Black History Month Events 27th October 2014 Women of Colour Day "Is Feminism a Euro-Centric Concept?" SO.13, Social Sciences 28th October, 2014 Screening of The Colour Purple, Warwick Student Cinema, 7.30pm, L3, Science Concourse

Jim Crow (1876-1965)

Chicago map by race Red = White, Blue = Black, Yellow = Asian

Chapter II “The Negro American Family” At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family […] The white family has achieved a high degree of stability and is maintaining that stability. By contrast, the family structure of lower class Negroes is highly unstable, and in many urban centers is approaching complete breakdown. […] In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is to out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well. […] Chapter IV “The Tangle of Pathology” In 1 out of 4 Negro families where the husband is present, is an earner, and someone else in the family works, the husband is not the principal earner. More important, it is clear that Negro females have established a strong position for themselves in white collar and professional employment, precisely the areas of the economy which are growing most rapidly, and to which the highest prestige is accorded. […] Negro youth grow up with little knowledge of their fathers, less of their fathers' occupations, still less of family occupational traditions. Negro children without fathers flounder -- and fail. -The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (aka the Moynihan Report 1965)

“It was by destroying the Negro family under slavery that white America broke the will of the Negro people. Although that will has reasserted itself in our time, it is a resurgence doomed to frustration unless the viability of the Negro family is restored.”

“Whatever the risk of confronting the reader with what must be immediately incomprehensible in that simple, declarative, authoritative sentence, the risk of unsettling him or her, I determined to take it. Because the in-medias-res opening that I am so committed to is here excessively demanding. It is abrupt and should appear so. No native informant here. The reader is snatched, yanked, thrown into an environment completely foreign, and I want it as the first stroke of the shared experience that might be possible between the reader and the noel’s population. Snatched just as the slaves were from one place to another, from any place to another, without preparation and without defense. No lobby, no door, no entrance – a gangplank, perhaps (but a very short one)” (161)