This paper is a case study of African‐American women’s leadership. It documents women’s involvement in a voter registration drive in 1946 and traces the develop‐ment of an ‘official history’ of that event that emerged in the ensuing decades. This narrative shifted emphasis from the organising leadership that both women and men exhibited to a form of leadership – success in electoral politics – that pertained almost exclusively to men. Concluding remarks address the relevance of memory and narrative for writing the history of women’s leadership.
Over the last fifteen years, historians of the civil rights movement have been charting a new interpretive course. A nationally oriented narrative, with a chronology centered on key events in the life of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., has given way to a host of state and local studies, with all the variety one would expect from such a turn. As a result, many basic questions are being revisited, including periodization (When did the movement begin and end?), scope (What events, actions, and issues constitute the movement?), and personnel and leadership (How do we write a history of activism and leadership in a mass movement?). Often, these questions refract upon each other. A narrative that begins in the 1930s, for example, will of necessity introduce previously ignored actors and events. To explore any of these questions is to ask, as Adam Fairclough did in a 1990 review essay that still raises many timely issues, "What was the civil rights movement?"! This essay considers this basic question, and especially the matter of periodization, through the life history method of oral history.' The storytelling that emerges from oral history practice is a narrative act in which experience is ordered and interpreted, and the life history approach, which aims at a full narration of personal history, leads naturally to a consideration of beginnings and endings. Implicitly, each life story opens onto the question of periodization." Kathryn L. Nasstrom is assistant professor of history at the University of San Francisco.
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