I Am a Man! by Steve Estes

I Am a Man! by Steve Estes

The civil rights movement was first and foremost a struggle for racial equality, but questions of gender lay deeply embedded within this struggle. Steve Estes explores key groups, leaders, and events in the movement to understand how activists used race and manhood to articulate their visions of what American society should be. Estes demonstrates that, at crucial turning points in the movement, both segregationists and civil rights activists harnessed masculinist rhetoric, tapping into implicit assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality. Estes begins with an analysis of the role of black men in World War II and then examines the segregationists, who demonized black male sexuality and galvanized white men behind the ideal of southern honor. He then explores the militant new models of manhood espoused by civil rights activists such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and groups such as the Nation of Islam, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Black Panther Party. Reliance on masculinist organizing strategies had both positive and negative consequences, Estes concludes. Tracing these strategies from the integration of the U.S. military in the 1940s through the Million Man March in the 1990s, he shows that masculinism rallied men to action but left unchallenged many of the patriarchal assumptions that underlay American society.

"This is a moving and riveting look at the extraordinary people who came together to shape history" - Publishers Weekly

Steve Estes is associate professor of history at Sonoma State University. He is author of I AM a Man!: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (from the University of North Carolina Press).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780807855935
ISBN 10	0807855936
Title	I Am a Man!
Author	Steve Estes
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The University of North Carolina Press
Year published	2005-03-31
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.