins of the ongoing crisis of Egyptian marriage crisis, this book offers critical background for the understanding of contemporary Egyptian youth.

Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Confronting Fascism in Egypt: Dictatorship versus Democracy in the 1930s (2009)

Since 9/11 public figures in the US and in some European states have debated the existence of an intellectual tradition called Islamo-Fascism. Serious scholars joined the fray arguing that in and around the Second World War Arab thought absorbed the basic tenants of Fascist, mainly Nazi thought to degree that a fusion of sorts between Islamic fundamentalism and Nazism took place. In this remarkable and meticulously researched book, the authors joined hands to offer the most comprehensive analysis of Arab cultural relationship with Fascism and Nazism. Their argument convincingly shows how the Arab intellectual elite repeatedly and successfully resisted Fascism, insisting instead on the durability and benefits of democratic culture.

Jörn Rüsen (ed.) Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate (2002)
In this unique collection, historians of history writing and philosophers of history question the universality of the Western historical method. Contributors from Europe, Asia and the Middle East reflect on the philosophical foundations of Islamic and Chinese historical tradition and of the causes and dynamics that brought about their demise.

Great Books on Africa and the U.S.

by Toyin Falola

Richard D. Mahoney. JFK: Ordeal in Africa.

JFK: Ordeal in Africa chronicles the difficult policy decisions of the Kennedy administration during the height of African independence movements. Mahoney portrays Kennedy as a supporter of national independence who was forced to compromise his pro-African ideals for the sake of domestic Cold War politics. Ordeal in Africa is a sympathetic examination of Kennedy’s attempts to further American interests while simultaneously trying to keep the Cold War out of independence movements in the Congo, Ghana, and Angola.

Ebere Nwaubani, The United States and Decolonization in West Africa, 1950-1960.

The United States and Decolonization in West Africa offers a nuanced, but very different, perspective on post-colonial West Africa. Nwaubani argues against the conventional definitions of “decolonization” and “independence” and claims that the United States was not a force against colonialism, but rather advanced its own economic and political agenda. Nwaubani further posits that the Cold War was not a significant factor in international relations between West Africa and the United States.

Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War.

Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle examines the United States’ post-WWII policy towards South Africa. Borstelmann argues that the relationship was centered on South Africa’s supply of weapons-grade uranium. Furthermore, South Africa’s anti-Communist stance and support of the United States’ policy towards Korea significantly prevented U.S. criticism of apartheid policy.

Let the Enslaved Testify

by Daina Ramey Berry

For nearly 30 years, historians have debated about the use of former slave narratives as a “valid” historical source. Scholars question the authenticity of interviews collected in the 1930s, often by white Works Progress Administration (WPA) field workers. Were the interviews honest depictions of the past or blurred historical memories? Did the former slaves feel comfortable answering questions about enslavement? How old were they during slavery? How much were these stories edited? Any study of the recordings must begin by understanding the editors. Their background, beliefs, and views of slavery all influenced the ways they recorded the former slaves’ stories. Fortunately, we have detailed biographical information about the WPA field workers in addition to their notes, instructions, and editorial process. With all this evidence, we can examine slave narratives in a multi-dimensional manner. Comparing drafts of the narratives with field notes and final edited copies, opens a window onto the writing process that one rarely witnesses. Such detailed examination makes it possible to use slave autobiographies as we use plantation records and other sources without privileging one over the other.

Jack Rosa — Rosa and Jack Maddox (Briscoe Center for American History, UT Austin)

In addition to written records of slave narratives, we can now listen to the former bondpeople talk about their experience with the peculiar institution. The Library of Congress has a collection entitled “Voices from the Days of Slavery” which contains nearly seven hours of audio recordings of formally enslaved men and women. These audio files are the original recordings of WPA interviews that were used to compose the written slave narratives. As my students often say, it’s even more chilling to hear former slaves recount their experiences of slavery than to read their autobiographies in an edited collection. The audio files are revealing in that one can hear the questions posed and answered in their original form. Historians can compare the questions asked, place the responses in context, and learn about omitted material. This alone allows the researcher a different lens to explore a somewhat controversial historical source.

Jack and Rosa Maddox, a formerly enslaved couple from Texas pictured here, shared their experiences with WPA worker Heleise M. Fereman in the late 1930s. Two versions of their narrative, (one seventeen pages, the other seven), and a photograph are available at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at The University of Texas at Austin. This is a rather unusual narrative because it contains an interview of the couple together; one can glean a bit about their interaction with each other as well as with Fereman. Viewing the two documents, there is a stark difference in the language between the long and short version of the narrative. One begins with Jack Maddox stating “Yes I was born a slave and so was Rosa.” The other begins with “Yes’m, I’s borned a slave and so was Rosa.” This distinction serves as one of the primary reasons scholars question the use of enslaved narratives. Which version is correct? In versions of narratives from Virginia, historian John Blassingame discovered references to cruel punishments, forced marriages, family separations, ridicule of whites, and the kindness of Union soldiers that often did not appear in the original WPA interviews. How does one rectify these discrepancies? It is important to view the original source in all of its iterations, in this case, the field notes, instructions to WPA interviews, any drafts of the narrative, as well as the audio tape if available. All of this is necessary to let the enslaved testify.

This narrative was recorded December 2, 1937
JACK and ROSA were both born in slavery, Jack to the Maddox family, in Georgia, and Rosa to the Andrews family in Mississippi. They were married in Union Parish, Louisiana, in 1869, and are proud of the fact that they have been married sixty-nine years and “was a lovin’ pair all dem years.” They live in Dallas, Texas.

Jack begins the story:

“Yas’m, I’s borned a slave and so was Rose. We done git out of slavery and I’s better off for gittin’ out, but Rosa don’t think that-a-way. She says all we is freed for is to starve to death. Her white folks was good to her, that’s the reason she thinks that-a-way. But don’t you ‘spect me to say I loved my white folks. I love ‘em like a dog loves hickory! I can say them things now, and I’d say them anywheres—in he court house, before the jedges, before Gawd—‘cause they done done all to me they can.

“I’s borned in Georgia and my mammy’s name was Lucindy. But she died and left my li’l baby brother crawlin’. I had a older sister and she so good. Many a time when she wasn’t more’n nine year old, I done hold a pine torch for her to see how to wash our rags, at night. We had to sleep on the floor, huddled together so we wouldn’t freeze to death.

“We used to wait outside the kitchen door of massa’s big house. The cook give us all she could, sometimes a teaspoon of syrup and we’d mix it with water to make somethin’ sweet. We was hungry all the time, never did get much to eat no time. Or we’d eat at a biscuit with fried meat grease on it. We’d be too hungry to give the baby his rightful share. We’d git chicken feet where they done throw ‘em out, and roast ‘em in ashes and gnaw the bone.

“My pappy was a blacksmith and could make anything from a horseshoe nail to a gooseneck. He’s sold to Jedge Maddox from the Burkhalters, and pappy allus say they was mean as they come. But Rosa, here, her massa was good to her, wasn’t he, Rosa?

Rosa goes on with her story.

“That’s right. Dr. Andrews was a good man and a good liver. He come from Mississippi but he moved to Union Parish in Louisiana. He brung me and my mama along and told her to piece quilts. They was only twelve slaves and I had all my time to play till I was nine years old. I was the baby of my mama and she had eight older chillen, and Dr. Andrews was good to us and give us good li’l cabins and cotton mattresses and blankets. We had enough to eat, too, and it was ‘lowanced out to us every two weeks, syrup and meal and flour and fat meat and plenty of milk. The madam, that’s Miss Fannie, had a garden and give us fresh greens and things.

“The neighbors used to say, ‘There goes Andrews’ free niggers.’ That’s ‘cause he hardly ever whipped them and give them rest and play time, and took care of us when we was sick. I sho’ thunk a heap of Dr. Andrews.

“When I was nine or sech I went in to the house as waitin’ and nursegirl. The Andrews had two boys and a gal, and I nursed them and waited on Miss Fannie. But they never better cotch me with a book.”

Jack takes up the story.

“On Jedge Maddox’ place if a nigger was cotched with a book he got whopped hard. We had to work when we was right small. The Jedge done move to Mount Enterprise, in Texas, and I worked in the fields. We had to git up ‘fore daylight, ‘cause the overseer, he thunk three o’clock was a good time to git up. I got a li’l more to eat after I was in the fields, but I had to steal most of it, one way and ‘nother. But the older I’d git, the more I larnt the taste of the whip, with my back laid open. I’d go fishin’ and cook and eat them in the woods, so the missus couldn’t take them ’way from me. They found out about it, though, and put a chain around my legs and on my arms and a stick under my knees and chain my hands down to it. I’s hobbled worse’n a animal, and my chains clanked when I’s tryin’ to make a fire for the Jedge, and he got mad and beat me half to death. The he put a iron band and chain round my neck and it choked me terrible. Yes, I’s a white folks nigger. I love ‘em jes’ like dat dog loves a hickory switch!

“They was lots of spec’lators comin’ to Texas them days, and one day Jedge Maddox brung home a purty mulatto gal, real bright and long black hair what was purty straight. The old lady come out the house and took a look and say, ‘What you brung that thing here for?’ Jedge say, ‘Honey, I brung her here to do you fine needlework.’ Missus say, ‘Fine needlework, you hind leg!’

“You know what missus done? When Jedge away from home, she gits the scissors and crops that gal’s head to the skull. I didn’t know no more ‘bout that case, but I do know white men got plenty chillun by the nigger women. They didn’t ask ‘em. They jes’ took ‘em. Rosa’ll tell you the same.

Rosa takes up the story.

“Whoo-ee! Nobody need to ask me. I can tell you a white man laid a nigger gal when he wanted her. Some them white men had a plumb cravin’ for the other color. Leastways, they wanted to start themselves out on nigger women. But master was a good man and I never heard of him botherin’ any nigger women. But they was some redheaded neighbors what had a whole crop of redheaded nigger slaves.

Jack continues.

[…]

“ ‘bout time war come ‘long, I ‘member them days plain. My brother and me went to haul salt from Grand Saline, in Texas. Then I’s sont with mules and more niggers to work on breastworks. I heared the battle of Vicksburg and that was somethin’ to hear, Gawd knows!

“Goin’ home I stopped by Mrs. Anderson’s place. She had a boy named Bob who deserted and was hidin’ at home. Some ‘federate soldiers come by and say they’ll burn the house down lessen he comes out. So he came out and they tied him with a rope and the other end to a saddle and went off with him trottin’ ‘hind the hoss. His mammy sont me followin’ in the wagon. I followed thirteen mile. After a few miles I seen where he fell down and the drag signs on the ground. Then when I come to Hornage Creek I seen they’d gone through the water. I went across and after awhile I found him. But you couldn’t tell any of the front side of him. They drug the face off him. I took him home.

“When I got to Tyler I seen Yankee prisoners they took at Mansfield. Richard Burns and Jimmie Lock was there. But after that when I jined the Federals I seen them all again, ‘cause they ‘scaped out in wheelbarrows, covered with shavin’s.

“I hadn’t been back home long when Jedge got mad and ties my shirt over my head and beats me bloody raw, so I ran away and jined the Federals. We walked through the woods a long time, maybe two weeks, and found them by Monticello, in Arkansas. They give us hardtack and sowbelly and the first coffee I ever drank. It was June 25 and I stayed with that bunch till December of that same year. It was 1865. I went with them to San Antonio and a man named Menger had a hotel and give me a job and a glass of lager beer there. First time I ever had any of that. My job was to haul down to the Yankee camp at San Pedro Spring, right by San Antonio.

“But the itchin’ heel got ahold of me and I started back to Arkansas and worked in a sawmill, and in 1868 I went to Louisiana to work in a new sawmill and met Rosa. I sho’ loved her the first time I seen her.

“We marries and ‘cides to buy a farm and makes a payment on a piece of unclear land. Rosa worked like a man. We sawed trees and split logs and cut shingles and dug our own well. We cleared the land and planted it. We had a baby in ‘bout ten months and I thought everything in the world was fine them. Rosa made all our clothes and knitted my socks and we was livin’ tol’ble well. Then the man we bought the place from died and we found out it didn’t ‘long to us. The children of the man sold the land away from us.

“So we went from tenants to a Louisiana farmer and every year we come out with nothin’ but owin’ that man money. After three years of him ad his son fell out and the son come and told me his paw was beatin’ me on the books. He told me I was a fool not to learn to read and write and so he helps me and I studies every night. When time come for the next ‘greement, I tells the man we’ll keep double books. At end of the year he had me owin’ money but my books showed me nearly a hundred dollars ahead. I tells him figgers don’t lie, but the hand what makes them sho’ could. I never got that money but we parted our ways then.

“I farmed here and yonder and had seven chillen. One boy is livin’ and he’s fifty-one year old. In 1892 I come to Dallas and worked for the Lingo Lumber Company a long time.

“Rosa and me been sweethearts all the time. She’s been the best woman and I never wanted to make no swaps. Its never too cold, never too bad for her to do for me. Course, I ain’t allus been so virtuous. I stepped out the middle the road, but Rosa didn’t take on none.”

“I guess its a man’s nature to do with women, and I guess they can’t go agin they nature. But I allus been good. But daddy’s a right good man. He was good ‘nough to me.

“When we’s purty old we knew a woman with a baby and she treated that baby pitiful bad. Jack ‘members how mis’ble he was when he was a li’l boy and says we can take the baby, so his mammy gave him to us. He’s been with us ever since and he’s fifteen now. He knows the names of the baseball players and the G-men. He’s a fine boy and larns well in school.

“This is the first time Jack and me ever told anybody our story. We ain’t done so much, but the best we could.”

For more on issues discussed in this post see:

John W. Blassingame, “Using the Testimony of Former Slaves,” Journal of Southern History, XLI no. 4 (1975)

More narratives can be found here at Project Gutenberg

Many narratives have been published:

George Rawick, ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 26 Volumes

Charles Perdue and Thomas Barden, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves

James Mellon, ed., Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember

Norman Yetman, ed., Voices From Slavery: 110 Authentic Slave Narratives

Photographs:
Rosa and Jack Maddox, Briscoe Center for American History

Black is Beautiful – And Profitable

by Tiffany Gill

Black is beautiful. The Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s popularized this slogan and sentiment, but almost half-a-century earlier, black beauty companies used elaborate advertisements like the one pictured here to sell their vision to uplift and beautify black women. African American women like Madam C.J. Walker produced beauty products and trained women to work as sales agents and beauticians. and in the process, developed an enduring enterprise that promoted economic opportunities and connections with African descendant peoples throughout North and South America.

Some of the most effective marketing strategies of the early black beauty industry are on display in this Walker Manufacturing Company’s 1919 advertisement. Madam C.J. Walker, founder of the Walker Manufacturing Company, was one of the most important figures in the beauty industry and pioneered marketing strategies that shaped it for decades. While white owned beauty product manufacturers in the late nineteenth century advertised beauty products that celebrated skin lightening and hair straightening regimens, the products highlighted in the Walker advertisement featured hair growers and salves to combat dryness and other scalp ailments. African American consumers were more compelled to support companies that did not address them as though their darker skin and highly textured hair were things to be fixed, but instead bought beauty products that promoted healthier hair and scalps.

Although Madam Walker died unexpectedly just before this advertisement was featured in the Crisis Magazine the official mouthpiece of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Walker’s influence dominates. In fact, Walker, in life and in death, was the most effective advertising tool for her company. Born Sarah Breedlove in Delta, Louisiana in 1867, Walker was orphaned by age eight and a widowed mother of a two year old by age 21. When left with the responsibility of raising her daughter on her own with little formal education, Walker found employment in one of the few areas available to African American women—domestic labor. After moving to St. Louis, she became increasingly frustrated with her limited economic prospects as a washerwoman and began working part time as a sales agent for the Poro Company, a beauty products manufacturing and educational company established by Annie Malone. While working for Malone, Walker claimed in interviews years later that she had a dream where she was given ingredients for a special hair grower to help African American women with the hair issues that emerged from poor diet and hygiene. Most likely, the product she eventually marketed as her “Wonderful Hair Grower” was a modification of a similar product offered by Malone. At any rate, with only $1.50 to her name, Walker and her daughter relocated to Denver and launched her company. When Madam Walker died in May 1919, her estate was valued at close to $700,000.

Walker’s humble beginnings resonated with the African American women she sought to reach with her products; her ascent to the African American elite made her a legend and an inspiration.

It is no surprise then that Walker’s image and name were emblazoned on every hair product and in every advertisement. Images of Walker’s well-coiffed, shiny hair, as well as the iconic image of her in the lower left hand corner of the advertisement looking regal, well-dressed, and tastefully accessorized, linked the use of these hair products with upward mobility and economic success. The Walker Manufacturing Company also promoted these principles by giving African Americans opportunities not only to buy the hair products, but to escape the limited labor opportunities that black women faced by becoming a sales agent. Proclaiming their desire to “belt the globe” and celebrating that they indeed had “agents everywhere,” opened up the possibility for black women to not only consume beauty culture, but to derive economic benefit from it as well.

Finally, the most striking aspect of this advertisement is in the way that it seeks to celebrate the building of an African American beauty empire that expands beyond the continental United States. For black entrepreneurs to travel across the United States to sell their products was not unusual. Black beauty pioneers like Madam Walker, however, traveled throughout the Caribbean and South and Central America to introduce women of African descent in these regions to their products and occupational opportunities. In November 1913, Walker traveled to Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, Costa Rica, and the Panama Canal Zone. The trips were a mixture of work and play. Much of the black press coverage of her travels as well as her own accounts discusses her leisure and philanthropic activities. Still, the desire for entrepreneurial expansion was never far from her mind. For example, after returning from Haiti, Walker encouraged “the Southern Negro with money” to invest in the uncultivated soil of Haiti to introduce “progressive American customs and habits.” By 1919, Walker’s company had indeed made significant inroads throughout North and South America as the advertisement indicates. This hemispheric reach was a source of pride for the company and allowed black Americans to feel connected to people of African descent throughout North and South America through their shared consumer experience.

The image of Madam C.J. Walker’s “Wonderful Hair Grower,” shining like the sun, rising above the nations, boasting about its supreme reputation, continued to draw black consumers in large numbers until the 1930s when the Great Depression and increased competition caused the company to lose its dominance in the beauty world. Still, the pioneering work of Walker and her company helped to facilitate a black beauty and hair care industry that is now valued at over four billion dollars. Madam Walker helped many realize that black is not only beautiful, but profitable, too.

For more on the black beauty industry, you can read

Tiffany M. Gill, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry

The official biography of Madam C. J. Walker

African American Women at Duke University Libraries

Ava Purkiss on Michele Mitchell’s Righteous Propagation right here in Not Even Past

Interesting portrait of Madam C. J. Walker by the artist, Sonya Clark, at the Blanton Museum of Art

The advertisement is published with the kind permission of A’Lelia Bundles/Madam Walker Family Archives/madamcjwalker.com. It is not to be reproduced for any purpose without permission.

Radio & Community

by John McKiernan-González

We learn to listen before we learn to read and we speak long before we learn to write. Most archives, however, are built to store printed pages, maps, personal letters, diaries, logbooks, notebooks, and manuscripts. We sometimes claim that these texts allow us to hear the voices of the past, but radio recordings let us to hear the tenor of those conversations.

With the advent of radio in the 1920s, people found a medium that bridged the spoken word and the printed page, household and community. With the purchase of a radio and the turn of a dial, people could hear worlds far beyond their immediate neighborhood. In the 1930s, radio became part of the political landscape. The intimacy of radio listening made presidential addresses fireside chats. Local radio hosts and producers added these broadcasts to a wildly diverse radio landscape, a landscape that reflected the general ethnic orientations in a given city. In 1930s Los Angeles, for example, Pedro Gonzalez of KPMC radio, kept his listeners abreast of developments in news and music in Mexican America. Radio provided a powerful way to connect musicians to their audiences, a situation that allowed Pedro Gonzalez’ recording career to blossom even further. Listeners participated in this Mexican American community without having to purchase, subscribe to or even read a paper. We know this because his recordings on vinyl are available, the local English and Spanish-Language news reported on his celebrity comings and goings, and the Los Angeles Mexican community challenged his deportation in the 1930s. We can read about Pedro Gonzalez, we just cannot hear what he had to say.

The radio program we have here is from a very different moment in Chicano community radio: the end of the 70s. The Mexican American Experience was the first nationally distributed Latino-themed public radio show, the direct precursor to the award winning Latino USA. The Mexican American Experience was produced by the Longhorn Radio Network (LRN), a public service minority content factory located deep in the basement of the Communications building.* The LRN had a particular market niche. Federal guidelines required every radio station to have a set number of broadcast hours dedicated to minority content, and the LRN produced radio shows with public service and minority content for radio stations across Texas and the Southwest. The Mexican American Experience was one of these shows but is also the only Longhorn Radio Network radio show available to anyone with access to the web. The show’s hosts – Alejandro Saenz, Richard Goodman, Andres Tijerina, Gloria Contreras, John Wheat, Armando Gutierrez and Rosa Linda Fregoso — touched on leading issues facing Chicano communities in Texas and the rest of the United States. The show also provided a public forum for the first substantial generation of Latino faculty and graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.

The recording we have here – “Educating Undocumented Children” – was broadcast on KUT (Austin) just before the Supreme Court decided Plyler v. Doe, which in 1982 established that undocumented children had constitutional rights to education in the United States under the equal protection clause. This 5-4 decision also implied school districts had the responsibility to educate every child in their district. Previously, in 1975, the state legislature had passed Texas Education Code 21031, which gave school districts the authority to charge tuition for or exclude undocumented students from school. Parents immediately challenged the constitutionality of the ruling and a variety of cases from Austin, Tyler and Houston started bubbling up into the federal district courts. In the summer of 1981, Austin Independent School District decided once again to prohibit the attendance of undocumented students. In the fall of 1981, school principals across Austin started to prevent children from attending school.

Rosa Linda Fregoso decided to feature key players in this situation on her radio show. Mark White, the attorney general for the State of Texas; Peter Shay, the lead attorney for the ACLU, Mr. Lopez, a local parent and Nestor Rodriguez, all agreed to be recorded for the show. Peter Shay focused on the constitutional shakiness behind the argument that some people in this country should have less access than others to equal protection under the law. Mark White emphasized the ways the funding streams for federal and the state government did not benefit Texas equally. Mr. Lopez pointed out that he paid sales tax, property tax and income tax, but his children did not receive any benefit from his labor or his taxes. Nestor Rodriguez discussed the impact of the court decision on children in East Austin. He chatted about the alternative school for undocumented children he established on the grounds of the Our Lady of Guadalupe church. Linda Fregoso moved across these very different political realms and- through editing – placed two East Austin residents in direct conversation with national debates over the constitutional importance of schooling. By listening, the debate seems less abstract, and – since no Supreme Court decision had yet been written or heard – the question regarding education and the bill of rights was still open.

This program captured history in the making, a history that we still all share. Radio may be a way to get people to exercise their historical imagination, to listen for differences between then and now, even though then was only 30 years ago.

LISTEN HERE: http://www.laits.utexas.edu/onda_latina/program?sernum=MAE_81_46_mp3&term=plyler

*Audio files of 226 broadcasts of “The Mexican American Experience,” produced by The Longhorn Radio Network are available at Onda Latina thanks to the College of Liberal Arts, the Nettie Lee Benson Library, the Center for Mexican American Studies, the Department of History, FASTEX, and the Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Service; all of The University of Texas at Austin.

Sources and More:

Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (2009)

Melvin Patrick Ely, The Adventures of Amos and Andy: The Social History of an American Phenomenon (2001)

Ari Kelman, Station Identification: a Cultural History of Yiddish Radio (2009)

David Montejano, Quixote’s Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966-1981 (2010)

Alexander Russo, Points on the Dial: Golden Age Radio beyond the Networks (2010)

George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (1994)

Richard Valencia, Chicano Students and the Courts: The Mexican American Legal Struggle for Educational Equality (2009)