Beyond Loving: Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Black Freedom Movement

FAIN: FEL-273699-21

Traci Lynnea Parker
University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Amherst, MA 01003-9242)

Research in support of a book manuscript that considers black love, marriage and family as integral expressions of black freedom movement ideology.

Beyond Loving examines African American romances in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Historians have fixated on miscegenation in these movements and have not appreciated intraracial black relationships, which far outnumbered mixed-race ones. Beyond Loving argues that the civil rights revolution generated important shifts between African American men and women; and, because gender and Jim Crow were intricately intertwined in deeply pathological ways, these relationships became sites for confronting racism and gender and sexual inequalities. Black activists whose radical ideas were forming and shaping the black freedom movement, I find, explored unconventional ideas related to the structure of their romantic relationships hoping to liberate the individual and the race. Beyond Loving offers new insights into activists’ lives and experiences and illustrates how love and activism shaped changing ideals of gender, sexuality, family, and community in the twentieth century.