Cherisse Jones-Branch – författare

They lived deeply separate lives. They wrestled with what Brown v. Board of Education would mean for their communities. And although they were accustomed to a segregated society, many women in South Carolina--both black and white--knew that the unequal racial status quo in their state had to change.

Crossing the Line reveals the early activism of black women in organizations including the NAACP, the South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party, and the South Carolina Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. It also explores the involvement of white women in such groups as the YWCA and Church Women United. Their agendas often conflicted and their attempts at interracial activism were often futile, but these black and white women had the same goal: to improve black South Carolinians’ access to political and educational institutions.

Examining the tumultuous years during and after World War II, Jones-Branch contends that these women are the unsung heroes of South Carolina’s civil rights history. Their efforts to cross the racial divide in South Carolina helped set the groundwork for the broader civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Following in the tradition of the Southern Women series, Arkansas Women highlights prominent Arkansas women, exploring women’s experiences across time and space from the state’s earliest frontier years to the late twentieth century. In doing so, this collection of fifteen biographical essays productively complicates Arkansas history by providing a multidimensional focus on women, with a particular appreciation for how gendered issues influenced the historical moment in which they lived.Diverse in nature, Arkansas Women contains stories about women on the Arkansas frontier, including the narratives of indigenous women and their interactions with European men and of bondwomen of African descent who were forcibly moved to Arkansas from the seaboard South to labor on cotton plantations. There are also essays about twentieth-century women who were agents of change in their communities, such as Hilda Kahlert Cornish and the Arkansas birth control movement, Adolphine Fletcher Terry’s antisegregationist social activism, and Sue Cowan Morris’s Little Rock classroom teachers’ salary equalization suit. Collectively, these inspirational essays work to acknowledge women’s accomplishments and to further discussions about their contributions to Arkansas’s rich cultural heritage.Contributors:Michael Dougan on Mary Sybil Kidd Maynard LewisGary T. Edwards on Amanda TrulockDianna Fraley on Adolphine Fletcher TerrySarah Wilkerson Freeman on Senator Hattie CarawayRebecca Howard on Women of the Ozarks in the Civil WarElizabeth Jacoway on Daisy Lee Gatson BatesKelly Houston Jones on Bondwomen on Arkansas’s Cotton FrontierJohn Kirk on Sue Cowan MorrisMarianne Leung on Hilda Kahlert CornishRachel Reynolds Luster on Mary Celestia ParlerLoretta N. McGregor on Dr. Mamie Katherine Phipps ClarkMichael Pierce on Freda HoganDebra A. Reid on Mary L. RayYulonda Eadie Sano on Edith Mae Irby JonesSonia Toudji on Women in Early Frontier Arkansas

Following in the tradition of the Southern Women series, Arkansas Women highlights prominent Arkansas women, exploring women’s experiences across time and space from the state’s earliest frontier years to the late twentieth century. In doing so, this collection of fifteen biographical essays productively complicates Arkansas history by providing a multidimensional focus on women, with a particular appreciation for how gendered issues influenced the historical moment in which they lived.Diverse in nature, Arkansas Women contains stories about women on the Arkansas frontier, including the narratives of indigenous women and their interactions with European men and of bondwomen of African descent who were forcibly moved to Arkansas from the seaboard South to labor on cotton plantations. There are also essays about twentieth-century women who were agents of change in their communities, such as Hilda Kahlert Cornish and the Arkansas birth control movement, Adolphine Fletcher Terry’s antisegregationist social activism, and Sue Cowan Morris’s Little Rock classroom teachers’ salary equalization suit. Collectively, these inspirational essays work to acknowledge women’s accomplishments and to further discussions about their contributions to Arkansas’s rich cultural heritage.Contributors:Michael Dougan on Mary Sybil Kidd Maynard LewisGary T. Edwards on Amanda TrulockDianna Fraley on Adolphine Fletcher TerrySarah Wilkerson Freeman on Senator Hattie CarawayRebecca Howard on Women of the Ozarks in the Civil WarElizabeth Jacoway on Daisy Lee Gatson BatesKelly Houston Jones on Bondwomen on Arkansas’s Cotton FrontierJohn Kirk on Sue Cowan MorrisMarianne Leung on Hilda Kahlert CornishRachel Reynolds Luster on Mary Celestia ParlerLoretta N. McGregor on Dr. Mamie Katherine Phipps ClarkMichael Pierce on Freda HoganDebra A. Reid on Mary L. RayYulonda Eadie Sano on Edith Mae Irby JonesSonia Toudji on Women in Early Frontier Arkansas

The first major study to consider Black women’s activism in rural Arkansas, Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps foregrounds activists’ quest to improve Black communities through language and foodways as well as politics and community organizing. In reexamining these efforts, Cherisse Jones-Branch lifts many important figures out of obscurity, positioning them squarely within Arkansas’s agrarian history.

The Black women activists highlighted here include home demonstration agents employed by the Arkansas Agricultural Cooperative Extension Service and Jeanes Supervising Industrial Teachers, all of whom possessed an acute understanding of the difficulties that African Americans faced in rural spaces. Examining these activists through a historical lens, Jones-Branch reveals how educated, middle-class Black women worked with their less-educated rural sisters to create all-female spaces where they confronted economic, educational, public health, political, and theological concerns free from white regulation and interference.

Centered on the period between 1914 and 1965, Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps brings long-overdue attention to an important chapter in Arkansas history, spotlighting a group of Black women activists who uplifted their communities while subverting the formidable structures of white supremacy.