by Anita Hill
Barack Obama, whose fervent search for home brought him to the presidency, must seize the moment of crisis to enlarge our concept of home for all Americans, but especially the next generation. I would call on all of the nation’s leaders—political and social—to take up this cause. Americans are in need of a twenty-first century vision of our country—not a vision of movement, but one of place; not one of tolerance, but one of belonging; not just of rights, but also of community—a community of equals. This new vision will lead to an inclusive American democracy that stays alive and remains real for everyone.
On October 16, 2011, I will celebrate the one hundredth birthday of my mother, Erma Hill. The place where I live, with its long, snowy winters, is not likely what she contemplated thirty-five years ago when she sent me off with two sets of luggage. But it is my home, and each day I honor her by working to live up to her dream that I will find a more just America than the one she lived in and that, as she did, I will leave it better than I found it.
Acknowledgments
Thanking everyone who has contributed to this book is a daunting task, but there is one logical place to start—home. Charles Malone’s insight, patience, good humor, and unflinching commitment to me and my work sustained me daily through years of research and writing. My cousin Willie Faye Parker was the link between me and the grandparents we shared. Her stories of their lives in Arkansas gave vitality and new meaning to our family’s written oral history and the information generously provided me by historian Richard Buckelew and researchers at the Little River County (Arkansas) Genealogical Society and the National Archives and Records Administration. Siblings Elreatha, Albert, Billy, Doris, Allen, Joyce, Carlene, John, Ray, and JoAnn each shared stories about our farm and community in Oklahoma that enriched the book and my appreciation of our upbringing. My brothers Alfred and Winston, who passed during this project, deserve special thanks for their poignant remembrances and their gentle but insistent encouragement. Eric, my nephew, who read, researched, and advised from the start, was especially helpful to my understanding of popular culture and the meaning of home for young African American men today. My family’s support and love serve as the base from which I dared reenvision equality in America.
During the twelve years that Brandeis University has been my intellectual home, many colleagues at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program have given generously of their time and talents to help me understand the complexity of equality in a way that made this project possible. Yet the book may not have happened had Robert Reich, then a colleague at Brandeis, not coaxed me to write about my mother as I was grieving her death and pondering her life. Lisa Lynch, dean of the Heller School, offered enormous support and just the right amount of prodding to “finish the manuscript.” Andreas Teuben, Robin Feuer Miller, Mari Fitzduff, Theodore Johnson, James Mardrell, and Dennis Nealon, whose thoughtful contributions to early drafts and enthusiasm for the book’s ideas energized my efforts, were kind and supportive beyond anything in their job descriptions. Donna Einhorn, who eagerly assisted me in structuring the work on this book and all my projects, makes my time at Brandeis all the more productive and enjoyable. Together with Lindsay Markel’s research and editorial assistance, these colleagues, along with many on the staff and a host of students, helped me conceptualize and develop the design for the project.
With their vast knowledge of books and the publishing world, Larry Kirshbaum, my agent, and Joy Johannessen, my friend and an exceptional editor, took what were ideas for Reimagining and shaped it into a solid proposal for a manuscript. Friends and colleagues Susan Hoerchner, Shirley Wiegand, William Rhoden, William J. Wilson, Sydney Goldstein, Kathleen Peratis, Emma Coleman Jordan, Susan Faludi, Russ Rhymer, Stacy Blake-Beard, Lillian Rubin, and Lani Guinier raised important questions that both broadened and refined my thinking as I wrote each chapter.
Notes
Introduction
1. Throughout the book I use the term “race.” Though I talk mostly about African Americans and European Americans, I realize the value in the stories of people of different races as they search for home. Indeed, in writing this book I hope to open exploration into the ways each of us searches for belonging and, ultimately, how we can all feel at home in America. [back]
2. T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” in The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt, 1980), 129. [back]
3. On March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams, who was attending the Continental Congress: “[I]n the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.” Available at “Selected Manuscripts: Remember the Ladies,” Massachusetts Historical Society, accessed April 27, 2011, www.masshist.org/adams/manuscripts_1.cfm. [back]
4. “A Speech at the Memorial Service for Samuel Chapman Armstrong,” in The Booker T. Washington Papers, ed. Louis R. Harlan, vol. 3, 1889–95, eds. Stuart B. Kaufman and Raymond W. Smock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 317. [back]
5. See, for example, Traki L. Taylor, “ ‘Womanhood Glorified’: Nannie Helen Burroughs and the National Training School for Women and Girls, Inc., 1909–1961,” in “New Perspectives on African American Educational History,” special issue, Journal of African American History 87, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 390–402; Audrey Thomas McCluskey, “ ‘We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible’: Black Women School Founders and Their Mission,” Signs 22, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 403–26. [back]
6. Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940). See also Allen R. Kamp, “The History Behind Hansberry v. Lee,” UC Davis Law Review 20, no. 3 (1986–87): 481–99. [back]
7. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor, 1965). [back]
8. See, for example, Sharon Epperson and Peter Chin, “You Can Buy a Home,” Essence, June 2006, 170, describing how three black women fulfilled their dream of owning a home. [back]
9. Allen J. Fishbein and Patrick Woodall, Women Are Prime Targets for Subprime Lending: Women Are Disproportionately Represented in High-Cost Mortgage Market (Washington, DC: Consumer Federation of America, 2006), www.consumerfed.org/elements/www.consumerfed.org/file/housing/Women PrimeTargetsStudy120606.pdf. [back]
10. Mayor of Baltimore v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., 324 Fed. Appx. 251, 2009 U.S. App. LEXIS 9127 (4th Cir. Md. 2009); John Fritze, “Lawsuit by City Targets Lender,” Baltimore Sun, January 8, 2008. See also Kenneth C. Johnston et al., “The Subprime Morass: Past, Present, and Future,” North Carolina Banking Institute Journal 12 (2008): 127, www.law.unc.edu/documents/journals/articles/99.pdf. [back]
11. Mayor of Baltimore v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., 677 F. Supp. 2d 847, 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 834 (D. Md. 2010). The January 6, 2010, order dismissing the City of Baltimore’s complaint is available at www.mdd.uscourts.gov/Opinions/Opinions/WellsFargo06jan10.pdf. [back]
12. Mayor of Baltimore v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., 677 F. Supp. 2d 847, 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 44731 (D. Md. 2010). Amended complaint, filed April 7, 2010; in author’s possession. [back]
13. Christopher Clausen, “Moving On,” Wilson Quarterly 32, no. 1 (2008): 22. [back]
14. The White House: Inside America’s Most Famous Home, Adobe Flash video and transcript, C-SPAN Video Library, December 6, 2008, www.c-spanvideo.org/program/282748-8. [back]
Chapter 1. Home: Survival and the Land
1. Henry Louis Gates Jr., quoted in WNET.ORG, “African American Lives, Acclaimed PBS Series by Harvard Scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Becomes a Summer Course in Spain,” news release, July 9, 2009, www.thirteen.org/pressroom/pdf/company/WNETAALSummerCourseRelease.pdf. [back]
2. F. Heinemann, “The Federal Occupation of Camden as Set Forth in the Diary of a Union Officer,” Arkansas Histor
ical Quarterly 9, no. 3 (Autumn 1950): 215. [back]
3. Laura F. Edwards, “ ‘The Marriage Covenant Is at the Foundation of All Our Rights’: The Politics of Slave Marriages in North Carolina after Emancipation,” Law and History Review 14, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 101. [back]
4. Randy Finley, “In War’s Wake: Health Care and Arkansas Freedmen, 1863–1868,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 51, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 144. [back]
5. William Rogers, quoted in Kenneth C. Barnes, Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 174. [back]
6. Rogers, quoted in Barnes, Journey, 173. [back]
7. Christian Recorder (Philadelphia), March 24, 1892, reprinted in Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, vol. 2 (Citadel: New York, 1970), 793. [back]
8. “Race War Is On: Whites of Arkansas Killing Off the Colored Men,” Nebraska State Journal, March 24, 1899, accessed May 12, 2011, http://yesteryearsnews.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/; and P. Butler Thomkins, letter to the editor, New York Times, August 5, 1899, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F40E11FC3C5911738DDDAC0894D0405B8985F0D3. [back]
9. “Mob at Ashdown Lynches a Negro,” Arkansas Gazette, May 15, 1910, in the author’s possession. [back]
10. Little River County Mortgage Record No. 4, 1896–7, 254, obtained from Little River County Genealogical Society, e-mail message to author, August 8, 2008. [back]
Chapter 2. Belonging to the New Land
1. For a general discussion, see Michael J. Shapiro, Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject (New York: Routledge Press, 2004), 74. See also Andrea Most, “ ‘We Know We Belong to the Land’: The Theatricality of Assimilation in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!,” PMLA 113, no. 1 (January 1998): 77–89, for a discussion of Jud Fry’s racialization and the assimilation theme of the musical; and Bruce Kirle, “Reconciliation, Resolution, and the Political Role of Oklahoma! in American Consciousness,” Theatre Journal 55, no. 2 (May 2003): 252–74. [back]
2. Shapiro, Methods, 74. [back]
3. Sandra Baringer et al., letter to the editor, PMLA 113, no. 3 (May 1998): 452–55. [back]
4. Dianna Everett, “Lynching,” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Oklahoma Historical Society, accessed April 27, 2011, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/L/LY001.html. See also Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. and Lonnie E. Underhill, “The ‘Crazy Snake Uprising’ of 1909: A Red, Black, or White Affair?,” Arizona and the West 20, no. 4 (Winter 1978): 322–23. [back]
5. Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. and Lonnie E. Underhill, “Black Dreams and ‘Free’ Homes: The Oklahoma Territory,” Phylon 34, no. 4 (4th Quar. 1973): 342–57; M. Jeff Hardwick, “Homesteads and Bungalows: African-American Architecture in Langston, Oklahoma,” Shaping Communities: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 6 (1997): 21–32; James M. Smallwood, “Segregation,” Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Oklahoma Historical Society, accessed March 19, 2011, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/S/SE006.html. [back]
6. “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress,” was Booker T. Washington’s proposal for model interaction between blacks and whites, as presented in his September 18, 1895, “Atlanta Compromise” speech to a mostly white audience. Booker T. Washington Papers, 583–87. [back]
7. Ben Brantley, “Wilson’s Wanderers, Searching for Home,” New York Times, April 17, 2009, http://theater.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/theater/reviews/17turn.html. [back]
8. Kevin Boyle, “Promised Land,” New York Times, March 19, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/review/Boyle-t.html. [back]
9. Ira Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (New York: Viking, 2010), 18. [back]
Chapter 3. Gender and Race at Home in America
1. Abigail Adams, “Remember the Ladies” (see introduction, n. 3). [back]
2. Gail Collins, America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines (New York: Perennial, 2003), 80, 83. [back]
3. Ibid., 80. [back]
4. John Edgar Wideman, The Homewood Books (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 155. See also Wilfred D. Samuels, “Going Home: A Conversation with John Edgar Wideman,” Callaloo 6, no. 1 (Feb. 1983): 41–42. [back]
5. Dolores Hayden, “Biddy Mason’s Los Angeles, 1856–1891,” California History 68, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 86–99. [back]
6. Karen A. Johnson, “Undaunted Courage and Faith: The Lives of Three Black Women in the West and Hawaii in the Early 19th Century,” in “The African American Experience in the Western States,” special issue, Journal of African American History 91, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 4–22. [back]
7. Brantley, “Wilson’s Wanderers.” [back]
8. Berlin, Making, 290. [back]
9. Barbara Burlison Mooney, “The Comfortable Tasty Framed Cottage: An African American Architectural Iconography,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, no. 1 (March 2002): 48–67. See also American Victorian Cottage Homes (Bridgeport, CT: Palliser, Palliser & Co., 1878; repr., New York: Dover, 1990), 15–16, plate 19, “Design 29—Shows plan, elevations and perspective view of a tasty little Cottage of six rooms, with necessary conveniences for making a comfortable and attractive home.” [back]
10. The Booker T. Washington Papers, ed. Louis R. Harlan, vol. 3, 1889–95, eds. Stuart B. Kaufman and Raymond W. Smock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 503–4. [back]
11. Booker T. Washington Papers, 317. [back]
12. Booker T. Washington, “Educational Engineers,” Outlook 95 (June 4, 1910): 266. [back]
13. Booker T. Washington, “Signs of Progress among the Negroes,” Century Magazine 59 (1900): 472–78, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/washington/signs.html. [back]
14. Booker T. Washington Papers, 498–501. [back]
15. Justice Joseph P. Bradley, concurring opinion, Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. 130 (1873), 141–42. [back]
16. Jessica Sewell, “Sidewalks and Store Windows as Political Landscapes,” Constructing Image, Identity, and Place: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 9 (2003): 85–98. [back]
17. Tera W. Hunter, “African-American Women Workers’ Protest in the New South,” OAH Magazine of History 13, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 52–55. [back]
18. Dorothy Sterling, Black Foremothers: Three Lives (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1988), 133. [back]
19. Nannie Helen Burroughs, quoted in Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 229. [back]
Chapter 4. Lorraine’s Vision: A Better Place to Live
1. Herbert Hoover, “Address to the White House Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership,” December 2, 1931, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=22927#axzz1LbRl5lpJ. [back]
2. See, generally, Janet Hutchison, “Building for Babbitt: The State and the Suburban Home Ideal,” Journal of Policy History 9, no. 2 (1997): 184–210. See also Jeffrey M. Hornstein, A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 128–32. [back]
3. Paul C. Luken and Suzanne Vaughan, “ ‘Be a Genuine Homemaker in Your Own Home’: Gender and Familial Relations in State Housing Practices, 1917–1922,” Social Forces 83, no. 4 (June 2005): 1614. [back]
4. Ibid., 1611. [back]
5. Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). [back]
6. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: R
andom House, 2010), 269. [back]
7. Allen R. Kamp, “The History Behind Hansberry v. Lee” (see intro., n. 6). [back]
8. Enoch P. Waters Jr., “Hansberry Decree Opens 500 New Homes to Race,” Chicago Defender, November 23, 1940, 1. [back]
9. To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, adapted by Robert Nemiroff (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 20. [back]
10. Sidney Fields, “Housewife’s Play Is a Hit,” New York Daily Mirror, March 16, 1959, cited in Margaret B. Wilkerson, “ ‘A Raisin in the Sun’: Anniversary of an American Classic,” Theatre Journal 38, no. 4 (December 1986): 442. [back]
11. Langston Hughes, “Harlem,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, eds. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 1267. [back]
12. Collins, America’s Women, 422. [back]
13. Jane Riblett Wilkie, “Changes in U.S. Men’s Attitudes toward the Family Provider Role, 1972–1989,” Gender and Society 7, no. 2 (June 1993): 268. [back]
14. Lyndon B. Johnson, ”Remarks at the University of Michigan,” May 22, 1964, www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/640522.asp. [back]
15. For a discussion of the trend, see Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 111–30. See also Joe Soss and Sanford F. Schram, “A Public Transformed? Welfare Reform as Policy Feedback,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 1 (February 2007): 112. [back]