The Life of Madie Hall Xuma

The Life of Madie Hall Xuma PDF Author: Wanda A. Hendricks
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252053575
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
Revered in South Africa as "An African American Mother of the Nation," Madie Beatrice Hall Xuma spent her extraordinary life immersed in global women's activism. Wanda A. Hendricks's biography follows Hall Xuma from her upbringing in the Jim Crow South to her leadership role in the African National Congress (ANC) and beyond. Hall Xuma was already known for her social welfare work when she married South African physician and ANC activist Alfred Bitini Xuma. Becoming president of the ANC Women’s League put Hall Xuma at the forefront of fighting racial discrimination as South Africa moved toward apartheid. Hendricks provides the long-overlooked context for the events that undergirded Hall Xuma’s life and work. As she shows, a confluence of history, ideas, and organizations both shaped Hall Xuma and centered her in the histories of Black women and women’s activism, and of South Africa and the United States.

The Life of Madie Hall Xuma

The Life of Madie Hall Xuma PDF Author: Wanda A. Hendricks
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252053575
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
Revered in South Africa as "An African American Mother of the Nation," Madie Beatrice Hall Xuma spent her extraordinary life immersed in global women's activism. Wanda A. Hendricks's biography follows Hall Xuma from her upbringing in the Jim Crow South to her leadership role in the African National Congress (ANC) and beyond. Hall Xuma was already known for her social welfare work when she married South African physician and ANC activist Alfred Bitini Xuma. Becoming president of the ANC Women’s League put Hall Xuma at the forefront of fighting racial discrimination as South Africa moved toward apartheid. Hendricks provides the long-overlooked context for the events that undergirded Hall Xuma’s life and work. As she shows, a confluence of history, ideas, and organizations both shaped Hall Xuma and centered her in the histories of Black women and women’s activism, and of South Africa and the United States.

Hope and Dignity

Hope and Dignity PDF Author: Emily Herring Wilson
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 9781566390170
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the Foreword by Maya Angelou InHope and DignityEmily Wilson and Susan Mullally have offered some answers to the question of Black survival. Wilson, a good and recognized poet, traveled her adopted State of North Carolina (she is originally from Georgia) talking to older Black women and listening to their responses. Interestingly, the women collected in this book appear to be speaking more to their ancestors and even to their unborn progeny than to Emily Wilson and therein must lie the book's success. For, since Wilson is White, it is natural to suspect anything Black people might say to her. (There is the old saying among Blacks: "If white people ask you where you are going tell them where you've been.") It is a compliment to Wilson to say that she was wise enough to pose her questions then stand aside so that the women could reflect privately on the pasts they have lived and even those they wished they had lived. Mullally's photographs are inspired and to the point. She has demonstrated as much sensitivity as Wilson and an equal amount of poetic curiosity. The subjects appear, as out of a mist, suddenly clear and clearly mistresses of their real and imagined times. They have overcome the cruel roles into which they had been cast by racism and ignorance. They have wept over their hopeless fate and defied destiny by creating hope anew. They have nursed, by force, a nation of hostile strangers, and wrung from lifetimes of mean servitude and third class citizenship a dignity of indescribable elegance. "If I had it to do over," Mrs. Bryant explains, "I would just as soon have the days of back yonder as today. I had. But I'm sure the children can have so much more and so much more easier till this is better days for living but not the kind of living we was brought up with. We had time to visit each other, and had time to go see the sick and didn't have no thoughts of putting nobody in the rest home. Maybe if there was four or five working on the farm, one could stay at the house and wait on that sick person. And it didn't put no bigger strain on them. Now it seems like they have keyed up themselves for fine houses, fine furniture, fine cars, fine everything until it takes them both to work [the wife and the husband]. But used to if the man had to be sick, the woman with the neighbor's aid could carry on. Or if the woman had to be sick, the neighbors would help do the chopping or do whatever she had been doing till she could get well. Now there's no way that no one hardly, the way they've got themselves stretched out for wanting so much, that they can carry on as well as we did. When mother stays at home with the children and works with them, like I did, you near about know them. No way hardly they can fool you or nothing. I'm not giving myself no pat, but nobody worked more hours than I did." These women are teachers comprehensively. Their accounts inform us that while life in North Carolina and in all the United States, has been hard for the Black woman (and man and child) it can be borne with dignity, and it can be changed by hope. Salutes to Wilson and Mullally, and humble thanks to all the women collected in this book. I understand them. They are my grandmothers. Author note:Emily Herring Wisonis a writer in Wonston-Salem, North Carolina. She is working with Margaret Supplee Smith on a history of women in North Carolina.Susan Mullally Clarkis a photographer in Greensboro, North Carolina, who is currently working on a photographic study of brothers and sisters. Wilson and Clark traveled more than 20,000 miles through the South in the course of interviewing, lecturing, and photographing forHope and Dignity.

Fannie Barrier Williams

Fannie Barrier Williams PDF Author: Wanda A. Hendricks
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252095871
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
Born shortly before the Civil War, activist and reformer Fannie Barrier Williams (1855-1944) became one of the most prominent educated African American women of her generation. Hendricks shows how Williams became "raced" for the first time in early adulthood, when she became a teacher in Missouri and Washington, D.C., and faced the injustices of racism and the stark contrast between the lives of freed slaves and her own privileged upbringing in a western New York village. She carried this new awareness to Chicago, where she joined forces with black and predominantly white women's clubs, the Unitarian church, and various other interracial social justice organizations to become a prominent spokesperson for Progressive economic, racial, and gender reforms during the transformative period of industrialization. By highlighting how Williams experienced a set of freedoms in the North that were not imaginable in the South, this clearly-written, widely accessible biography expands how we understand intellectual possibilities, economic success, and social mobility in post-Reconstruction America.

Extending the Diaspora

Extending the Diaspora PDF Author: Dawne Y. Curry
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252076524
Category : African diaspora
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
Fresh perspectives on the black diaspora's global histories

Street Life under a Roof

Street Life under a Roof PDF Author: Emily Margaretten
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252097696
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
Point Place stands near the city center of Durban, South Africa. Condemned and off the grid, the five-story apartment building is nonetheless home to a hundred-plus teenagers and young adults marginalized by poverty and chronic unemployment. In Street Life under a Roof, Emily Margaretten draws on ten years of up-close fieldwork to explore the distinct cultural universe of the Point Place community. Margaretten's sensitive investigations reveal how young men and women draw on customary notions of respect and support to forge an ethos of connection and care that allows them to live far richer lives than ordinarily assumed. Her discussion of gender dynamics highlights terms like nakana--to care about or take notice of another--that young women and men use to construct "outside" and "inside" boyfriends and girlfriends and to communicate notions of trust. Margaretten exposes the structures of inequality at a local, regional, and global level that contribute to socioeconomic and political dislocation. But she also challenges the idea that Point Place's marginalized residents need "rehabilitation." As she argues, these young men and women want love, secure homes, and the means to provide for their dependents--in short, the same hopes and aspirations mirrored across South African society.

Alfred B. Xuma

Alfred B. Xuma PDF Author: S. Gish
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230599621
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
President of the African National Congress in South Africa between 1941-49, Alfred B. Xuma was one of the most influential black South Africans of his generation. In this biography of Dr. Xuma, the first of its kind, the author explores the impact of African-American ideas on African nationalism, the debates within the anti-apartheid movement in the 1940s and 1950s, and the often rocky relationship that existed between white liberals and African nationalists.

Choreographies of African Identities

Choreographies of African Identities PDF Author: Francesca Castaldi
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252090780
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Get Book Here

Book Description
Choreographies of African Identities traces interconnected interpretative frameworks around and about the National Ballet of Senegal. Using the metaphor of a dancing circle Castaldi's arguments cover the full spectrum of performance, from production to circulation and reception. Castaldi first situates the reader in a North American theater, focusing on the relationship between dancers and audiences as that between black performers and white spectators. She then examines the work of the National Ballet in relation to Léopold Sédar Senghor's Négritude ideology and cultural politics. Finally, the author addresses the circulation of dances in the streets, discotheques, and courtyards of Dakar, drawing attention to women dancers' occupation of the urban landscape.

Grounds of Engagement

Grounds of Engagement PDF Author: Stéphane Robolin
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252097580
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
Part literary history, part cultural study, Grounds of Engagement examines the relationships and exchanges between black South African and African American writers who sought to create common ground throughout the antiapartheid era. Stéphane Robolin argues that the authors' geographic imaginations crucially defined their individual interactions and, ultimately, the literary traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Subject to the tyranny of segregation, authors such as Richard Wright, Bessie Head, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Michelle Cliff, and Richard Rive charted their racialized landscapes and invented freer alternative geographies. They crafted rich representations of place to challenge the stark social and spatial arrangements that framed their lives. Those representations, Robolin contends, also articulated their desires for black transnational belonging and political solidarity. The first book to examine U.S. and South African literary exchanges in spatial terms, Grounds of Engagement identifies key moments in the understudied history of black cross-cultural exchange and exposes how geography serves as an indispensable means of shaping and reshaping modern racial meaning.

Somalis Abroad

Somalis Abroad PDF Author:
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252099451
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on a wealth of ethnographic detail, Stephanie Bjork offers the first study on the messy role of clan or tribe in the Somali diaspora, and the only study on the subject to include women's perspectives. Somalis Abroad illuminates the ways clan is contested alongside ideas of autonomy and gender equality, challenged by affinities towards others with similar migration experiences, transformed because of geographical separation from family members, and leveraged by individuals for cultural capital. Challenging prevailing views in the field, Bjork argues that clan-informed practices influence everything from asylum decisions to managing money. The practices also become a pattern that structures important relationships via constant--and unwitting--effort.

Walter & Albertina Sisulu

Walter & Albertina Sisulu PDF Author: Elinor Sisulu
Publisher: New Africa Books
ISBN: 9780864866394
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 696

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is well-told story and an important historical record of the struggle for a democratic South Africa.