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Do What You Gotta Do : Black Women Entertainers and Civil Rights Activism in The 1960s

ISBN: 9780195314038 | 0195314034

Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Pub. Date: 12/13/2013

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Summary Author Biography

The Civil Rights movement and popular culture are so closely intertwined in American memory that, even today, the soundtrack of counter-cultural opposition is what many still associate with the 1960s mainstream. What is less remembered today is how risky political activism was, on and off-stage, for black female entertainers who were simultaneously trying to gain mass popularity. Rather than looking at the women of the sit-ins and popular protests, Ruth Feldstein in this project considers the public careers and activism of popular entertainers-... MOREactress Lena Horne, vocalist Nina Simone, model-turned-singer Abbey Lincoln, folk singer Miriam Makeba, actress Diahann Carroll, and actress Cicely Tyson. She examines each woman's personal political commitments and connections, and the ways that they were used nationally and internationally as symbols of the African American and women's rights struggles, in order to highlight particular moments of change in politics, the entertainment industry, and notions of celebrity. Their cultural work, she argues, helped to constitute the climate in which dramatic political events and changes occurred, as well as how they and their work have been and remembered by the public.

Do What You Gotta Do examines the role of black female entertainers in the Civil Rights movement.

In 1964, Nina Simone sat at a piano in New York's Carnegie Hall and began to play a jaunty show tune. Then she began to sing. "Alabama's got me so upset/Tennessee made me lose my rest/And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam!" Simone, and her song, became icons of the civil rights movement. But Simone's confrontational style was not the only path taken by black women entertainers. Their careers formed a rich tapestry that changed the way Americans saw race and gender.

In How it Feels to be Free, Ruth Feldstein examines celebrated black women performers during the 1960s, illuminating the risks they took, their roles at home and abroad, and how they raised the issue of gender amid racial turmoil and their demands for black liberation. Feldstein examines six women: Lena Horne, an activist since the 1940s, South African folk singer Miriam Makeba, Nina Simone, singer and actresses Abbey Lincoln and Diahann Carroll, and actress Cicely Tyson. These women did not simply mirror black activism; their performances helped constitute the era's political history. Makeba connected America's struggle for civil rights to the fight against apartheid, while Simone sparked high-profile controversy. Yet Feldstein finds nuance in their careers. In 1968, Hollywood cast the outspoken Lincoln as a maid to a white family in For Love of Ivy, adding a layer of complication to the film. That same year, the sitcom Julia starred Carroll. Was it a landmark for casting a black woman or for treating her race as unimportant? The answer is not clear-cut. Yet audiences gave broader meaning to seemingly apolitical performances.

These six women demonstrated that entertainment was not just entertainment. Overtly or indirectly, they helped to transform meanings of black womanhood in a revolutionary time.

Ruth Feldstein is Associate Professor of History, Harvard University. She is the author of Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-1965.

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