Remaking Respectability by Victoria W. Wolcott

Author:Victoria W. Wolcott [Wolcott, Victoria W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Women's Studies, History, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781469611006
Google: Vgoz-fwV3ugC
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2013-01-01T04:01:09+00:00

Conclusion

By the time the severe economic deprivation of the Great Depression was being felt in Detroit, the ideology of bourgeois respectability was already in decline. As middle-class African Americans moved out of the East Side neighborhood, their sensitivity to working-class behavior and neighborhood appearance decreased, lessening the elite impulse to police and transform the behavior of incoming migrants. In the 1930s, middle-class African Americans dubbed the East Side neighborhood “Paradise Valley” and described it as a space of commercialized leisure rather than vice. New women’s clubs and more secular religious programs incorporated emerging social identities that were not bounded by the old-settler versus newcomer dichotomy. Remarkably, in the face of pervasive racism, African American women effectively developed a female public sphere in which they could articulate their concerns and develop innovative reform strategies.

The Ossian Sweet case demonstrated the power of female respectability in the theater of the courtroom. Nevertheless, the most enduring image of the case was not that of the demure and educated African American female witnesses but that of the African American men who defended their homes against white mob violence. Self-defense and self-determination were strategies that would become more public throughout the 1930s, as working men and women took to Detroit’s streets to demand their right to a decent standard of living and protection from racist violence. These strategies were legacies of a working-class notion of respectability that emphasized self-respect. During the next decade, working-class African Americans who fought for their rights in assertive and inventive ways remade respectability.

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