46 pages • 1 hour read
Tera W. HunterTo ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Black Body
Hunter’s history of working-class black women’s labor largely focuses on efforts by whites to control the black body. According to Hunter, the black body “is a site where a society’s ideas about race, class, gender, and sexuality are constructed to give the appearance of being mandates of nature while actually conforming to cultural ideologies” (185). In other words, seemingly straightforward efforts to regulate things like dancing, dress, hygiene, movement, and the appearance of bodies are never just about exercising dominance over working-class black women. Instead, the real issue is getting people to accept uncritically that such dominance is exactly the way things should be. In effect, contests over black bodies are contests over what black bodies are for. For white employers, black bodies are for creating profit, while for working-class women, black bodies are for self-expression, protecting their communities, joy, or even pleasure.
In Chapter 9, Hunter also explores how the bodies of black, female domestic servants came to be “metaphors for disease” (203) and “social disorder” (203). Whites projected their racial anxieties about the place of black female domestic workers, who crossed the racial boundaries of segregation by working in the homes of their white employers, onto black bodies. For whites, the black female body became a symbol of their fears about not being able to maintain the distinction between black and white.
The Birth of a Nation
The Birth of a Nation is a 1915 film by D.W. Griffith the portrayed a pro-Confederate, racist, pro-Ku Klux Klan portrait of how the South might be redeemed from the excesses of supposed incompetent black rule during the period of Reconstruction. The film is an important symbol of the New South because Griffith used innovative film techniques to propagate white supremacist representation of the South. His whitewash of Southern history played an important role in normalizing white supremacy as an acceptable part of modern Southern identity.
The almost universal adulation for the film galvanized black civil rights groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The reaction to the film is emblematic of how disenfranchised African Americans used collective action and interventions in white representation of African Americans to push back against white dominance.
Decatur Street and the White City
Decatur Street was an important site of working-class African-American leisure. For working-class African Americans, Decatur Street represented a zone of freedom in which they could engage in leisure that defied white employers’ expectations that black bodies were to be used for their profit. Working-class African Americans dominated Decatur Street, so it is an important symbol of black working-class identity. Whites and other ethnic groups freely mingled with blacks on Decatur Street, so this site is also associated with cross-racial encounters that defied efforts to racially segregate the residents of Atlanta.
Other spaces in Atlanta such as the White City, a park reserved for whites only, were “white consumer fairylands” (147) that allowed whites to enjoy their leisure without ever seeing a black face beyond those who cared for white children. These parks are important symbols of Jim Crow laws and white supremacy.
The International Cotton Exposition of 1881
Business and industrial interests organized the International Cotton Exposition of 1881 to introduce Atlanta to the rest of the country as a place open for investment and business. The exposition is therefore an important symbol of the New South. As Hunter points out, the washerwomen’s strike in the summer leading up to the exposition showed working-class black women’s unwillingness to serve as docile laborers who, though essential to this New South, stood to receive none of the benefits.
