412 Women's Studies in Communication

Women and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965. Edited by Davis W.

Houck and David E. Dixon. Jackson, MS: University Press of
Mississippi, 2009, pp. ix-xxvii + t-322 (includes index). ISBN 978-
1-60473-107-t. Hardback. US $50.00.

Women and the Civil Rights Movement is an extraordinary book. A

collection of 39 full-text speeches, the volume dramatically expands our
understanding of twentieth-century women's public discourse in the
United States and complicates our sense of the canonical rhetorical efforts
of the Civil Rights Movement. Moreover, it points students of both
women's public address and the rhetoric of social movements back toward
an unrealized scholarly future, one rooted in the discovery, reconstitution,
publication, and criticism of lost speech texts.
Houck and Dixon's general introduction begins synecdotally, with the
"dreadful" "Tribute to Women" at 1963's March on Washington. Here
they represent the "egregious" effacing of women's "voice and their
struggle to have a voice" from our collective memory of the Civil Rights
Movement (x-xi). Houck and Dixon summarize twenty years of scholar-
ship on women in the movement to establish the scope of women's
involvement. In some parts of the South women were "typically three or
four times more likely to be involved" than men (xiv). Houck and Dixon
explore the various explanations for this by pointing to the "differential
reprisal interpretation" (the notion that women were less likely than men
to be killed for their involvement), religious conviction, and social net-
works. They argue that these historical perspectives and beliefs establish
just how alarming women's "relative invisibility" (xvii) is in light of the
"profound influence" (xi) they so obviously had. The authors conclude
that women not only were "granted an important place at the speaking
dais" (xi), but also formed the "foundation of the movement's success"
and eventually became its "dominant force" (xiv, quoting Marable Man-
ning and Charles M. Payne, respectively).
But where are the "material traces" (xi) of that influence? Where are
their speeches? Houck and Dixon note that the enormous literature on the
Civil Rights Movement includes several speech anthologies but only a
handful of women's civil rights speeches from the period between Brown
V. Board of Education (1954) and the Voting Rights Act (1965). The
Houck and Dixon anthology is therefore "something of a flrst" (xii) and
comprises speeches drawn from archives around the country, including
sources as diverse as the Moses Moon audio collection at the Smithsonian,
 Book Reviews 413

the Smith College collection, and the Oregon Historical Society archives
(xii).
Speakers famous and obscure are represented here and their speeches
are arranged chronologically, beginning with Mary McLeod Bethune's
"Full Integration - America's Newest Challenge," a 1954 speech delivered
in Detroit, Michigan, and ending with Constance Baker Motley's 1965
address to a Southem Christian Leadership Conference audience in Bir-
mingham, Alabama. Houck and Dixon introduce each speech with a
bio-critical headnote that serves to orient readers to the speaker, text, and
context. Because many of these notes reveal important but little-known
chapters in the movement and the often remote resting places of the
surviving texts, they also facilitate the editors' hope that the "volume will
be a spur to" the "discovery, dissemination, and critical evaluation" (xii)
of women's civil rights speeches.
The speeches address a wide range of topics, issues, and themes. All of
them concern the problems of racism, including the sources and effects of
discrimination, the need to resist unjust and unconstitutional laws, and the
courage and perseverance required for the struggle. From a deep concern
about sexism in the movement, to an awareness of the differences (espe-
cially on methods of protest and change) that divide them, and an attention
to the unfinished nature of their journey, what becomes most clear is an
abiding commitment to see that journey to its end. Throughout, the reader
is struck not only by the wealth of new perspectives Women and the Civil
Rights Movement provides, but also by the many ways in which these
speeches suggest (and perhaps demand) a rethinking of both the rhetoric
of civil rights and the history of women's public address. To this reader,
three themes emerge most poignantly: religion, sacrifice, and empower-
ment.
Religion, especially the Christian religion, is as evident in Bethune's
story of the Christ of the Andes statue (7-9) as it is in Johnnie Carr's
invocation of the "power of God" (86-87), Diane Nash's call for "radical
good to resist radical evil" (168), and Margaret C. McCulloch's argument
in favor of a Christian basis for the movement (210-12). While not explicit
in all texts, reUgion constitutes an important rhetorical force in these
women's rhetoric, and religious undercurrents seem to exert a strong but
subtle infiuence on the nature and tone of their debates.
Sacrifice is a second theme, all the more powerful for the spare and
unsentimental accounts of murder, suffering, and loss. Whether it is
Mamie Till Bradley's stark description of her son Emmet's body in a
414 Women's Studies in Communication

Chicago undertaker's parlor (22-23), Myrlie Evers' depiction of her hus-

band Medgar as a "soldier found dying on a southern battlefield" (243),
Elizabeth Allen's report of the night her husband Louis was gunned down
(258-62), Rita L. Schwemer's portrayal of the harassment she and her
husband Michael suffered prior to his disappearance and murder (265-69),
or Fannie Lou Hamer's tale of torture in the jails of Winona, Mississippi
(284-85), sacrifice marks and unites the women in these pages. So pow-
erful is the theme of sacrifice in this volume that is serves to confirm the
claims of Danielle Allen [Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship
since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004)] and
others that sacrifice is an important and largely neglected rhetorical theme
in civil rights discourse.
Growing out of their religious convictions and willingness to sacrifice,
the belief in their own power to change the unjust world they inherited also
emerges as a consistent theme. Sarah Patton Boyle's 1954 statement that
"many who are prejudiced now easily can be changed" (15) may have
evoked Pollyanna and tempted the Fates, but later declarations by Diane
Nash (155-68), Katie Louchheim (180-85), Anne Braden (188-98), and
Ella Baker (246-50) echo at least the conviction that change is possible,
the effort is transformative, and human agency is real and powerful.
Indeed the speeches themselves are real and powerful, and they offer
far more than a short review can explore - so much so that the collection
prompts us to ask why it took so long for our discipline to produce such
a collection and how we might build on Houck and Dixon's effort. As is
well known, when Communication Studies crawled from the primordial
ooze of late nineteenth-century ideas about rhetoric in early twentieth-
century English departments, it emerged as departments of "Speech"
where oratory and public speaking were central concerns. Speech collec-
tions were among the earliest products of this evolutionary process and, as
Houck and Dixon demonstrate (xiii), communication scholars eventually
sought to recover women's speeches and to add their voices to the raucous
cacophony of our history. Somewhere along the way, however, the diffi-
cult tasks of rhetorical archeology gave way to sexier fare: Theory, film
studies, visual rhetoric, television imagery, electronic texts, and the se-
ductive music of the blogosphere drew scholars of women's rhetoric away
from speech texts before the work of recuperation and preservation had
fairly even begun.
Women and the Civil Rights Movement reminds us, however, that
oratory is our discipline's primary literature, our original responsibility.
 Book Reviews 415

our terroir. At a time when historians, journalists, and the reading public
are demonstrating a renewed interest in the study of speeches, we should
be good stewards of our terrain, cultivating additional efforts at textual
recovery, reconstruction, and criticism. Of course, scholars of women's
communication should continue to study a wide range of discourse. But
we should neither avoid nor ignore the lost speeches of our collective past
for, as Houck and Dixon's effort demonstrates, the labors of archival
research and textual preservation can often produce a rich, varied, and
useful harvest.
Sean Patrick O'Rourke
Furman University
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