Black Women Writers and Singers of the Avant-Garde and Civil Rights Movement

When one thinks of America in the 1960s and 1970s, one thinks of the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam War protests, Free Speech Movement, Women’s Liberation, the Gay Rights Movement, etc. Not to put too fine a point on it, this twenty year span in American history was not only one of the most tumultuous times in American history, but it served as the perfect time for subordinated groups to claim or reclaim their identities and let their voices be heard by the dominant culture. In retrospect, the voices of black women as a subordinated group do not seem to speak to the dominant culture as loud as other groups. Few black women authors and artists emerged from the shadows of the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation Movements as a testament to the struggle for black women’s voices to be heard.

Black women were able to assert themselves as political and intellectual figures in dominant culture by way of their contributions to the arts, namely writing, film and music. While black women’s voices seem to have melded into the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the 1970s provided more opportunity to be acknowledged by dominant culture. The Black Arts Movement offered black women a chance to speak out against the injustices that blacks continued to face in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, but the predominantly male collective offered few women a chance to speak. Black women struggled with participation in Women’s Liberation Movement due to pressure from those in the Black Power Movement feeling as if the torn black woman was neglecting her race. For many black women, the question became “what more can I do to assert myself?” From reflective, illustrative writings to blaxploitation heroines and disco divas in song, being a black woman in 1970s America’s dominant culture suddenly meant being cool.

Although black women can be identified as a subordinated group in terms of gender and racial status, this does not stop them from being considered capable to induce their own form of an avant-garde movement. Theorist Matei Calinescu defines avant-garde movement as having:

“(1) the possibility that its representatives be conceived of, or conceive of themselves, as being in advance of their time[…]and (2) the idea that there is a bitter struggle to be fought against an enemy symbolizing the forces of stagnation, the tyranny of the past, the old forms and ways of thinking, which tradition imposes on us like fetters to keep us from moving forward” (Calinescu 121-22).

Black women may not have rendered their voices loud and clear during the early 1960s Civil Rights Movement, but they stood in solidarity with black men as a racial collective. The main goal of the Civil Rights movement was equality amongst American blacks and whites. Those that chose to stand up and fight for their rights were fighting against one major oppressive enemy: racism. Activists and protesters were fighting to move and think forward, to think beyond “the old forms and ways of thinking.”

For notable black women, artistic works were the best ways of defeating the enemy. In her 1967 essay “The Civil Rights Movement: What Was it Good For?” award-winning author Alice Walker evaluated the effectiveness of the Civil Rights Movement and took time to reflect upon the ways in which it changed her life and the lives of those around her. On living through and reaping the benefits of the Civil Rights Movement, she states, “I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing…Just “knowing” has meant everything to me. Knowing has pushed me out into the world, into college, into places, into people” (Walker 85). These sentiments spoke for many black women who finally felt that they actually “existed” in a country that appeared to be teeming with racial hatred at every turn.

Black Arts Movement writer Carolyn Rodgers’s work seems radical in comparison to Walker’s. Her poem “It Is Deep (don’t ever forget the bridge that you crossed over on),” serves as both a note of love and respect for her mother, and a biting commentary on the struggle that her mother endured. Rodgers knows that her mother does not fully understand her stance on blacks nor why she subscribes to her radical beliefs. While Walker speaks on the gift of knowing, Rodgers admires her mother’s naivetÃ?©, undoubtedly shared by many older blacks at the time. The idea of the mother storming into Rodgers’s apartment to provide money for food and the phone bill is illustrative of the mother-daughter bond which transcends generations as well other metaphoric ideas (Rodgers 468). Providing money for food is symbolic of a mother’s love and desire to feed and nurture her offspring at any cost. Providing money for the phone bill shows a need for constant and accessible communication in order to maintain and strengthen a familial bond. Rodgers may not share the same views as her mother, but she is proud to be able to call her “mother.”

The writings of Walker and Rodgers are strong examples of sacral art. These works highlight the glories and adversities faced by black women as a collective in 1960s and 1970s America. These works do not serve an immediate purpose or function for the bourgeois or dominant culture other than be provided with a glimpse of the lives of black women in the late 1960s. These works belong in the category of sacral art because they are produced and received by the black woman or black collective. They serve as cult objects, or works that function in culturally reflective ways. This coincides with the bourgeois, dominant culture’s desire to strive for self-understanding through art. However, the similarities end there considering that blacks and black women create art in post-Civil Rights Movement America which affords them a chance to achieve some communal self-understanding which comes automatically to the bourgeois (BÃ?¼rger 238). The idea of sacral art continues when looking at Black action films and disco music in the 1970s.

While black action films of the 1970s marked an effort for black actors and directors to assert themselves in the mainstream, many films in the genre were box office disappointments and fodder for critics. On the other hand, the elements of black camp therein show the films’ lasting effects on American popular culture, in and out of the black community. Aside from the slew of black action, or blaxploitation, films of actress Pam Grier, former fashion model Tamara Dobson’s depiction of heroine “Cleopatra Jones” is one of the most recognizable and notable performances by black actresses in the decade. Instead of the camera solely playing voyeur while focusing on the slinky, ultra-feminine Cleopatra, the slowed cinematography allows the audience to pay more attention to the “visual detail [and] presents the practices of ordinary life as modes of knowledge, often non-verbal” (Kronengold 82). A statuesque figure at six-foot-two, Cleopatra Jones was a high-afroed, high-fashion, karate-chopping black Amazon. Cleopatra’s appearance defined cool, aesthetically and in demeanor, for black women. Although her persona and exploits were beyond belief and, at times, stereotypical, Cleopatra Jones served as a symbol of black power and black feminism. Although the tough and intimidating Cleopatra could be read or misread as a lesbian, the misreading allows lesbianism to be commodified at this black heroine’s expense as well as the dismissal of Jones as the “failure of black nationalism’s radical goals, black women’s multiple struggles for sexual equality and the class conflicts and homophobia of both the black and women’s organizations that flourished during the period” (Brody 226).

The flourishing of disco in the 1970s also saw black women in the mainstream being inadvertently paired with homosexuals once again. Disco can be seen as avant-garde due to its status as a form of music emanating from the margins of mainstream American culture. The voices of black women such as Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer, Anita Ward and Candi Staton were free to sing their narratives of love, lust and deceit while providing an ethnic, feminine counter to Rock and Roll. These narratives were shared not only by black women but by gay men. With many black female singers being raised in and honing their talents in churches and/or having homophobia due to traditional (read: heterosexual) structure of the black family, some singers were not happy with knowing their main audience’s sexual orientation (Hughes). Despite the feelings of those singers who stood firm, with their beliefs on sexual orientation, Disco proved to be a formidable force in American culture. Despite the mass amount of ridicule that it received from critics, Disco proved to be financially successful in dominant culture and served as a unifier of black women and gays as subordinated groups. It would be hard to imagine Disco without the union of black female voices and gay spirit culminating in its brand of communal music celebrating life, love and the body.