In Love and In Struggle: African American Romances and the Civil Rights Movement

Reflecting on the 1964 Freedom Summer, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staffer Jean Wheeler Smith recalled: “There was a lot of sex in SNCC...we were twenty years old...what do you expect?” The civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, as several historians have rightly noted, collided in the mid-twentieth century. The movement was not only a struggle for social justice but also became a site for romantic and sexual experimentation. Indeed, most romantic encounters were short-lived, uncommitted, and complicated. Still these relationships were instrumental in dismantling barriers and fostering egalitarianism, as well as providing much-needed comfort and relief, albeit temporary, from the extreme dangers of white supremacy and violence.

This paper examines African American women’s romances in the civil rights movement. According to one scholar, African American female activists “wrestled with the problem of balancing their social lives with their movement commitments.” This paper argues that, because gender, sexuality, and Jim Crow were intricately intertwined in deeply pathological ways, romantic relationships became sites for confronting racism and gender inequalities. These relationships were informed by the movement; and these relationships also informed changing ideals of gender and sexuality, family and community, and activism in the mid-twentieth century. In other words, African American women whose radical ideas were forming and shaping the civil rights movement also explored non-traditional ideas related to the structure of their romantic relationships. The story of African American women, sexual politics, and the civil rights movement complicates the evolving narrative and analysis on black love, families, and community. It also personalizes and broadens our understanding of gender roles and intimate relationships in the black freedom struggle.