appear in the work rather than creating or imaging
a world to fit into some abstract theory only a few
can decipher.
In a career spanning more than 30 years, Chris-
tian’s own critical portfolio comes from a per-
spective acutely aware of the intersections of race,
class, and gender on the lives of the black women
novelists she studies, as well as her own reading as
a black feminist critic—a field and discipline she
helped create. While Christian levied sharp criti-
cism on literary theorists, she did not turn away
from literary theory; she embraced it in her own
work, including Female Subjects in Black and
White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1997), ed-
ited with Elizabeth Abel and Helen Moglen, exam-
ining the complexities of applying psychoanalysis
to readings by women writers, specifically women
writers of color. In this work, as in others, Chris-
tian’s analysis was not a catalogue of fixed theories
that she read through the work but a project of ac-
tively theorizing to understand not only what each
writer writes and why the writer writes, but also
to illuminate ways to understand the writer and
the work itself. She weaves her personal experi-
ence with the experience of theorizing and creates
analyses that show a partnership between theorist
and writer.
Christian dedicated her life to making the
world aware of the work of black women novel-
ists and other women of color as well as furthering
studies on the intersections of race, gender, and
class in these women’s lives, all evidenced by her
help in establishing the African-American stud-
ies department at the University of California at
Berkeley and her position as chair of Berkeley’s
Ethnic Studies Department. Christian took her
personal passion and made it a central feature of a
life steeped in social consciousness and conscious
activism and in doing so left a legacy of important
critical thought that will continue to inform stud-
ies in not only African-American literature but
American literary studies as a whole.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspec-
tives on Black Women Writers. New York: Teachers
College Press, 1985.
———. Black Women Novelists: The Development of
a Tradition, 1892–1976. Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood, 1980.
———. “Fixing Methodologies: Beloved.” In Female
Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis,
and Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Barbara
Christian, and Helen Moglen, 363–370. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997.
———. “The Race for Theory.” Cultural Critique 6
(Spring 1987): 51–63.
Gena Elise ChandlerCivil Rights movement (1954–1965)
For many critics the Civil Rights movement offi-
cially began with the unanimous Supreme Court
decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,
on May 17, 1954. This Supreme Court ruling de-
clared that separate was not equal and opened the
doors for school integration, overturning Plessy
v. Ferguson (1896), which had approved school
segregation as legal and constitutional almost 60
years earlier. The next 11 years changed the course
of history, especially as life was lived in the south-
ern United States. Parallel worlds that supported
a Jim Crow environment were legally challenged,
as ordinary citizens rose to the demands of these
extraordinary times. Other important markers of
the genesis of this movement are Emmett Till’s
lynching in Money, Mississippi, in August 1955
(for allegedly whistling at or saying something to
a white woman), and the Montgomery, Alabama,
bus boycott, which began in December 1955 and
lasted 381 days. Both events attracted national at-
tention in the movement’s early days. The latter
event launched MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., as the
spokesperson for the nonviolent agenda of the
movement.
In subsequent years, the Civil Rights move-
ment was associated with several other impor-
tant historical events, including the integration of
public school systems across the South, the sit-in
movement, the freedom rides, the assassination of
Medgar Evers, and the March on Washington. In
the fall of 1957, nine black students integrated the
previously all-white Central High School in Little104 Civil Rights movement