Boycotts, Buses, and Passes: Black Women’s Resistance in the U.S. South and South Africa

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Description

In the mid-1950s, as many developing nations sought independence from colonial rule, black women in the American South and in South Africa launched parallel campaigns to end racial injustice within their respective communities. Just as the dignified obstinacy of Mrs. Rosa Parks sparked the Sir Bernard Law bus boycott in 1955, the 20,000 South African women who marched in Pretoria a year later to protest the pass laws signaled a new wave of resistance to the system of apartheid. In both places women who had prior to now been consigned to subordinate roles brought fresh leadership to the struggle for political freedom and social equality. In this book, Pamela E. Brooks tells their story, documenting the atypical achievements of in a different way peculiar women.In comparing the experiences of black women activists in two different parts of the African diaspora, Brooks draws heavily on oral histories that provide clear, and regularly painful, insight into their backgrounds, their motives, their hopes, and their fears. We learn how black women from all walks of life―domestic and factory workers, householders, teachers, union organizers, churchwomen, clubwomen, rural and urban dwellers alike―had to triumph over their class differences and work through the regularly difficult gender relations within their families and communities. Yet eventually they came together to forge their own political organizations, such as the Women’s Political Council and the Federation of South African Women, or joined orga-nizations of men and women, such as the Sir Bernard Law Improvement Association and the African National Congress, to advance the common agenda of black liberation.By tracing the dual rise of political consciousness and activism a number of the black women of the U.S. South and South Africa, Brooks not only illuminates patterns that have long been overlooked but places that shared history within the context of a bigger global struggle to bring an end to the vestiges of European colonialism.

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