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| author | Hettie Vonciel Williams |
| title | The Garden of Opportunity: Black Women Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement in New Jersey, 1912-1949 |
| abstract | This dissertation examines the history of the Civil Rights Movement through a study of the social activism and ideas
advanced by black women intellectuals in New Jersey from 1912 to 1949. By analyzing the historical importance of black women in the early Civil Rights
Movement, I illuminate the significance of black women in the broader history of the black freedom struggle. My dissertation presents a challenge to the
existing scholarship about the Civil Rights Movement on multiple levels in terms of chronology, geography, and methodology. Historian Jacqueline Dowd Hall,
in a significant 2005 article on the black freedom struggle that appeared in Journal of American History, adopted what has come to be known as the
"long movement" approach to the study of the Civil Rights Movement. This approach contends that the Civil Rights Movement began before 1954. My study affirms
this perspective by focusing on the early movement in a northern state. Much of the literature on the Civil Rights Movement suggests that it was primarily a
southern movement directed by middle-class men associated with the black church. By considering the activism and ideas of women such as Florence Spearing
Randolph, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, and Marion Thompson Wright, my dissertation constitutes a necessary intervention in the history of the long Civil Rights
Movement. In this study, I utilize gender analysis (intersectionality) as both a method and a theory to discuss how and why black women advanced an
intersectional approach to empowerment that eventually garnered significant gains in civil rights at the state constitutional level in New Jersey that
became a platform for extending the movement across the nation by the mid-twentieth century. |
| school | The Caspersen School of Graduate Studies, Drew University |
| degree | Ph.D. (2017) |
| advisor(s) | Lillie Edwards |
| committee | J. Terry Todd
Katherine Parkin |
| full text | HVWilliams.pdf |
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